Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.

Gibbon’s sentence observes a moral and psychological limitation: human compassion weakens with distance. Suffering that is remote—geographically, socially, or imaginatively—tends to become an abstraction, reported rather than felt, and therefore fails to move us to sustained concern or action. The remark also hints at how public opinion can tolerate large-scale calamities (war, famine, persecution) when they occur “elsewhere,” because the emotional immediacy that prompts aid is missing. Read in a historical register, it aligns with Enlightenment-era reflections on sympathy and sensibility: fellow-feeling is real but partial, strongest where proximity makes another’s pain vivid and personal.