Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/469

Rh be reclaimed, and here and there the moral desert of asceticism has already begun to bloom with flowers from the revived seeds of Grecian civilization.

Monachism, at least, is fast disappearing; in this age of railroads and steam-engines we have no time for positive self-torture à la Simon Stylites. But our commercial Pecksniffs have found it a time- and money-saving plan to stick to the negative part of the anti-pleasure dogma, and hope to atone for the dreary materialism of our daily factory-life by the still drearier asceticism of a Puritan sabbath: six days of misery in the name of Mammon, balanced by one day of sixfold misery in the name of Christ. "Worldly pleasures" are still under the ban of our spiritual purists; daily drudgery and daily self-denial are still considered the proper sphere of a law-abiding citizen, and special afflictions a special sign of divine favor. Life has become a socage-duty; we do not think it necessary to alleviate the distress of our poor till it reaches a degree that threatens to end it. We have countless benevolent institutions for the prevention of outright death, not one benevolent enough to make life worth living. Infanticide is now far more rigorously punished than in old times; we enforce every child's right to live and become a humble, tithe-paying Christian, but as for its claim to live happy we refer it to the sweet by-and-by. We shudder at the barbarity of the Cæsars, who permitted the combat of men with wild beasts, to cater to the amusement of the Roman populace; but we contemplate with great equanimity the misery of millions of our fellow-citizens, wearing away their lives in workshops and factories; millions of children of our own nation and country, who have no recreation but sleep, no hope but oblivion, to whom the morning sun brings the summons of a taskmaster and the summer season nothing but lengthened hours of weary toil; nay, we make it the boast of our pious civilization to deprive them of their sole day of leisure, to interdict their harmless sports, lest the noise, or even the rumor of their merriment, might disturb the solemnity of an assemblage of whining hypocrites. Hence the recklessness, the Nihilism, and the weary pessimism of our times, the melancholy that everywhere underlies the glittering varnish of our social life. Hence also that vague yearning after a happy hereafter, which the murderers of the happy past have made the principal source of their revenues.

With few exceptions the children of Christendom are stricken with a disease which mirth alone can cure. In North America and North Britain, especially, it is pitiful to witness the slow withering of so many light-loving creatures in the hopeless night of poverty and Sabbatarianism; more pitiful to see the reviving of their spirits at every deceptive sign of dawn, the expedients of poor, compromising Nature, her makeshifts with half-recreations and half-sufficient rest, in the lingering hope of a better future—to come only with the repose from which no factory-bell can awaken a sleeper, when after long years of