The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer | Page 6

borrowed for the purpose from a barrister, only in order to
be able to give another man a sound drubbing; a second has chosen the
mask of patriotism and the public welfare with a similar intent; a third
takes religion or purity of doctrine. For all sorts of purposes men have
often put on the mask of philosophy, and even of philanthropy, and I
know not what besides. Women have a smaller choice. As a rule they
avail themselves of the mask of morality, modesty, domesticity, and
humility. Then there are general masks, without any particular
character attaching to them like dominoes. They may be met with
everywhere; and of this sort is the strict rectitude, the courtesy, the
sincere sympathy, the smiling friendship, that people profess. The
whole of these masks as a rule are merely, as I have said, a disguise for
some industry, commerce, or speculation. It is merchants alone who in
this respect constitute any honest class. They are the only people who
give themselves out to be what they are; and therefore they go about
without any mask at all, and consequently take a humble rank.
It is very necessary that a man should be apprised early in life that it is
a masquerade in which he finds himself. For otherwise there are many
things which he will fail to understand and put up with, nay, at which
he will be completely puzzled, and that man longest of all whose heart
is made of better clay--
_Et meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan.[1]_
[Footnote 1: Juvenal, Sat. 14, 34]
Such for instance is the favour that villainy finds; the neglect that merit,
even the rarest and the greatest, suffers at the hands of those of the
same profession; the hatred of truth and great capacity; the ignorance of
scholars in their own province; and the fact that true wares are almost
always despised and the merely specious ones in request. Therefore let

even the young be instructed betimes that in this masquerade the apples
are of wax, the flowers of silk, the fish of pasteboard, and that all
things--yes, all things--are toys and trifles; and that of two men whom
he may see earnestly engaged in business, one is supplying spurious
goods and the other paying for them in false coin.
But there are more serious reflections to be made, and worse things to
be recorded. Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast. We know it, if
only in the business of taming and restraining him which we call
civilisation. Hence it is that we are terrified if now and then his nature
breaks out. Wherever and whenever the locks and chains of law and
order fall off and give place to anarchy, he shows himself for what he is.
But it is unnecessary to wait for anarchy in order to gain enlightenment
on this subject. A hundred records, old and new, produce the conviction
that in his unrelenting cruelty man is in no way inferior to the tiger and
the hyaena. A forcible example is supplied by a publication of the year
1841 entitled _Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the United States
of North America: being replies to questions transmitted by the British
Anti-slavery Society to the American Anti-slavery Society_.[1] This
book constitutes one of the heaviest indictments against the human race.
No one can put it down with a feeling of horror, and few without tears.
For whatever the reader may have ever heard, or imagined, or dreamt,
of the unhappy condition of slavery, or indeed of human cruelty in
general, it will seem small to him when he reads of the way in which
those devils in human form, those bigoted, church-going, strictly
Sabbatarian rascals--and in particular the Anglican priests among
them--treated their innocent black brothers, who by wrong and violence
had got into their diabolical clutches.
[Footnote 1: _Translator's 'Note_.--If Schopenhauer were writing
to-day, he would with equal truth point to the miseries of the African
trade. I have slightly abridged this passage, as some of the evils against
which he protested no longer exist.]
Other examples are furnished by Tshudi's _Travels in Peru_, in the
description which he gives of the treatment of the Peruvian soldiers at
the hands of their officers; and by Macleod's _Travels in Eastern
Africa_, where the author tells of the cold-blooded and truly devilish
cruelty with which the Portuguese in Mozambique treat their slaves.
But we need not go for examples to the New World, that obverse side

of our planet. In the year 1848 it was brought to life that in England,
not in one, but apparently in a hundred cases within a brief period, a
husband had poisoned his wife or _vice versâ_, or both had joined in
poisoning their children, or in