We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.”
—Mrs. Jellyby, Bleak House, by Charles Dickens (1852)
Conceptions of morality change, never more so than in the lifetime of The New Criterion. If a person who died at the time of the first issue were to return to life, he would find himself in an angrier and more charged moral atmosphere than the one he had left—and one in which the principles that undergird Western civilization scarcely seem to be in evidence. Indeed, he would think that the world was a moral hornets’ nest that had been poked with a stick, so furious is the buzzing.
Some years ago, I shared a public platform with a person considerably more eminent than I. The subject of discussion was what it took to be good, which can be argued over for an eternity without compelling a universally accepted answer. This does not make the question meaningless, however, as the Logical Positivists might once have claimed; indeed, there are few questions more important.
The person more eminent than I (whom I shall not name, the avoidance of pointless personal denigration being a part, albeit a small one, of what it takes to be good) said that it took intelligence to be good. Since the eminent person almost certainly considered
