I. The supreme mistake of Christian ethics, and one which runs directly counter to the Golden Rule, is its exaggeration of love of one's neighbor at the expense of self-love. Christianity attacks and despises egoism on principle. Yet that natural impulse is absolutely indispensable in view of self-preservation; indeed, one may say that even altruism, its apparent opposite, is only an enlightened egoism. Nothing great or elevated has ever taken place without egoism, and without the passion that urges us to great sacrifices. It is only the excesses of the impulse that are injurious. One of the Christian precepts that were impressed upon us in our early youth as of great importance, and that are glorified in millions of sermons, is: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you." It is a very ideal precept, but as useless in practice as it is unnatural. So it is with the counsel, "If any man will take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also." Translated into the terms of modern life, that means: "When some unscrupulous scoundrel has defrauded thee of half thy goods, let him have the other half also." Or, again, in the language of modern politics: "When the pious English take from you simple Germans one after another of your new and valuable colonies in Africa, let them have all the rest of your colonies also--or, best of all, give them Germany itself." And, while we touch on the marvellous world-politics of modern England, we may note in passing its direct contradiction of every precept of Christian charity, which is more frequently on the lips of that great nation than of any other nation in the world. However, the glaring contradiction between the theoretical, _ideal_, altruistic morality of the human individual and the _real_, purely selfish morality of the human community, and especially of the civilized Christian state, is a familiar fact. It would be interesting to determine mathematically in what proportion among organized men the altruistic ethical ideal of the individual changes into its contrary, the purely egoistic "real politics" of the state and the nation.