I don’t see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without these qualities—­we should have made an audience that would have shamed the other classes out of their share in the national vices.  We should have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers, honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous and brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten gains.  I say it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is—­to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows.  Therefore let us have done with this nonsense about our being much better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pretence that that was a reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has been given to us.

The essay on “Moral Swindlers,” in Theophrastus Such, clearly indicates George Eliot’s point of view in ethics.  She makes those moral traits which are social of greater importance than those which are personal.  She complains that a man who is chaste and of a clean personal conduct is regarded as a moral man when his business habits are not good.  To her, his relations to his fellows in all the social and business affairs of life are of higher importance than his personal habits or his family relations.  She rebels against that deep moral instinct of the race which identifies morality with personal character, and is indignant that the altruism she so much believed in is not everywhere made identical with ethics.  To her, the person is nothing; the individual is thought of only as a member of a community.  She forgot that any large and noble moral life for a people must rest upon personal character, upon a pure and healthy state of the moral nature in individuals.  Nations cannot be moral, but persons can.  Public corruption has its foundation in personal corruption.  The nation cannot have a noble moral life unless the individuals of which it is composed are pure in character and noble in conduct.  She complains that sexual purity is made identical with morality, while business integrity is not.  Every social and moral bond we have, she says, “is a debt; the right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie nowhere else.”  It is a debt owed, not to God, but to humanity; it is therefore to be paid, not by personal holiness, but by human sympathy and devotion.