The Cure

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THE CURE.

From those misty days of antiquity of which we are supposed to know little or nothing, down to the present time, men have been exceedingly fond of giving good advice. No occupation is more pleasant and easy—flattering, too, for it supposes a kind of tacit superiority in the adviser over the advised, all very nice and grateful to the universal sentiment of vanity. Almost everybody can discern with the utmost clearness the mote or beam, as the case may be, in his neighbor’s eye, and at the same time manifests the most stolid indifference to the state of his own optics. Almost everybody can point out the course which his neighbor ought to pursue, and manifests at the same time, the most mysterious indifference as to his own state.

So it is everywhere, and the same principle applies in numberless cases. Does some great crime come to light in the circles where virtue and morality were thought to have taken their abode, straightway the ninety-nine whose lives have not been blazoned to the world, exclaim against hypocrisy and private immorality. Does some horrible affair occur among the lower orders, straightway the journals, and the community of which they are the representatives, cry out that there is no such thing as public virtue, that the country is on the very verge of ruin, and the usual stereotyped phrases are used over again which have been used in the same connection from time immemorial. Everybody exclaims against everybody else, or against some unknown abstraction which they call the “progress of popular demoralization.” Meantime, everything goes on pretty much as usual and there is no change for the better. No cure can be discovered.

No, and there never will be until every individual making up the vast fabric of our social system stops short in his wholesale denunciations against his neighbors and looks to himself—his own principles, his own conduct. There never will be until every individual works out his own moral salvation. It is worse than useless to direct the thunders of our indignation against communities or abstractions. Let every man look to himself. Then society will take care of itself.