Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/68

58 felt to be in some way serviceable to others, brings kindred evils—an absence of certain positive pleasures of a high order, not easily exhausted, and a further falling back on egoistic pleasures, again tending toward satiety. And all this, with its resulting weariness and discontent, we may trace to a social organization under which there comes to the regulating classes a share of produce great enough to make possible large accumulations that support useless descendants.

The bias of the wealthy in favor of arrangements apparently so conducive to their comforts and pleasures, while it shuts out the perception of these indirect penalties brought round on them by their seeming advantages, also shuts out the perception that there is any thing mean in being a useless consumer of things which others produce. Contrariwise, there still survives, though in a weaker form, the belief that it is honorable to do nothing but seek enjoyments, and relatively dishonorable to pass life in supplying others with the means to enjoyment. In this, as in other things, our temporary state brings a temporary standard of honor appropriate to it; and the accompanying sentiments and ideas exclude the conception of a state in which what is now thought admirable will be thought disgraceful. Yet it needs only, as before, to aid imagination by studying other times and other societies, remote in nature from our own, to see at least the possibility of this. When we contrast the feeling of the Feejeeans, among whom a man has a restless ambition to be acknowledged as a murderer, with the feeling among civilized races, who shrink with horror from a murderer, we get undeniable proof that men in one social state pride themselves in characters and deeds elsewhere held in the greatest detestation. Seeing which, we may infer that, just as the Feejeeans, believing in the honorableness of murder, are regarded by us with astonishment; so those of our own day who pride themselves in consuming much and producing nothing, and who care little for the well-being of their society so long as it supplies them with good dinners, soft beds, and pleasant lounging-places, may be regarded with astonishment by men of times to come, living under higher social forms. Nay, we may see not merely the possibility of such a change in sentiment, but the probability. Observe first the feeling still extant in China, where the honorableness of doing nothing, more strongly held than here, makes the wealthy wear their nails so long that they have to be tied back out of the way, and makes the ladies submit to prolonged tortures that their crushed feet may show their incapacity for work. Next, remember that, in generations gone by, both here and on the Continent, the disgracefulness of trade was an article of faith among the upper classes, maintained very strenuously. Now, mark how members of the landed class are going into business, and even sons of peers becoming professional men and merchants; and observe among the wealthy the feeling that men of their order have public duties to perform, and that the absolutely idle among them are blameworthy. Clearly, then,