6. The diminished cost of generating power on a large scale, compared with a number of separate steam engines distributed over manufacturing districts.Hetty checked the smile, for that might have grown hysterical. She had to brace herself to the effort, an easier task seeing that Gordon Bruce was uppermost in her mind. For him she would have dared and done anything. The woman who was at the bottom of this thing was his deadly enemy. To gain her secrets must help in Gordon's final victory.
FORE:"I must see further into this," Hetty told herself. "When this honoured guest comes I will creep downstairs and listen. It's not a very nice thing to do, but if ever the end justifies the means, surely this is a case in point."
"Quick," cried Balmayne, as he pulled his companion to her feet. "You don't seem to be hurt, It's a mystery we were not killed. There's a rail out of the long line of rails in the square yonder, close here. Ah! Now you squeeze through and I'll follow. We shall save our skins yet."Utilitarianism agrees with the ancient hedonism in holding pleasure to be the sole good and pain the sole evil. Its adherents also, for the most part, admit that the desire of the one and the dread of the other are the sole motives to action; but, while making the end absolutely universal and impersonal, they make the motive into a momentary impulse, without any necessary relation to the future happiness of the agent himself. The good man does his duty because doing it gives him pleasure, or because the failure to do it would give him pain, at the moment; although he knows that a contrary course would save him from greater pain or win him greater pleasure hereafter. No accurate thinker would call this acting from a selfish or interested motive; nor does it agree with the teaching of Epicurus. Were all sensitive beings to be united in a single organism, then, on utilitarian principles, self-interest, interpreted in the sense of seeking its own preservation and pleasure, would be the only law that the individualised aggregate could rationally obey. But the good of each part would be rigorously subordinated to the good of the whole; and utilitarian morality desires that we should act as if this hypothesis were realised, at least in reference to our own particular interests. Now, the idea of humanity as forming such a consolidated whole is not Epicurean. It belongs to the philosophy which always reprobated pleasure, precisely because its pursuit is associated with the dereliction of public duty and with bitter rivalry for the possession of what, by its very nature, exists only in limited quantities, while the demand for it is unlimited or, at any rate, far exceeds the supply. According to the Stoics, there was only one way in which the individual could study his private425 interest without abandoning his position as a social being, and this was to find it exclusively in the practice of virtue.575 But virtue and public interest remained mere forms scantily supplemented by appeals to the traditional morality, until the idea of generalised happiness, of pleasure diffused through the whole community, came to fill them with substance and life.CHAPTER XXVI. THE BLACK MOTOR.[160]
