Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/112

104 the end of a much shorter period of work than he could have accomplished with ease and pleasantness, ere a tithe perhaps of the good he was really competent to do has been effected, his health breaks down, his strength fails him, he can no longer do the good he wanted so much to do. Nay, worse, life not only becomes a burden to him, but he becomes a burden to others. A wise and thoughtful care of self would have avoided this. Such care of self, then, even if regarded from the point of view which should be taken by the rest, is simply far-sighted regard for others.

Perhaps the simplest way of testing the matter is by considering what would happen if all or many of the members of a community followed a course which is commonly spoken of as if it were meritorious. It is manifest that a community chiefly composed of persons who neglecting self broke down their health and strength in exhausting efforts to advance the well-being of others would be a community constantly burdened by fresh accessions of worn-out and used-up members—including eventually most of those who had been most anxious to serve their fellows.

But the question becomes still more serious when the known facts of heredity are taken into account. The evil effects of self-neglect, whether in the form of overwork, or asceticism, or avoidance of all such pleasurable emotions as lighten the toils and worries of life, or in other ways, affect posterity as well as the individual life. Ill-health and weakness are transmitted to children and to children's children through many generations. It is not going too far to say that on the average more misery is wrought and to a much greater number by neglect of self than can be matched by any amount of benefit conferred during life, still less by such benefit as directly arises from self-sacrifice. A man shall work day after day beyond his strength for ten years, and by such excess of activity shall perhaps accumulate at the expense of a ruined constitution what may confer a certain amount of happiness on several persons, or keep discomfort from them. Probably with better-advised efforts during that time more real good might have been conferred on those same persons, for man does not live by bread alone; and certainly in the long run even of a single ordinary life much more good may be done by combining zeal for others with due regard for the welfare of self. But when we consider the multiplied misery inherited by the offspring of weak, sickly, and gloomy parents, we see that even though, on the whole, there had been during life a balance in favor of happiness conferred, this—more than out-weighed even in the first generation—would be many hundred times outweighed in the long run.

The thought seems strange to many that in conduct which appears to them mere care of self there may be further-seeing regard for others