“Cousin Georgina will wear ospreys to the bitter end, I prophesy,” said Roy. “You’ll never convince her that anything she likes is really hard on others.”
“Of course, many people have worn them before they knew of the cruelty,” said Cecil, “but afterward I can’t think how they can.”
“You see, people as a rule don’t really care about pain at a distance,” said Frithiof. “Torture thousands of these herons and egrets by a lingering death, and though people know it is so they wont care; but take one person within hearing of their cries, and that person will wonder how any human being can be such a barbarian as to wear these so-called ospreys.”
“I suppose it is that we are so very slow to realize pain that we don’t actually see.”
“People don’t really want to stop pain till it makes them personally uncomfortable,” replied Frithiof.
“Most things come round to selfishness when you trace them out.”
“Do you really quite think that? I don’t think it can be true, because it is not of one’s self that one thinks in trying to do away with the sufferings of the world; reformers always know that they will have to endure a great deal of pain themselves, and it is the thought of lessening it for others that makes them brave enough to go on.”
“But you must allow,” said Frithiof, “that to get up a big subscription you must have a harrowing account of a catastrophe. You must stir people’s hearts so that they wont be comfortable again till they have given a guinea; it is their own pain that prompts them to act—their own personal discomfort.”
“That may be, perhaps; but it is not altogether selfishness if they really do give help; it must be a God-like thing that makes them want to cure pain—a devil would gloat over it. Why should you call it selfishness because the good pleases them? ‘_Le bien me plaît_’ was a good enough motto for the Steadfast Prince, why not for the rest of us?”
“But is it orthodox, surely, to do what you dislike doing?”
“Yes,” struck in Roy, “like the nursery rhyme about
‘The twelve Miss Pellicoes they say were always taught To do the thing they didn’t like, which means the thing they ought.’”
“But that seems to me exactly what is false,” said Cecil. “Surely we have to grow into liking the right and the unselfish, and hating the thing that only pleases the lower part of us?”