"Mental Efficiency And Other Hints to Men and Women"

As a great prelate unforgettably said, " Things are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why, then, attempt to deceive ourselves -- that remorse for wickedness is a useful and praiseworthy exercise? Much better to forget. As a matter of fact, people indulge in remorse; it is a somewhat vicious form of spiritual pleasure.

Grief, of course, is different, and it must be handled with delicate consideration. Nevertheless, when I see, as one does see, a man or a woman dedicating existence to sorrow for the loss of a beloved creature, and the world tacitly applauding, my feeling is certainly inimical.

To my idea, that man or woman is not honouring, but dishonouring, the memory of the departed; society suffers, the individual suffers, and no earthly or heavenly good is achieved. Grief is of the past; it mars the present; it is a form of indulgence, and it ought to be bridled much more than it often is.

The human heart is so large that mere remembrance should not be allowed to tyrannize over every part of it.

But cases of remorse and absorbing grief are comparatively rare. What is not rare is that misguided loyalty to the past which dominates the lives of so many of us. I do not speak of leading principles, which are not likely to incommode us by changing; I speak of secondary yet still important things.

We will not do so-and-so because we have never done it as if that was a reason! Or we have always done so-and-so, therefore we must always do it as if thai was logic! This disposition to an irrational Toryism is curiously discoverable in advanced Radicals, and it will show itself in the veriest trifles.

I remember such a man whose wife objected to his form of hat (not that I would call so crowning an affair as a hat a trifle!). "My dear," he protested, "I have al- ways worn this sort of hat. It may not suit me, but it is absolutely impossible for me to alter it now." However, she took him by means of an omnibus to a hat shop and bought him another hat and put it on his head, and made a present of the old one to the shop assistant, and marched him out of the shop. There!" she said, " you see how impossible it is." This is a parable. And I will not insult your intelligence by applying it.

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