Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/634

616 merely are there the struggles of poor against rich going on, but the battles for position and pre-eminence are constant. The subjugated party or sect seeks first for toleration, then for equalization, and then for domination. We call contentment a virtue, but we inculcate discontent. A father reproaches his son for not exerting himself to improve his position, and at school and college and in subsequent periods of life efforts at advancement in the social scale are recommended. Individual antagonisms, class antagonisms, political, trading, and religious antagonisms take the place of war. Can war exhibit a more vigorous and persistent antagonism than competition does? Take the college student with ruined health; take the bankrupt tradesman with ruined family; take the aspirants to fashion turning night into day, and preferring gas or electric light to that of the sun. But our very amusements are of a combative character: chess, whist, billiards, racing, cricket, foot-ball, etc. And in all these we, in common parlance, speak of beating our opponent. Even dancing is probably a relic and reminiscence of war, and some of its forms are of a military character. I can call to mind only one game which is not combative, and that is the game you are in some sort now playing, viz., "patience," and with, I fear, some degree of internal antagonism!

Take, again, the ordinary incidents of a day's life in London. Fifteen to twenty thousand cabs, omnibuses, vans, private carriages, etc., all struggling, the horses pushing the earth back and themselves forward, the pedestrians doing the same, but the horses compulsorily—they have not as yet got votes. The occupants of the cabs, vans, etc., are supposed to act from free will, but in the majority of cases they are as much driven as the horses. Insolvents trying to renew bills, rich men trying to save what they have got by saving half an hour of time. Imagine, if you can, the friction of all this, and add the bargaining in shops, the mental efforts in counting-houses, banks, etc., and road-repair, now a permanent and continuous institution. Take our railways: similar efforts and resistances. Drivers, signal-men, porters, etc., and the force emanating from the sun millions of years ago, and locked up in the coal-fields, as Stephenson suggested, now employed to overcome the inertia of trains and to make them push the earth in this or that direction, and themselves along its surface. Take the daily struggles in commerce, law, professions, and legislation, and sometimes even in science and literature. Politics I can not enter upon here, but must leave you to judge whether there is not some degree of antagonism in this pursuit. In all this there is plenty of useful antagonism, plenty of useless—much to please Ormuzd and much to delight Ahriman; but of the two extremes, overwork or stagnation, the latter would, I think, do Ahriman's work more