is a very homely, but it is an essential lesson.  That the great mass of the citizens of a country should lay it well to heart, and act habitually on it, is the first condition of national prosperity.  Of course, this primary regard to our own interests, or those of the persons with whom we are more immediately connected, must be limited by wider considerations.  A man has duties, not only to himself and his own family, but to his neighbours, to the various institutions with which he is connected, to his town, his country, mankind at large, and even the whole sentient creation.  How far these should limit each other or a man’s individual or family interests is a question by no means easy to answer, and is the main problem which each man has to be perpetually solving for himself, and society at large for us all.  There is hardly any waking hour in which we have not to attempt to settle rival claims of this kind, and, according as we settle them to our own satisfaction or not, so have we peace or trouble of mind.  No one can reasonably deny that the more immediate interests of the individual and of the various social aggregates, including society at large, are frequently in conflict.  It seems to me, I must confess, that it is also futile to deny that there are occasions, though such occasions may be rare, in which even a man’s interests in the long run are incompatible with his social duties.  To take one or two instances.  It may sometimes be for the good of society that a man should speak out his mind freely on some question of private conduct or public policy, though his utterances may be on the unpopular side or offend persons of consideration and influence.  The man performs what he conceives to be his duty, but he knows that, in doing so, he is sacrificing his prospects.  Or, again, he is invited to join in some popular movement which he believes to be of a questionable or pernicious tendency, and, because he believes that to take part in it would be untrue to his own convictions and possibly harmful to others, he refrains from doing so, at the risk of losing preferment, or custom, or patronage.  Then, we are all familiar with the difficulties in which men are often placed, when they have to record a vote; their convictions and the claims of the public service being on one side, and their own interests and prospects on the other.  In all these cases it is true that, if their moral nature be in a healthy condition, they approve, on reflexion, of having taken the more generous course, while it is often a matter of life-long regret if they have sacrificed their nobler impulses to their selfish interests.  And, taking into account these after-feelings of self-approbation and self-disapprobation, it is often the case, and is always the case where these feelings are very strong, that a man gains more happiness, in the long run, by following the path of duty and obeying his social impulses than by confining himself to the narrow view which would be dictated by a cool calculation of what