Friendship's League, Offensive and Defensive

— " Love me, hate my enemies,” was the text of a little plaint recently made in the Club. The Contributor rose to protest against such a demand, but on me the chief and grateful effect of his protest was to bring to my mind with new clearness much that is to be said in its favor.

Put in this form it has a slightly ungenerous sound, but in this day, when the ties between men are generally so much more loosely knit than when personal fighting and peril played a greater part in making us esteem the virtues of gratitude and fidelity, it nevertheless seems to me to need unabashed emphasis. Of course it can be propounded in a thousand misplaced and puerile ways, but for myself, I am chiefly anxious that it shall never be through cowardice, nor laziness, nor stupidity, nor any meanness of soul that I refuse help in a friend’s fight.

I observe that some or all of these undesirable things are often at the root of the ready assertions that it takes two to make a quarrel, and that both sides are always to blame. Doubtless, as human beings, both sides always lack perfect wisdom, but there are plenty of quarrels where the overwhelming wrong comes from one party and is suffered by the other, and I take it that it is the part of friendship to discover it when this is the case, and to make the discovery known. Indeed, I think the simple, warm love of justice might do so much, and that friendship should hardly wait for so imperative a demand upon its championship. Ardent fidelity in friendship may lead to wrong, hut it is itself a good of overbalancing value. I rejoice to remember how passionately that prince of friends, Edmund Burke, sustained these views, not only when he could not help it, as the fighter of his friends’ battles, but when more intellectual conviction and temerity were required to make him lay down the law as to what his friends must do for him. After his quarrel with Single-Speech Hamilton he writes : “ I shall never, therefore, look upon those who, after hearing the whole story, do not think me perfectly in the right, and do not consider Hamilton an infamous scoundrel, to be in the smallest degree my friends, or even to be persons for whom I am bound to have the slightest esteem, as fair and just estimators of the characters and conduct of men. Situated as I am, and feeling as I do, I should be just as well pleased that they totally condemned me as that they should say there were faults on both sides, as I hear is (I cannot forbear saying) the affected language of some persons.”