Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/17

30, 1860. every corner of every asylum to which the news should penetrate, but in many thousands of English households where it is now a daily and nightly sorrow that the insane member of the family is not, and cannot be, ministered to either wisely or tenderly. Cannot this consolation be afforded? and, as the pattern method is provided, without much delay? I am sure the Nightingale Committee will bear with the question. .

contains 2,500,000 inhabitants, or thereabouts, the great bulk of whom have some amount of coin in their pockets. There must be a living to be made out of them by any lady or gentleman possessed of a moderate degree of ingenuity. Two millions and a half of human beings, who must be fed, and clothed, and lodged; who are afflicted with various diseases; who are constantly at loggerheads with each other; who must be consoled in their miseries, and amused in their prosperity; who must be conveyed hither and thither in cabs and omnibuses; who have immortal aspirations, and are troubled with corns;—surely there must be something grievously amiss in the mental organisation of any one who cannot manage to screw the means of an easy existence out of the complicated necessities and follies of such an enormous mass of human beings.

The unlikeliest men “get on,” the likeliest men “get off,” in this desperate struggle; for the struggle is a desperate one, save in the cases of those who are born in trade-purple, and who inherit fortunes, or the means of making them. There must, however, be something wrong about our usual definitions in these matters. We have not yet arrived at exact conceptions of likely and unlikely men.

The possession of brilliant intellectual qualities is, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, a bar, not a help, to advancement in the world. If you try to cut a stone with a razor, the razor will lose its edge, and the stone remain uncut. A very high education again, in the majority of instances, unfits a man for a contest with his fellows. You have rifled the cannon till the strength of the metal is gone. Each individual will just bear so much of intellectual culture, and no more, without loss of moral vigour. A too early and too sudden success has proved the ultimate ruin of thousands; if, again, success be too long deferred, the courage of others will give way. Lord Eldon used to say that the possession of a bare competence was, with rare exceptions indeed, an absolute bar to all chance of forensic distinction. Within my own experience of the struggles of the struggling profession suggested, I have seen the absolute necessity of providing means for a bare livelihood until the opportunity of entering upon the exercise of the profession might arise, produce similar results.

Speaking in general terms, and omitting for the moment all consideration of those extraordinary men who from time to time flash like comets through the firmament of humanity, I should say that a somewhat dull unimaginative man, with great powers of continuous labour, and the patience to abide results, and profit by the failures of his more brilliant fellow-creatures, is the likeliest man ultimately to “get on” in London. Youths of a more filibustering turn of mind, who are impelled by their own inner restlessness to take the chances of the game as it is played out in Australia or California, of course possess, and had need possess, other qualities. In London the faculty of sitting still on a chair or stool is largely rewarded; but then it is a faculty which in the majority of instances can only be educed by culture. Few men on the sunny side of forty can sit still.

Again, it appears to me that people in London obtain great rewards and emoluments, simply because they are forty years of age and upwards. A curate’s most brilliant pulpit effusions stand little chance by the side of his rector’s prose. Medical men get trusted, simply because their names have remained for twenty years on the same brass plate, on the same green doors. Men of letters, indeed, obtain distinctions and notoriety at an earlier period of life, but they do not very commonly reap the harvest until they are past forty, and are writing not quite for