One may
incline to hope that the balance of good over evil is in favour of
benevolence; one can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but
anyhow it is certain that there is a most heavy debit of evil, and
that this burden might almost all have been spared us if
philanthropists as well as others had not inherited from their
barbarous forefathers a wild passion for instant action.
Even in commerce, which is now the main occupation of mankind, and
one in which there is a ready test of success and failure wanting in
many higher pursuits, the same disposition to excessive action is
very apparent to careful observers. Part of every mania is caused by
the impossibility to get people to confine themselves to the amount
of business for which their capital is sufficient, and in which they
can engage safely. In some degree, of course, this is caused by the
wish, to get rich; but in a considerable degree, too, by the mere
love of activity. There is a greater propensity to action in such
men than they have the means of gratifying. Operations with their
own capital will only occupy four hours of the day, and they wish to
be active and to be industrious for eight hours, and so they are
ruined. If they could only have sat idle the other four hours, they
would have been rich men.
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