The wisest of them can only attain to stoicism - a dumb
protest against the environment. There are no stoics among well-fed
people. The Romans made that discovery for themselves, when they
abandoned the cheese-paring habits of the Republic.
In short, it seems to me that virtues and vices which cannot be
expressed in physiological terms are not worth talking about; that when
a morality refuses to derive its sanction from the laws which govern our
body, it loses the right to exist. This being so, what is the most
conspicuous native vice?
Envy, without a doubt.
Out of envy they pine away and die; out of envy they kill one another.
To produce a more placid race, [Footnote: By placid I do not mean
peace-loving and pitiful in the Christian sense. That doctrine of loving
and forgiving one's enemies is based on sheer funk; our pity for others
is dangerously akin to self-pity, most odious of vices. Catholic
teaching - in practice, if not in theory - -glides artfully over the
desirability of these imported freak-virtues, knowing that they cannot
appeal to a masculine stock. By placid I mean steady, self-contained.]
to dilute envious thoughts and the acts to which they lead, is at bottom
a question of nutrition.
