We shall progress faster by diligent striving to fashion the feeling of the time and stir it from the intellectual apathy which is the chiefest curse of the State.—Alex. M. Thomson.

The danger that confronts the new century is the recrudescence of racial antipathies and national animosities.—Hermann Adler.

The passion of jealousy has a long and significant history, and a pedigree more ancient than the allied sentiment, love of property, which has just been considered. The passion was useful to the welfare of the tribe at an early period, but it survives as purely a vice in the midst of consolidated nations, for it is essentially anti-social, not necessary to general welfare, and impossible to be exercised sympathetically or for the good of others. If I am jealous it means that I have a source of personal delight that I would guard from others and monopolise if I could. The happiness may be self-produced or rest on a being whom I love. In both cases it causes within me fears of interference, suspicion of my fellows, and a general tendency to dislike, nay, even to hate them if they dare to meddle with my secret joy. The emotion is fundamentally selfish, and when an individual is sympathetic all round he becomes incapable of it. He has risen above the egoistic passion of jealousy.

Mr. Darwin tells us that amongst savages addicted to “intemperance, utter licentiousness and unnatural crimes, no sooner does marriage, whether polygamous or monogamous, become common than jealousy leads to the inculcation of female virtue.” This gives the clue to the problem of jealousy’s evolutional value. It has played a part in the destiny of woman, and tended to shape her emotional nature. Its history is inextricably intertwined with hers, in all the varying degrees of servitude that mark her slow advance from a condition of absolute chattelism to one of rational equality with man.

By virtue of superior strength man has acted on the theory that he was made for God, and woman for him! and in the process of establishing his dominancy jealousy appeared and aided powerfully the gradual development of a new emotion—constancy, a social grace and virtue as certain to wax and grow as jealousy is to wane and slowly disappear.

In literature one finds a reflection of the entire history of jealousy and all its consecutive changes from barbarous times through the ages, when frequent duels witnessed to the honourable place it held in public estimation down to the present day, when it is somewhat discredited, and duelling—in Great Britain at least—has ceased altogether. To track this history were impossible here; I can only point to one or two significant pictures.

The play of “Othello” depicts the barbarous social conditions in which jealousy flourishes. Shakespeare reveals both the anti-social nature of the passion and the intellectual weakness of the mind that harbours it. “Trifles light as air,” says Iago, “are to the jealous confirmation strong as proofs of holy writ.” And in effect Othello is incapable of sifting evidence. The poor device of the stolen handkerchief seals the fate of Desdemona! Woman’s subject position is plainly set forth, and the foundations of the passion in masculine master-hood and pride of power are fully exposed. Othello’s wife must be his slave and puppet. “Out of my sight,” he cries, and patiently she goes. “Mistress,” he calls, and she returns. “You did wish,” he says to Lodovico, “that I would make her turn.” Desdemona is the very type of patient, gentle, enslaved womanhood, the ideal woman of a rough, brutal age. Her father describes her as—

Observe, however, inwardly she is more advanced than the men. She perceives the low nature of jealousy, and to Emilia says touchingly, “My noble Moor is true of mind, and made of no such baseness as jealous creatures are.” Alas, for her generous confidence! And when the base passion transforms her “noble Moor” into a monster of cruelty, she, true to the type of her sex at the period, resembles a pet dog that fawns upon and licks the hand that strikes him. This patient moan is all her utterance—

The only dignity she shows is in her refusal to display her sorrow before Emilia:

Jealousy and duelling flourished long after the Shakesperian period. Prose fiction in the eighteenth century is full of the subject of masculine rivalry in the appropriation of the female sex. The woman passionately desired is the prize or reward of a victory in which the hero has manifested adroitness in arts of bloodshed. Feminine will plays no part in the decision to which man the heroine shall belong, and the rivals for her possession make no pretence of superior character as a claim on her favour. The gentle spiritual qualities that alone create union of heart and mind seem unknown. Master-hood, an apotheosis of force, is the key to the drama; and the rapid rise of the novel in public esteem shows that pleasurable sensations were closely allied with the barbarous actions and feelings that belong to a militant age.

Early in the nineteenth century George Eliot draws the hero of her first great novel (Adam Bede) in the act of picking a quarrel with a rival for a woman’s love. She shows jealousy in him springing chiefly from a sense of property in Hetty. The wounded pride and self-importance of a too despotic nature finds relief in fighting Arthur Donnithorne. In Middlemarch the transition to a higher stage of evolution is marked. She gives us there a graphic picture of a woman wrestling with jealousy in the secrecy of her own chamber, and correctly places in the tenderly emotional nature of that sex the primary impulse to subdue the vile passion. Female jealousy made no appeal to arms, but in a thousand subtle ways it was sending forth currents of anti-social force, and without a widespread feminine repudiation of jealousy no clear advance to higher social life was possible. Dorothea is a true type of progressing womanhood. She gains a victory in the noble warfare we see her waging inwardly, and, rising far above the vile passion, she goes forth to her rival in a glow of generous emotion that not only compels the confidence of the latter, but for the time draws that selfish, narrow nature up to the level of her own.

There is no false note in this picture, and if we glance at the transcript of real life at the period we may easily find its counterpart. The well-known writer, Mrs. Jamieson (in her Commonplace Book) relates: “I was not more than six years old when I suffered, from the fear of not being loved, and from the idea that another was preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me! Whether those around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper or a fit of illness I do not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered me, but I never forgot that suffering. It left a deep impression, and the recollection was so far salutary that in after life I guarded myself against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonizing thing which men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has saved me from the demoralizing effects of the passion, by a wholesome terror and even a sort of disgust.”

The knell of a departing phase of inner life was sounding when womanhood acquired the power to sift evidence from childish recollections, to detect the utter uselessness of the suffering jealousy creates and the ignominy of allowing it to become a cause of suffering at all.

Mrs. Jamieson stands on the threshold of a new era, for critical intellect here enters the sphere of the emotions, and these, yielding to guidance and control, human reason is henceforth a prime factor in emotional evolution.

But further, sympathy when developed to a certain point inevitably leads men astray if not guided by reason. Let me here relate a sequence of events that occurred in my own experience.

Two girls became deeply attached; they worked and studied together, and their friendship was a source of constant joy. In course of time, however, one married, and the other girl felt forsaken. She suffered from jealousy, and imagined that the husband would suffer similarly if she kept her place in her friend’s affections. A husband’s right amounted, in her view, to a monopoly of a wife’s tenderness. She strove, therefore, to loosen the bond of friendship; to cool her own ardent affection and make no claims, lest it should disturb conjugal bliss. The action was brave and prompted by sympathy, but it did not make for happiness. In a few short years the wife on her deathbed spoke thus to her former friend: “Why did you separate yourself from me? How could you think my love would change? I have been happy in my husband and child, but love never narrowed, it widened me. There was plenty of room for friendship, too. I sorely missed you, and felt your loss threw a shadow over my married life.”

Sympathy alone, then, is no unerring guide to conduct. Nevertheless, in a society permeated by true knowledge of the nature of the emotions and their significance in evolution primitive good-feeling may evolve, passing through each stage from the basic or simple to the complex, and every generous emotion prove accordant with the truth of things, and therefore productive of inward joy and outward right action, i.e. action tending to general welfare even in all the labyrinthine complexities of a high civilization. Emotion accordant with the truth of things—that is the crux of the position; and again I can best illustrate the point by reference to events that occurred within my own knowledge—events, too, by no means uncommon. During eight years a girl was engaged to marry a man we shall call Roger. He was in India and she in England. They corresponded, but meanwhile an intimacy sprang up between the girl and another man—we may call him Mark—to whom unwittingly her heart went out more warmly than it had ever done to Roger. She thought the relation to Mark was one of pure friendship, and he knew nothing of her engagement to Roger. The latter’s approaching return to England, however, opened the girl’s eyes to her true position, and on Mark it fell as a cruel blow. He had courted affection and responded to it in all sincerity, and was merely withheld from an open avowal by the consciousness of, as yet, insufficient means to justify his suit in the eyes of her parents. When concealment was at an end the problem to him seemed simple enough. “Which do you love best?” he asked, and added dominantly, “he is the man you should marry.” The girl was not convinced. The knowledge that she could not love Roger best filled her with tenderness towards him. Her emotional nature—wide enough to embrace both rivals with sympathy—could give no decision, and intellect was confused by false teaching in childhood. “Duty,” she thought, “is always difficult; ought I not then to choose the hardest path of the two before me, and give up Mark?” In this grave dilemma she turned for advice to an elderly man on whose judgment she felt reliance. Bravely and truthfully she stated her case, innocently betraying that ignorance and the wish to do right were dangerously near carrying her into action that was wrong. “Let us reverse the position,” said her mentor. “Roger, we shall suppose, has written to you to come out to India and marry him, the fact being he has fallen in love with another girl. He did not mean to do that. His heart slipped away from you to her unconsciously, and he is shocked, and blames himself, not wholly without cause. But being an honourable man, he reasons with himself thus: ‘I am bound to keep my engagement to Mary; I will do so, and strive to make her happy.’ He meets you then with a lie in his heart, not on his tongue, for he will say nothing of your rival and of his sacrifice and pain. Would you be happy, think you? Would you miss nothing? And if later you discovered the truth, would you feel that the generous action was a just one to you?” “No, no,” she cried, “I never could wish him to sacrifice his happiness to mine; I would infinitely rather he told me the truth, and married the other girl.” “Precisely so,” said her friend, “the truth is always best; but I see you think Roger is less unselfish than you are! Is that just to him?” “I hardly know,” she murmured, “men are jealous, are they not?” “Jealous, ah, well, we men are frail, no doubt! But were I Roger, I tell you frankly, it would not mend matters to me that I had won my wife without the priceless jewel of her love. Be true to yourself, my young friend, that means also justice to him, and fling to the winds all fears that make you swerve from the path of open rectitude.” The girl fulfilled her difficult task. She relinquished the heroic mood, met her first lover with perfect candour, and a short time later became Mark’s wife. “Roger freed me at once,” she said to her wise mentor; “he’d rather have my friendship, which is perfectly sincere, than love with a strain of falseness. Oh, I am glad, and yet I know he grieves; I would give much to be able to console him!” “Ah,” said her friend, “beware of sentimentality and self-importance there. Roger’s consolation will come through his own true heart. In time he will love again. See to it that you ‘let the dead past bury its dead.’”

Loyalty to truth is not firmly rooted in humanity, while without truth as its guiding principle social feeling, constantly rising, overflows old channels and floods with new dangers the semi-civilization of the present. There is no escape at this juncture from the absolute necessity of developing the critical faculty and applying it to the social questions of the day; in other words, using reason, intelligence, knowledge, as the guides and controllers of feeling.

We turn now from personal emotions to an emotion that sways mankind collectively, and manifests itself in still more direful results than those of individual jealousy. Patriotism, like jealousy, is of ancient origin, and at one time possessed social utility. Without it there could hardly have occurred the transformation of vagrant tribes into massive communities solidly established on one portion of the earth’s surface and sectionally swarming to other portions as occasion requires.

The original element holding a tribe together has been termed by a recent sociologist “consciousness of kind,” i.e. a feeling not dependent on intellectual congeniality or emotional sympathy, but simply on nearness in place, time and blood. With tribal growth cohesion proves necessary to self-protection from adverse environments, whether of natural forces, wild animals or human foes. Experience reveals that union is strength, and hostility to other tribes fosters union in opposition. The inward attitude becomes complex; it embraces cohesion and repulsion; it is essentially a union in enmity. Now we have seen how in boyhood an innocent camaraderie or esprit de corps begets injustice to schoolmasters, and balks the development of the modern conscience; similarly here there are ethical dangers inseparable from a sentiment that beginning in “consciousness of kind” expands into sociality, yet has a converse side of hostility and hate. At the present day patriotism and international warfare are closely combined. The student of life who knows that the general trend of evolution is towards a reign of universal peace, recognizes that although nations have been consolidated by outward warfare and inward patriotism, this sentiment, so limited in range and so largely anti-social, can be no virtue for all time. Patriotism belongs to the militant stage of national history, and as regards Great Britain it is plainly out of date. Its action is not good, but evil.

The war in South Africa begun in 1899 was not caused by racial enmity, but by mercantile enterprise. Economic forces involved in Great Britain’s competitive commercial system were the prime factors in its creation, but without the existence of a vague unintelligent patriotic sentiment in the country generally the Government would not have been supported by the people in the prosecution of that war. Our enfranchised masses, fired by a sudden enthusiasm and racked by sympathy in the brave deeds and cruel sufferings of our soldiers and sailors, saw the phantasmagoria of modern warfare in false colours. Imagination was grasped and controlled by a press working—though half-unconsciously—in the interests of a special mercantile class; and while tender emotions overflowed in generous help to one’s own kind, a sympathy stimulated by public laudation, the reverse side of the picture was ignored. But in this, as in all wars, sympathy had its counterpoise in antagonism and rancorous enmity. All the brutal instincts latent in a race that had fought its way to supremacy among European Powers were roused afresh and stirred into fatal activity, and the evolving modern conscience and sentiments of justice, honour, truth towards all men, were checked and overborne by a loyalty that condones the fierce primitive passions. Hatred and uncharitableness were even voiced from some pulpits, and the term Pro-Boer was opprobriously launched at those lovers of peace who tried to defend their country’s foes from exaggerated blame. It was skilfully handled to promote militant enthusiasm, and discountenance all criticism of militant action and feeling.

On the emotional side of human nature inimical effects of warfare were wholly disregarded, and opinions on the subject of war given forth by a so-called educated class of men and eagerly imbibed by an ignorant public were confused, often false and shamefully misleading. One of these pseudo-teachers alleged that the wars of past times indicated chronic disease, but militarism in the present was useful, because in the home-life of the nation the restraints of authority are becoming weak (Capt. Mahan). And an eminent statesman announced his impression that the South African war was “designed to build up those moral qualities which are after all the only solid and the only permanent foundation on which any empire can be built”! (Mr. Balfour’s speech at Manchester; Scotsman’s Report, January 9, 1900.)

But the true method of judging an event is to exercise comparison, taking into account a far greater mass of social phenomena than that of the immediate present. Now the careful study of past history has proved that an outbreak of militant fraternity, combined with indulgence in the principle of enmity, leaves a society less fraternal than before in regard to the labours of peace and of building up; and against the claim that military training is a good preparation for civic life there lies the whole testimony of civilization. Further, the survival of militancy frustrates the solving of our great social problems, and the recent relapse to the militarist ideal is a grave hindrance to that social science which would provide the true ways of humanizing defective types. (I refer my reader for a fuller statement on these lines to Mr. J. M. Robertson’s Patriotism and Empire.) “After Waterloo,” says Mr. Robertson, “it seems to have been realized by the intelligence of Europe that militarism and imperialism had alike pierced the hands that leant on them.” Nevertheless, they reappeared, as we know, galvanized into fatal activity in human affairs, at the close of the nineteenth century.

Again, the action of international capitalism and the ideal of imperialism have been analysed from the standpoint of social philosophy by Mr. J. A. Hobson, an advanced and logical thinker on economic questions. His conclusion is that the driving forces of aggressive imperialism are the organized influences of certain professional and commercial classes which have definite economic advantages to gain by assuming a spurious patriotism, and the most potent of all these influences emanates from the financier. The power of financiers, exerted directly upon politicians and indirectly through the press upon public opinion, is, perhaps, so says Mr. Hobson, the most serious problem in public life to-day.^[5]

It is not by sanguinary conflicts in which victory turns on superior numbers, superior arms, and superior cunning in military tactics, that a nation’s greatness is built up at this period of the world’s history. What progress demands is not more of national wealth and international power; it is a better system of industrial life and a finer type of humanity—men and women of clear intellectual insight, high moral courage, unselfish instincts and humane sentiments guiltless of narrow exclusiveness. These men and women, discerning ideally the best methods of building up a nation’s greatness on the happiness of its people, will aid our half-civilized races to embody that ideal on the physical plane, and to educate their children to live up to it and show forth all its beauty.

In the mental basis of a high spiritual life even now our children are a reproach, for here and there they emit sparks indicative of embryonic sentiment in advance of practice around them. At the height of the Boer War a child in his nursery on being told that his nurse was opening a tin of boar’s head for breakfast, exclaimed, every feature quivering with sudden disgust, “Catch me eat my enemy’s head.”

When a nation repudiates with similar disgust that wholesale destruction of life, which is no whit less evil than the cannibalism of an earlier date, then will war and patriotism cease to be—their place taken by a civilization standing firm on the foundation of human happiness and love.

Given such outward conditions of life as are favourable to a freer exercise of the noblest social attributes and impulses of man, and the ethical temper will prevail. By ethical temper I mean not only the absence of all animosities that engender conflict, but the presence of a strong sense of personal rights and an equally strong protectiveness over the rights of others—a national impulse, in short, to an equivalence of liberty and social comfort for all mankind. But this justice is a supremely complex emotion—the one of all others that demands most of human capacity. It rests upon mental development, i.e. a universal enlargement of mind.

Industrial changes there must be, but these alone will not secure progress; we need true education, for in the deeper strata of existence—the region of feeling, the movements of change must be guided from the old order to the new. Hence the vital importance of moral education—an education that will create an intelligent appreciation of truth wherever presented, and bind all men together in loyalty to truth.