Scientific ethics,
which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the race
makes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways of
heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul. Such a code
is at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, being
equal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit
of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands of
the secret power that ordained its existence in the hour when nature was
constituted to be its mode of birth, consciousness, and death. And if
the choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our practical faith
that the service of the best, even to the point of death, is due to the
least in the hope of bettering the lot of man. Hence, as we are willing
that in communities the noblest should die for a cause, we consent to
the death of high civilizations, if they spread in some Hellenization of
a Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric world; and to the extinction of
aristocracies, if their virtues thereby are disseminated and the social
goods they monopolized made common in a people; and to the falling of
the flower of man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown on all the
winds of the future for the blessing of the world's fuller and more
populous life.
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