Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/526

512 society involves all miseries hunger, overwork, humiliation, is scarcely sufficient, for human beings able to judge would choose them all in preference to cancer. We believe the causes for this overweening horror of poverty, which certainly exists, and with many classes in this country furnishes an overpowering motive in life, are two, both of them easy to be explained. The first cause undoubtedly is that men fear most those future troubles which they most clearly realize, and that they realize very few. The majority of mankind, fortunately for themselves, have very little imagination, and that imagination is most easily stirred upon its hopeful side. Every man must die, and how very few think often of that greatest of events! It is the hardest thing in the world to induce men ever to expect pain, and the man who knows perfectly well that a burst of temper will bring on angina pectoris or that a glass of sherry will renew the torture of gout, still indulges his anger or his taste without any serious fear. The best argument against transportation as a punishment is that criminals have such a difficulty in realizing its meaning — soldiers, for instance, in India, often try to be transported — and it is the same want of imagination which, even in countries where the population has a horror of suffering, makes universal conscription possible. People do, however, realize poverty, realize it thoroughly and painfully, and dread it, therefore, as they never dread very much worse evils. They know what it is to have no money, and the prospect of having none affects them as keenly as if they were already destitute. The man, therefore, who sees destitution coming on, say, for twelve months, is therefore as far as the strain on him is concerned, a man who for twelve months has been destitute, and has suffered all, and more than all, that destitution implies. It is not true, perhaps, to say that nothing is so painful as imagination pictures it, for many pains, such as tic, are probably worse, but nothing is so painful as imagination pictures it in a man whose imagination is thoroughly informed. He collects together involuntarily all the terrors of the situation, which in fact would be dispersed, and expects the workhouse and starvation, as it were, together. He cannot or at least does not realize that the suffering of having to eat "skilly" and the suffering of being without a meal cannot happen simultaneously to the same individual. He would fear cancer for his daughter quite as much as poverty, but he knows what poverty would be, and does not, though he thinks he does, fully realize the disease. The second cause we believe to be the sense of injustice which enters into this peculiar form of suffering. Men submit to evils visibly dealt out to them by Heaven or fate with a resignation they are often unable to display under evils in which human will is an operating cause. We take it, the man who commits suicide from pecuniary pressure will always be found to be a man who has worked, and who has raged secretly or openly at the apparent injustice involved in work bringing no return. Nothing overturns the balance of the mind so quickly as a long-continued sense of injustice, and nothing, especially in the army and merchant navy, is so frequent a cause of suicide. The man who is gliding into poverty from no fault of his own, or from a fault he does not perceive, is apt, unless a man of singularly well-balanced judgment, to feel himself oppressed, and oppressed by power which is resistless, without being in any sense divine; he is compelled to fight, as it were, without weapons, and as it is not open to him in this world to decline the struggle, he leaves this world behind. Pharaoh's order that bricks should be made without straw excites a sort of horror in the minds of millions who do not know why straw was needed; and a little tradesman without capital, who toils like a slave, yet all in vain, constantly feels as the Jews did, as if he were fighting against a power which could not be mollified either by labour or obedience, but returns for submission only a demand for the impossible, and for labour only the sarcasm, "You are idle." No other form of misery, except perhaps, religious persecution, produces quite this impression, or, when it is continuous, so destroys the spring in most men's minds, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast," — except the bankrupt's.