Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/216

204 encourage and reward our labor. This, up to a certain point; but with wealth and luxury comes relaxed energy. Without necessity there is no labor; without labor no advancement. Corporeal necessity first forces corporeal activity; then the intellect goes to work to contrive means whereby labor may be lessened and made more productive.

The discontent which arises from discomfort lies at the root of every movement; but, then, comfort is a relative term, and complete satisfaction is never attained. Indeed, as a rule, the more squalid and miserable the race, the more are they disposed to settle down and content themselves in their state of discomfort. What is discomfort to one is luxury to another; "the mark of rank in Nature is capacity for pain;" in following the intellectual life, the higher the culture the greater the discontent; the greater the acquisition, the more eagerly do men press forward toward some higher and greater imaginary good. We all know that blessings in excess become the direst curses; but few are conscious where the benefit of a blessing terminates and the curse begins, and fewer still of those who are able thus to discriminate have the moral strength to act upon that knowledge. As a good in excess is an evil, so evil as it enlarges outdoes itself and tends toward self-annihilation. If we but look about us, we must see that to burn up the world in order to rid it of gross evil—a dogma held by some—is unnecessary, for accumulative evils ever tend toward reaction. Excessive evils are soonest remedied; the equilibrium of the evil must be maintained, or the annihilation of the evil ensues.

Institutions and principles essentially good at one time are essentially evils at another time. The very aids and agencies of civilization become afterward the greatest drags upon progress. At one time it would seem that blind faith was essential to improvement, at another time skepticism—at one time order and morality, at another time lawlessness and rapine; for so it has ever been, and whether peace and smiling plenty, or fierce upheavals and dismemberments predominate, from every social spasm as well as fecund leisure, civilization shoots forward in its endless course. The very evils which are regarded as infamous by a higher culture were the necessary stepping-stones to that higher life. As we have seen, no nation ever did or can emerge from barbarism without first placing its neck under the yokes of despotism and superstition; therefore, despotism and superstition, now dire evils, were once essential benefits. No religion ever attained its full development except under persecution. Our present evils are constantly working out for humanity unforeseen good. All systems of wrongs and fanaticisms are but preparing us for and urging us on to a higher state.

If, then, civilization is a predestined, ineluctable, and eternal march away from things evil toward that which is good, it must be that throughout the world the principle of good is ever increasing and that