" WICKED " OPINIONS.
TS there such a thing as a ' wicked ' opinion confidently and
honestly held ? A correspondent who writes us a very temperate letter in another column, and who repeats the criticism of a very wild and inaccurate critic in the wildest and most in- accurate of our daily papers, the Standard, accuses us of a derelic- tion of Liberal principle in admitting any such term into our vocabulary as that which we applied to "W. R. G.'s "apology for slavery and attack upon the policy of emancipation— "philo- sophical wickedness." The term indeed was probably suggested in the first instance by our antagonist. It was applied to in- tellectual opinions (and without our adjective, which partially qualified its meaning) in both" W. R. G.'s" letters to the Pall Mall Gazette, and also in that which we published last week. In the original letter of last April which provoked our first criticism, "W. R. G." had characterized those American politicians who say, like our own New York correspondent, "We have valued and fought for abolition, not to benefit the neg,roes, but to purify and emancipate ourselves,—to purge ourselves from a great wrong, not to benefit the victims of that wrong," thus :—" Now, Sir, this language—and we all know how commonly and how recklessly it is used—I bold to be wicked, so wicked that none but the pious and the fanatical would dare to use it." The same able writer recited the epithet, and extended it to include our own views in the letter addressed to us last week. He holds our opinions simply 'wicked,' we his to embody the " ne plus ultra of philosophical wickedness." Is either expression justifiable ? We readily admit that an intellectual precedent set by a writer so accomplished but also so unscrupulous, will not serve to justify his opponents. Ought we in fact to treat all opinions, however various in the kind and origin of their error, as a mathematician treats an erroneous theorem or a false computation ? If a man of culture should seriously defend Mormonism or free love' amongst us, or Machiavellian politics, or an esoteric religion for thinkers, and an exoteric religion for the mob, shall we say simply, How deplor- ably erroneous!' and begin forthwith digging away at the intellec- tual root of his blunder, so that we may turn it up to public view? We suspect that method of proceeding, if universally adopted, while it would expunge a good deal of virulent nonsense from our language, and almost limit the Standard, for instance, to its columns of news, would also so blanch public criticism as to destroy half its usefulness, and its best influence over the judg- ment of those to whom it is addressed.
For our part, we do not bold, we do not know that we ever held for a moment, what is now laid down as the essential principle, "common to all philosophical Liberals," that "all opinions are inno- cent." We believe that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances to which they may be subjected, many, nay most opi- nions may be innocent, though they could not be held by the majority of cultivated men in our own time without being visibly due to faults of passion or perverseness of will. We have been represented as virtually maintaining that "A man may believe in Mormonism, in mesmerism, in necromancy, in spiritualism, but not in Slavery. It is a great service to mankind to undermine the authority of the Bible; it is meritorious to assail the Church; it is lawful to deny Christian- ity ; it is pardonable to disbelieve in a Supreme Being ; but it is a deadly sin to doubt the wisdom and righteousness of Abolition." No doctrine was ever more opposed to our own. The truth no doubt is that moral elements enter into almost all opinions, but in a manner so subtle and so different in different cases that it becomes the first duty of the State to leave all opinion unshackled. We can con- ceive men seriously and innocently holding all these mis-beliefs, slavery included, and we can more easily conceive many of them, especially those involving practical conduct and influencing the pas- sions, as due to a moral cynicism or twist of character. Still there are general principles which will amply justify the general use of the strongest terms of moral praise or reprobation as applied to opinion. Suppose a man brought up in the purest and noblest atmosphere of Christian thought, turning deliberately to MohammedanisM or Ilindooism. Men would assuredly say that though it was no business of theirs to judge him, the chances were ten to one that passion had more to do with his conversion than intellectual con- viction. No doubt reasons might be alleged, in individual cases, to overthrow the weight of that presumption; intellectual eccentrici- ties might be shown, it might be proved that the licence of Moham- medanism, the impurity of Hindooism had no attraction for him,—an Oriental element in his character, involuntary in him, might be pointed out,—in short, possibly at least, evidence could be rendered that in an individual case a conversion of this sort did not imply necessarily a declension of character, but only the flowering of individual germs of eccentricity, which must needs have bloomed and borne their fruit before the intellectual character could gain its full largeness and maturity. But assuredly no man in his senses would attribute the conversion of a large number of educated English Christians to Mohammedanism or Hindooism to anything but a moral degradation,—a step downwards in the scale of moral purity and intellectual truthfulness. We may and do protest against the narrow philosophy which damns the Moham- medan and Hindoo because he cannot throw off all the shackles of race and prepossession, and become a Christian. But few indeed doubt that the regressive step would, with the large majority of men, imply anything but innocence, — spiritual and conscious deterioration,—though the intellect might possibly, as it often does, fall to the level of the passions by which it permitted itself to be influenced. Again, even with respectable but half-educated Englishwomen, or stronger still, un- educated Welshwomen, there is little doubt that the lapse into Mormonism is in the majority of cases—we do not say how large a majority—a sensible surrender to a lower class of passions and hopes, a throwing aside of the best and noblest conception of life in the hearts of the poor creatures who embrace it, and even where due to a superstitious conviction, yet to a superstition of a kind which they half know they could, and ought to, resist. Or to come to another class of subjects, when a philosopher, say like Hobbes, who has made himself familiar with thinkers of the highest calibre in both the hemispheres of philosophical thought, suddenly gives a lower and cynical tone to the science of human nature, as- sumes the state of war' as the normal condition of man, grounds everything on coarse selfishness, makes gratitude a lively sense of favours to come, pity, the "imagination of future calamity to our- selves, proceeding from the sense of another man's calamity," and so forth,—we do not say that the man was necessarily wicked, but we do say that his philosophy is wicked, that it took a man—owing either to moral misfortune or to his own fault—quite below the moral level of his age to believe that this is in any degree a true account of human nature, and we say, too, that to embrace it would render the disciples of such a philosophy more selfish, more obtuse to moral truth, more cynical than before. That is what we mean by a wicked philosophy. And we maintain that such an expression is not only justifiable for the purposes of the literary description of such a philosophy, but needful for the purposes of distinct thought. Hobbism, appearing on the eve of the Puritan revolution, deserved assuredly a more sinister character than even the worst Encyclopoedism, appearing as the fruit of the long decay of French society and government during the shameful reign of Louis Quinze.
And now to apply these suggestions to the controversy in which we have been engaged. We have time after time pointed out that the cause of the South seemed to us so evil, not because the South apologized for slavery, of which the North, as we have repeatedly shown, was at the beginning of the war equally guilty,—but because having inherited from their fathers the sense of its deep evil and a tradition in favour of its gradual extinction, they reversed that teaching, gave loose to the passions which slavery had roused, tried to build a society on it as a principle, and fought expressly for its extension. They set up as a philosophy of right that which their ancestors had excused as a fearful and unquestionable wrong, but a wrong for which they were not alone responsible. In short the South put forward a new code of politi- cal principle, in which what had been condemned by the most enlightened consciences of all nations for more than a hundred years, and abhorred for fifty, was erected into a divine command. What is the use of language, if that is not to be called political wickedness by those at least who hold by the convictions of the immense majority of good and wise men during that period?
Finally, when not even in America, but in England, which has long been freed from the taint of practical sympathy with the sin of slavery, and after we had learned by the experience of our own colonies that the average free negro is as far above the avbs- age level of the plantation negro of the South as our own working classes are above the average of the West Indian negro, one of our most accomplished writers assails the policy of emancipation with the bitterest cynicism, and writes as if in the contest between the South fighting for the principle of slavery, and the North fighting first to limit, then to extinguish, that monstrous evil, all the sin were on the side of the latter, when he exerts his utmost in- fluence to panegyrize the virtues (!) for the exercise of which
• slavery affords a scope ; though we do not judge the writer, we have no hesitation in saying the opinion is wicked, by which we mean that in nine cases out of every ten it would be fed by the most cynical and despotic passions in the nature of man, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand it would lead to the indulgence of such passions, even if it were not originally due to them. But we have no wish to return again to the particular illustration which suggested this article. We only desire to defend the proper application of moral epithets to intellectual opinions, and to disavow that spurious and unmeaning Liberalism which affects to believe that there is no vital connection at all between moral law and intellectual convic- tion. The truth we believe to be that national and individual character has quite as much to do with opinions as national and individaal intellect. Even in the highest conceivable case of purely impartial conviction, strength of character must have been powerfully exerted to hold off the distracting influence of pre-
judices, prepossessions, and passions. In ordinary cases these pre- judices and passions do enter into the very essence of so-called conviction, and though true Liberalism discerns the impossibility of distinguishing the different elements, and even if that were possible, which it is not, discerns still more clearly the certainty of fanning the very passions and prejudices you wish to uproot by subjecting them to legal penalty, —it is very weak Liberalism indeed which really supposes that any great proportion of human opinions are founded purely on evidence and free of all taint of passion. It is well indeed not to deal rashly in imputations of this baser alloy to the intellectual convictions of others, and therefore we have pointed out the general limits within which alone sunii epithets seem to us generally justifiable,—namely, when the opinion put forward is a visible descent from the level attained by a whole generation of sincere thinkers. But literature would lose half its force, and public opinion more than half its salutary influence, were no opinion, however retrograde and mischievous, denounced as well as refuted. For ourselves we do not court denunciation, but we assuredly entertain no feeling of anger when we are denounced on much more elastic principles than those on which we endeavour to guide the distribution of our own censure. The moral buffets given and taken by men in earnest about their opinions,—whether it be their intellect, or their will, or their passion, or all three, which are in earnest,—do more to rouse public opinion to some- thing like real vigilance, than all the pale discriminations of mere logic. Vituperation is weak and contemptible,—but strong denun- ciation of evil doctrine, accompanied either by true reasons, or what the writer believes to be true reasons, is resented by no masculine intellect, and pricks the drowsy thought and drowsier consciences of men into an intelligent activity which they would seldom experience without such a spur.
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