“Oh, all that about the Companies, I know, was most unfortunate.  In commerce people are led to do so many things, and he might not know exactly how everything would turn out.  But Sir Gavial made a good use of his money, and he is a thoroughly moral man.”

“What do you mean by a thoroughly moral man?” said I.

“Oh, I suppose every one means the same by that,” said Melissa, with a slight air of rebuke.  “Sir Gavial is an excellent family man—­quite blameless there; and so charitable round his place at Tiptop.  Very different from Mr Barabbas, whose life, my husband tells me, is most objectionable, with actresses and that sort of thing.  I think a man’s morals should make a difference to us.  I’m not sorry for Mr Barabbas, but I am sorry for Sir Gavial Mantrap.”

I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was offensively brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was the more pernicious scoundrel of the two, since his name for virtue served as an effective part of a swindling apparatus; and perhaps I hinted that to call such a man moral showed rather a silly notion of human affairs.  In fact, I had an angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes happen, noticed my anger without appropriating my instruction, for I have since heard that she speaks of me as rather violent-tempered, and not over strict in my views of morality.

I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in their full meaning were confined to women like Melissa.  Seeing that Morality and Morals under their alias of Ethics are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute—­seeing that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science or that which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself to no wider view of life than that of village gossips.  Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls.  And since we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion—­the one of these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest conduct towards men.  With such