Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/16

6 expressed the results of his own observation: "Traveling," he says, "makes men wiser, but less happy. When men of sober age travel they gather knowledge, but they are, after all, subject to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects, and they learn new habits which can not be gratified when they return home." Again, as the former few and simple requirements of the masses have become more varied and costly, the individual effort necessary for the satisfaction of the latter is not relatively less, even under the new conditions of production, than before, and in many instances is possibly greater. Hence, notwithstanding the large advance in recent years in the average rates of wages, and their increased purchasing power, there is no less complaint than formerly of the cost of living; when (as M. Leroy-Beaulieu has pointed out in the case of France ) the foundation for the complaint is for the most part to be found in the circumstance that a totally different style of living has been adopted, and that society makes conformity with such different style a standard of family respectability.

There is, therefore, unquestionably in these facts an explanation of what to many has seemed one of the greatest puzzles of the times, namely, that with greater and increasing abundance and cheapness of most desirable things, popular discontent with the existing economic condition of affairs does not seem to diminish, but rather to greatly increase. And out of such discontent, which is not based on anything akin to actual and unavoidable poverty, has originated a feeling that the new conditions of abundance should be further equalized by some other methods than intelligent individual effort, self-denial, and a natural, progressive material and social development, and that the state