He has not so much
grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the
light. Such turnings round into a new attitude the world has seen on a
less extensive scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century,
for example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men. There
was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth century that
seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that had not been guilty
of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank, kindly,
gentle life of the prosperous classes in any European country before the
years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling
from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable
existence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence,
the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were
no real differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;
their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and habits of
mind. And turning to more individual instances the constantly observed
difference between one portion of a life and another consequent upon
a religious conversion, were a standing example of the versatile
possibilities of human nature.
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