All the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation; and the vices likewise. Our people are deficient in righteous indignation. When you see a man righteously indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this the force. Nothing else will arouse courage but courage, faith but faith. You see, for instance, a knot of men who are really indignant at the injustice of the times. But their indignation seems to you a danger; because it is likely to defeat some candidate, some pet measure of yours. You wish to allay it. You wish yourself well rid of this sacred indignation; it is inconvenient. Open your eyes to the light of science. Here is a spark of that fire with which everybody ought to be filled. All your scheming was only for the purpose of getting this fire. Then foment it. Virtue then, is a mode of motion, or it is an attitude of mind in a human organism, which enables that organism to transmit virtue to others. But vice is also a mere attitude of mind by which vice is transmitted. We know less about the natural history of vice than we do of dipsomania and consumption; but we know this much, that the vices are co-related, and breed one another _in transitu_; the tendency being towards lighter forms in the later catchers. Avoid another’s guilty side, and you reinforce it; sympathize with it, and you catch his disease, or some disease. I have held hands with my friend (who is in the wrong) over his family troubles, and it has given me the distemper for a week. The German actor, Devrient, went mad while studying the inmates of asylums, as a preparation to playing King Lear. It was not the living in asylums that drove him mad, but his sympathetic attitude toward the disease. This exposed him. Why is it we commend the man whose antagonism to crooked work is so great that he shows a tempter the door before he has finished his proposition? Parleying is not only a danger; it is the beginning of the trouble itself. It is very difficult and very odious offending people, by forcing them to see in which direction our wheels really go round; and yet the alternative is to have our machinery forced back to a standstill. We are interlocked with other people and cannot break free. We are held in place by fate, and played upon against our will. When you see cruelty going on before you, you are put to the alternative of interposing to stop it, or of losing your sensibility. There is a law of growth here involved. It is inexorable. You are at the mercy of it. You wish yourself elsewhere, but you are here; you are a mere illustration of pitiless and undying force. The part you take, may run through a fit of bad temper or malice. It may turn to covetousness or conceit, who can tell? Some poison has entered your eye because you looked negligently upon corruption. It will cost you some part of your sense of smell. “Use or lose,” says Nature when she gives us capacities. What you condone, you support; what you neglect, you confirm.