For it is only through
compassion that we learn to understand those who differ from us in
social station or temperament, and can at all come to love them. Let
me examine my own natural tendencies, and I am soon made aware of how
impossible it is to love _all_ my fellow men. I commence my life, for
instance, under conditions which permit me to see only a small section
of society, which I imagine to be the world itself. I know nothing,
and am told nothing, of those whose lives do not lie in the direct line
of my limited vision. The process of education removes me at each
stage further from the likelihood of knowing them. I acquire ideals,
habits, and manners of which they are destitute. I come to regard an
acquaintance with various forms of knowledge as essential to life, and
I am naturally disdainful of those who do not possess this knowledge.
In the same way I regard a certain code of manners as binding, and the
lack of this code of manners in others as an outrage. My very thoughts
have their own dialect, and I am totally unacquainted with the dialect
of those whose thoughts differ from my own. Thus with the growth of my
culture there is the equal growth of prejudice; with the enjoyment of
my privilege, a tacit rejection and repudiation of the unprivileged.
How then am I ever to find myself in any relation of affection towards
these human creatures from whom I am alienated by the nature of my
education? If, by any chance, I come in contact with them, it is
certain that they will arouse in me repugnance and perhaps disgust.
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