Italy : 32. National Prejudices

'Another Assassination! This venerable City,'  I ex-
claimed, 'what is it, but as it began, a nest of robbers
and murderers?  We must away at sunrise, Luigi.' --
But before sunrise I had reflected a little, and in the
soberest prose.  My indignation was gone; and when
Luigi undrew my curtain, crying, 'Up, Signor, up!  The
horses  are  at  the  gate.'  'Luigi,'  I replied,  'if thou
lovest me, draw the curtain.'
  It would lessen very much the severity with which men
judge of each other, if they would but trace effects to
their causes, and observe the progress of things in the
moral as accurately as in the physical world.  When we
condemn millions in the mass as vindictive and sanguinary,
we should remember that, wherever Justice is ill-adminis-
tered,  the  injured  will  redress  themselves.  Robbery
provokes to robbery; murder to assassination.  Resent-
ments become hereditary;  and what began in disorder,
ends as if all hell had broke loose.
  Laws create a habit of self-restraint, not only by the
influence of fear, but by regulating  in  its exercise  the
passion  of  revenge.  If  they  overawe  the  bad by the
prospect of a punishment certain and well-defined, they
console the injured by the infliction of that punishment ;
and, as the infliction is a public act, it excites and entails
no enmity.  The laws are offended ; and the community
for its own sake pursues and overtakes the offender; often
without the concurrence of the sufferer, sometimes against
his wishes.
  Now those who were not born, like ourselves, to such
advantages, we should surely rather pity than hate; and,
when at length they venture to turn against their rulers,
we should lament, not wonder at their excesses; remem-
bering  that nations  are  naturally patient and long suffer-
ing, and seldom rise in rebellion till they are so degraded
by a bad government as to be almost incapable of a good
one.
  'Hate them, perhaps,' you may say, 'we should not ;
but despise them we must, if enslaved, like the people of
Rome,  in  mind as well as body ;  if  their  religion  be  a
gross and barbarous superstition.' -- I respect knowledge ;
but I do not despise ignorance.  They think only as their
fathers  thought,  worship  as  they worshipped.  They do
no more ; and, if ours had not burst their bondage, brav -
ing  imprisonment  and  death,  might  not  we at this very
moment  have  been  exhibiting,  in  our  streets  and  our
churches, the same processions, ceremonials, and mortifi-
cations?
  Nor should we require from those who are in an earlier
stage  of  society,  what belongs  to  a  later. They are only
where  we  one  were;  and  why  hold  them  in  derision?
It  is  their  business  to  cultivate  the  inferior  arts  before
they  think  of  the  more  refined ; and  in  many of the last
what are we as a nation,  when  compared  to  others  that
have  passed  away?  Unfortunately  it  is  too  much  the
practice  of  governments to nurse and  keep  alive  in  the
governed  their  national  prejudices.  It  withdraws  their
attention from what is passing at home, and makes them
better tools  in  the  hands of  Ambition.  Hence  next-door
neighbours are held up to us from our childhood as natural
enemies ; and we are urged on like curs to worry each other.
  In like manner we should learn to be just to individuals.
Who  can  say,  'In  such  circumstances  I  should  have
done  otherwise?'  Who,  did  he  but  reflect  by  what
slow gradations, often by how many strange concurrences,
we are led astray;  with how much reluctance, how much
agony,  how  many  efforts  to  escape,  how  many  self-
accusations, how many sighs, how many tears. --- Who,
did  he  but  reflect  for  a  moment, would  have  the  heart
to  cast  a  stone?  Fortunately  these  things  are  known
to  Him,  from whom no secrets are hidden ;  and  let  us 
rest in the assurance  that His judgements are not as ours
are.