Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 November 1880 — Breaking the Golden Rule. [ARTICLE]

Breaking the Golden Rule.

Richard Grant White discusses interestingly, in the New York Time s, the dispositions of certain persons to be uncharitable in speech and actions towards oth«s with whom they have no relationship, and who have never done them the slightest injury, oftentimes not being acquainted by sight. He says: “The cause of such enmity is one of the mysteries of human nature. Such enmity would seem to evidence that in some hearts there is a spring of spontaneous malignity. There is an offense known to the law as malicious 'mischief, by which term is meant those injuries, generally to property, which are done apparently without any 011161: motive than that of a wanton desire to do mischief to others. And these offenses are often committed by those who would not readily be guilty of a serious crime, or even of a sin. A woman who wonld not steal a dollar or a yard of silk will, in mere malice, ruin another woman’s silk gown, if she can do so with, as she thinks, no chance of being found out. Tho other woman may not have done her any wrong, may not be even her rival; but for some reason nndefined to herself, perhaps even unacknowledged, she hates her, and it Is gall to her to see ‘that woman’ handsomely apparelled. The philosophy of much of this embitterment he suggests in this paragraph; “In a word, envy, sheer envy, makes active, malignant enemies. Vanity wounded, not through intention, but by tho mere successful display of superior abilities, rankles into hatred. It is essential that success should attend the manifestations of superiority; for nothing is so grateful to some mind 9, nothing falls so soothingly upon some souls, as the knowledge that a man whose strength they feel, bat do not acknowledge, has made a vain effort to rise above their own level of mediocrity. Sucoess of a person, in the same strata of society with a detractor, to a degree exceeding that of the offender, might also be mentioned as a prompting to violence of words and deeds. Jealousy of another’s good fortune has Ms illustration all about ns—some very amusing at times, othera equally Bad. "We all know such cases.”