this extreme disapprobation was right:  but it cannot be denied that this is the direction to which all human beings are likely, at first, to feel an impulse to go.  A man does you some injury:  you are much angrier than if he had done the like injury to some one else.  You are much angrier when your own servants are guilty of little neglects and follies, than when the servants of your next neighbour are guilty in a precisely similar degree.  The Prime Minister (or Chancellor) fails to make you a Queen’s Counsel or a Judge:  you are much more angry than if he had overlooked some other man, of precisely equal merit.  And I do not mean merely that the injury done to yourself comes more home to you, but that positively you think it a worse thing.  It seems as if there were more of moral evil in it.  The boy who steals your plums seems worse than other boys stealing other plums.  The servant who sells your oats and starves your horses, seems worse than other servants who do the like.  It is not merely that you feel where the shoe pinches yourself, more than where it pinches another:  that is all quite right.  It is that you have a tendency to think it is a worse shoe than another which gives an exactly equal amount of pain.  You are prone to dwell upon and brood over the misconduct which affected yourself.

Well, you begin to see that this is unworthy, that selfishness and mortified conceit are at the foundation of it.  You determine that you will shake yourself free from this vulgar error.  What more magnanimous, you think, than to do the opposite of the wrong thing?  Surely it will be generous, and even heroic, to wholly acquit the wrong-doer, and even to cherish him for a bosom friend.  So the pendulum swings over to the opposite extreme, and you land in the secondary vulgar error.  I do not mean to say that in practice many persons are likely to thus bend the twig backwards; but it is no small evil to think that it would be a right thing, and a fine thing, to do even that which you never intend to do.  So you write an essay, or even a book, the gist of which is that it is a grand thing to select for a friend and guide the human being who has done you signal injustice and harm.  Over that book, if it be a prettily written tale, many young ladies will weep:  and though without the faintest intention of imitating your hero’s behaviour, they will think that it would be a fine thing if they did so.  And it is a great mischief to pervert the moral judgment and falsely to excite the moral feelings.  You forget that wrong is wrong, though it be done against yourself, and that you have no right to acquit the wrong to yourself as though it were no wrong at all.  That lies beyond your province.  You may forgive the personal offence, but it does not rest with you to acquit the guilt.  You have no right to confuse moral distinctions by practically saying that wrong is not wrong, because it is done against you.  All wrong is against very many things