may be described, in common phrase, as ‘neither born nor thought of.’  I am a father myself, but I wish to be fair and to take a just view of matters.  If a mother leaves her child on a doorstep, for example, the filial bond can hardly be expected to be very strong.  In such a case, indeed, the infant seems to me to have a very distinct grievance against its female parent, and to be under no very overwhelming obligation to its father.  ’Handsome is as handsome does’ is a principle that applies to all relations of life, including the nearest; and if duty never absolutely ceases to exist, it is, at all events, greatly moulded by circumstances.

Patriotism, for instance, is very commendable, but your country must be worth something to make you love it.  It is next to impossible that an inhabitant of Monaco, for example, should be patriotic.  He can at most be only parochial.  The love of one’s mother is probably the purest and noblest of all human affections; but some people’s mothers are habitual drunkards, and others professional thieves.  Even filial reverence, it is plain, must stop somewhere.  That is one of the objections which, with all humility, I feel to the religion of M. Comte.  The worship of my grandmother would be impossible to me, unless I had reason to believe her to have been a respectable person.  Her relationship, unless I had had the advantage of her personal acquaintance, would weigh I fear, but little with me, and that of my great-grandmother nothing at all.  The whole notion of ancestry—­unless one’s ancestors have been distinguished people—­seems to me ridiculous.  If they have not been distinguished people—­folks, that is, of whom some record has been preserved—­how is one to know that they have been worthy persons, whose mission has been to increase the sum of human happiness?  If, on the other hand, they have been only notorious, and done their best to decrease it, I should be most heartily ashamed of them.  The pride of birth from this point of view—­which seems to me a very reasonable one—­is not only absurd, but often very reprehensible.  We may be exulting, by proxy, in successful immorality, or even crime.  Our boastfulness of our progenitors is necessarily in most cases very vague, because we know so little about them.  When we come to the particular, the record stops very short indeed—­generally at one’s grandmother, who, by the way, plays a part in the dream-drama of ancestry little superior to that of that ‘rank outsider,’ a mother-in-law.  ‘Tell that to your grandmother’ is a phrase that certainly did not originate in reverence; and even when that lady is proverbially alluded to in a complimentary sense, her intelligence is only eulogised in connection with the ‘sucking of eggs.’

It so happens that I have quite a considerable line of ancestors myself, but only one of them ever distinguished himself, and that (he was an Attorney-General) in a doubtful way; and I confess I don’t take the slightest interest in them.  I prefer the pleasant companion with whom I came up in the train yesterday, and whose name I forgot to ask, to the whole lot of them.