PART IV.. How Far Our Happiness Depends on Others.

How far our Happiness depends on Others.

I. What Others Give Us: Safety, Liberty, Education.

A student of human affairs has observed that it is very difficult to find happiness within oneself, and impossible to discover it elsewhere. Were the witticism reversed it would be equally true. “Imperfect happiness,” observes the philosopher Kant, “arises from man’s unsocial passions.” Man’s only enemy is man, but he is also his only ally. In the pursuit of happiness each must aid himself with all his might, but all his might will prove of no avail without the aid of others.

The well-being of the individual depends directly on the social organization around him. From it alone can he obtain safety, freedom, and the means of knowledge; in return, it demands respect for its rules,――that which we call Morality.

For security, safety, man is absolutely dependent on his fellows, on society. Deprived of it, a prey to well-grounded fears, he can neither develop his own powers nor enjoy the fruit of his labors. If you know the bloodhounds are on your track, the most beautiful landscape will lose its attractions. When the courtier Damocles praised Dionysius to his face as the happiest man on earth, the tyrant seated the sycophant at a luxurious repast with a sword suspended above his head by a single hair. The story is familiar to all, because its moral is a universal truth. The king stood alone on the giddy height of his power, and the dread of the inevitable fall was the vampyre that sucked the blood from all his pleasures and left them corpses before his eyes.

Men have always felt that the only security is to become members of a social organization. The savagest horde has its own, its totem, clan, or gens. But in pursuit of safety, men are apt to sacrifice freedom. To escape the fire, they plunge into the water; but neither element is their right abode. Society stands opposed to the individual. It governs by rules and averages, demands conformity, restricts liberty, dislikes personality.

Thus arises the ceaseless struggle, to and fro, over the earth, through all history, between the social and the individual theories of happiness. The constitution of the ideal civil society should realize the conditions necessary for the highest personal enjoyment. But where do we find such a constitution? Not even in theory have we reached it. On the one side are the moral tyrants, afflicted with what Mirabeau called the mania of governing, la fureur de gouverner, who would make men happy against their will by prescribing for them what they should eat and what they should drink, on what days they should work and on what days play. Over against them is the camp of the disclassed, unable to govern themselves, and, therefore, hating to be governed by any.

Both are equally impotent to the end both profess. Nothing but a distorted growth can result from a conformity to moral standards brought about by external compulsion. Only what a man does or leaves undone of his own free will develops and strengthens his nature. Freedom makes him a man, compulsion an animated machine. Good soldiers are not trained by fighting behind ramparts, but by exposure in the field to the enemy. What if some perish in the fray? The success of the day is cheaply bought by the fall of the few.

Limitations, restrictions, however, there must be, and that man alone is truly a freeman who recognizes and respects them. Liberty is not lawlessness; it is the ability to make the law our servant and not our master, an ability which we must acquire through our own efforts. The rights of men are equal, but they can enjoy them only so far as they qualify themselves so to do. All citizens of the United States have an equal right to pre-empt a portion of the public domain; but to secure the land they must make certain personal efforts. So it is with all other social advantages and conditions of happiness; men deserve them only so far as they cultivate a capacity for them; and not equality, but justice in their distribution, must be the final aim of every sane social compact.

The only use of this excellent government of ours, or of any other on the face of the earth, is――what? The preservation of your liberty and mine. Nothing else. Never forget this. Any government is worth paying a dollar to support, or lifting a finger to defend, only so far as it secures to each woman and man her or his greatest possible personal liberty. To the extent that it falls short of this or goes beyond it, it is worthless and an enemy. The limits of a government are plain enough, when we thus define them from the vantage-ground of individual freedom. It should protect from external enemies and internal dissensions, and from violence to person or property; it should enforce justice between man and man, and woman and man; it should extend its direct care to the weak, the immature, and the incapable; and it should supply to all the means of self-culture, of education, in its widest sense. Here its action should end. All else should be left to the individual.

There is another theory of government than this. It would treat all men as if they never come of age, or remain forever feeble-minded. It would supply them with work, take care of their pay, dictate their amusements, prohibit doubtful indulgences, and deliver from temptations by removing them. Such a government would make grown-up children, not men. It is the ideal of all priests, of most women, and of dreamers. It has at times been partially realized, and always with disastrous results to the strength of the individual character. I have seen more drunken men in one week in the State of Maine, where the sale of intoxicants is prohibited, than during three months in Italy, where their sale is unrestricted.

The advocates of all such attacks on personal liberty――be they priests or social dreamers――are not less opposed to free thought than to free action. The defense of their opinions, not the discovery of truth, is to them the purpose of research. The logical ultimatum of the one is the stake, of the other the dynamite bomb. Both would restrict the untrammeled and unbiased pursuit of knowledge.

Knowledge, however, is the twin brother of liberty and the provider for the treasury of happiness. Much more than a fine phrase is the poet’s line, that “He is a freeman, whom the truth makes free.” Not what he is, or what he has, but what he knows, gives the individual real power, and, through power, freedom and the ability to use it for the gratification of his desires through the unrestricted employment of his faculties.

The materials of knowledge are represented by the degree of civilization possessed by a nation. Their distribution should be through education――unbiased, secular, universal――co-extensive with the demand of the governed, equal to both sexes. This is within the plain province of government. Children cannot educate themselves, and ignorant parents see no need of learning. Yet the period of childhood is the golden age for instruction. It is the epoch of permanent impressions, dear and indelible, like the initials of a loved one cut on the bark of a young beech, remaining legible even when the solid heart of the aged tree is decayed.

Inertia denies the possibility of improvement. Obscurantism dislikes it. Let them pass on. Whatever a man is, there is the power for better within him; we know not how much better. Faculties trained turn from bad to good. What is a weed in the fields becomes a flower in the garden. The State cannot afford to leave education to the people. Grass grows of itself, but grain needs tillage.

How strongly this is shown in the lamentable education of women in all civilized countries! Sedulously confined to empty accomplishments and conventional moralities, they are everywhere found to be the chief supporters of decaying dogmas, serfs to social opinion, frittering away their lives in vanities which men have left centuries behind them. Both sexes are to blame for this. Men love to rule, and they fear the increased knowledge which freedom would bring to women; and women are jealous of the eminence which learning gives a sister and seek to belittle its value.

What if I refer again and again to this subject? I have too often witnessed the exceeding unhappiness of women in all grades of society not to have it frequently in my thoughts. They are more unhappy than men, as I have said before, and I believe it is mainly because they are worse educated. I know the instruction in the best schools for girls in the United States, and to what is it directed? To two ends, to be “good,” and to shine in society. What they should be taught is to understand the hygiene of their own bodies, to take care of their own money, to govern their decisions by justice and reason and not by impulse, to occupy their thoughts with facts and not with fiction, and, more than all, to be independent in thought and deed, and not to allow either society or sentimentality to cast the final vote in the direction of their actions.

Such doctrine may sound heretical; so I hasten to bring to its support a reputable endorser in the person of a clergyman of the Church of England, that writer who so charmingly combines the best of humor with the best of sense, the Rev. Sydney Smith. I take it from his essay on “Female Education,” an essay that ought to be read and pondered by every woman in the land, the whole burden and spirit of which is expressed in the following most pregnant sentence,――“The happiness of woman will be increased in proportion as education gives to her the habit and the means of drawing her resources from herself.”

How much better this than the following insufferable twaddle of Thomas de Quincey: “It is more in harmony with the retiring graces of their sexual character that they should practice a general rule of submission to the traditional belief of their own separate Church, even when that belief has long been notoriously challenged as erroneous”? He is in earnest, too; and the late Poet Laureate in “In Memoriam” said nearly the same. Blind leaders of the blind! who think that falsehood and ignorance are going to point the way to light and truth.

The fact is, the moral side of woman has been educated, and thus educated, out of all proportion to her other faculties. What is not “very stuff of the conscience” makes little or no impression on her. The Good, the Fit, the Conventional are for her the True; which is a grievous error, and retards her real progress.

Education is not only the foundation for happiness; it should and it can be made a pleasure in itself. This will sound strange to those who are principally familiar with such institutions of education as those of the Mr. Squeers or Dr. Blimber type. But the schoolmaster has himself been to school, and after flogging children for several thousand years, and thereby developing a healthy hatred of books which it is a wonder did not hurl the race back into barbarism, he has learned from Froebel and Pestalozzi and others that it is actually possible for a sane mind to study with pleasure if the chance is offered. Indeed, a learned writer who has many admirers in this country, Mr. Herbert Spencer, is able to say,――“The usual test of political legislation――its tendency to promote happiness――is beginning to be the test of legislation for the school and the nursery;” and elsewhere,――“As a final test by which to judge any plan of culture should come the question,――Does it create a pleasurable sensation in the pupil?”

This is good counsel; but, like many good things, it is also old. Two thousand years ago or so Plato wrote,――“In education, direct boys to what amuses their minds.”

Security, liberty, and the means of knowledge,――these, therefore, are the conditions of happiness which every government should, and all in some measure do, offer the individual. For them, he is entirely dependent on others. In whatever delusion to the contrary his ignorance or his arrogance may plunge him, he can obtain these inestimable benefits in no other way than through the social organization, and he cannot therefore escape his liability for them. If he denies it or refuses it, the consequences will be as inevitable as they will be disastrous. He who wisely consults the conditions which determine his own happiness will not seek in isolation or self-sufficiency these elements, which can alone be obtained through the co-operation of his fellow-man.

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Social progress is advanced far more by strengthening the weak than by chastising the wicked.

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The sense of safety implies not merely absence of fear, but also freedom of action.

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Justice should be the motto of the State; prudence that of the individual.

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Self-recognition is a part of happiness; but the recognition by others of what we pride ourselves upon, is another and a large part of it.

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Man is a social being; but the true aim of his social activity is to learn how to be solitary.

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He who thinks it necessary to seek solitude for self-improvement often finds there is still one too many persons present.

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The purpose of law is liberty; of obedience, independence; of submission, emancipation.

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The well-being of the individual, not of the class, should be the aim of government. It should not be “by the people for the people,” but by the people for the person.

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The true moral education is that which makes every intellectual question a matter of conscience, and every matter of conscience an intellectual question.

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An explanation which demonstrates the impossibility of knowing is about as satisfactory as one which imparts the knowledge desired. But there are some who call everything incomprehensible which they do not comprehend.

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Many children and nearly all girls are educated by equivocations and taught truths by means of falsehoods. What have the teachers to expect when their pupils discover this fact?

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There are a good many branches of education about which it is sufficient for most to know that they exist.

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That moral strength is alone real which has been acquired by repeated exposure to temptation and repeated successful resistance.

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We never fully acknowledge to ourselves how very human we are. We each secretly think that there is something in us not shared by any other man or woman.

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Women love too deeply to be able to judge justly.

II. What we Owe Others: Morality, Duty, Benevolence.

The much-maligned Epicurus is reported to have delivered the oracular utterance,――“The man who is not virtuous can never be happy;” and poets and moralists have exhausted their ingenuity in devising variants of the well-worn line,――“’Tis virtue only makes our bliss below.”

Who would have supposed that philosophers should have been found――aye, and they of high degree――who toss overboard these venerable maxims as antiquated rubbish? Yet such is the surprising case.

The mighty Kant, tearing away the cobwebs of the dogmatic philosophy, feared not to declare,――“There is not in the moral law the slightest ground for a necessary connection between Morality and Happiness;” and again,――“The goal of a perfect harmony of Desire and Duty cannot be obtained;” while in our own day the critical Alexander Bain calmly observes,――“Happiness and Virtue are independent aims and not identical. The treatment of Happiness should be dissevered from that of Ethics.”

Scarcely could the contrast of the new and the old schools of thought be more vividly displayed than in these brief quotations. There are some, indeed, who have even gone farther, and maintained that the pursuit of happiness and that of virtue are not only independent, but even incompatible aims; because, writes Dr. Despine, a French psychologist of repute,――“Happiness is the satisfaction of desire, while virtue consists in doing good, not to satisfy the desire of doing it, but out of a sense of duty, and in opposition to desire.” This statement, however, overlooks the existence of a moral sense and the normal pleasure derived from its gratification.

Morality and the moral sense are not to be confounded. All men have a love for the beautiful, but nowise agree as to what is beautiful; and there is just as wide and just as impassable a gulf between the various conceptions of morals, although, in all, the moral sense is present.

Morality is nothing more than the conformity of the individual to the type of the society in which he lives. It is the recognition of the debt which he owes it for securing him the privileges of safety, liberty, and education, as I have explained in the last chapter. Not his own moral sense, but the society in which he is, lays down the terms on which that debt is to be paid; and while he feels on the one side entitled to these rights, he acknowledges, on the other, his liability for his social duties in exchange for them.

There is, therefore, no such thing as a universal or even a general code of morality, nor can there be. There is no act which may not sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong. I have heard of a French writer, who composed a work entitled “The Seven Cardinal Sins,” showing how under certain circumstances every one of them could be committed by a perfectly virtuous person. I have never read his book, but I delight in his doctrine. Take the Decalogue itself, written, as we are told, by the very finger of Divinity, and there is not a command in it that both Christian and Jew do not break most virtuously whenever occasion calls. “Thou shalt not kill;” and all nations spend more annually in preparations for killing by land and sea than they do in a generation for institutions of learning. “Thou shalt not rob;” and Abraham Lincoln with one glorious stroke of his pen robbed the citizens of the United States of a hundred million dollars’ worth of valuable slaves. Truth-telling? The observation of Socrates in the Symposium still holds good,――“In speaking of holy things or persons, there is a general understanding that you should praise them, not that you should tell the truth about them;” witness the discussions that come up from time to time on the characters of “the Fathers of the Republic” or the books of the Bible.

In every code of morals there is one law for our friends and another for the rest of the world; our duty to our family is ever in conflict with our duty to our neighbor; and our duty to our country is opposed to our duty to humanity at large. A father who would treat other children as his own would be deemed unnatural, and a statesman who consulted the advantages of other nations would be cast out as a traitor. This is the “dualism of morals,” and its necessary existence destroys all possibility of a universal and inflexible code of morals. The antagonism is not likely to decrease. The most violent contradictions between the various views of life will be likely to be found precisely in the highest culture; because there the individual comes most to his own, and is least willing to sacrifice his own rights to a society whose claims he disallows.

Men now question the right of society to demand what it does from them in exchange for the benefits it confers upon them; and they are right. Society itself must be brought to the test of the Moral Sense. This faculty is that which we also call the sense of Duty, or of “the Ought,” or Conscience. It is a judge, not a lawgiver, and it derives its right of sitting in judgment from its ancient descent, dating back to the time when man first gathered together in hordes or clans under some sheltering rock for mutual aid. It is as much a part of human nature as is the love of association, and as such its satisfaction is as essential to happiness, but is by no means the whole of happiness, as so many have taught. In fact, it is often enough entirely absent, as in genuine criminals. It is now well known that these neither experience remorse for crime nor take pleasure in well-doing, whatever sentimentalists may say to the contrary.

The pleasure of the moral sense comes solely from the satisfaction of itself, and not necessarily, in the least, from the practice of virtue or benevolence or charity. The inquisitor, Torquemada, lighting the hellfires of the Inquisition, the anarchist hurling his bomb into the crowd, Judith yielding her maiden chastity to the embrace of Holofernes, all enjoyed the highest pleasure of the moral sense, because all acted in the complete conviction that they were doing right.

The man is moral who believes he is so, and the woman is chaste who considers herself such, no matter what their actions are. What we think the most fiendish crimes have been perpetrated by fervent Christians, and there are religions now numbering millions of intelligent adherents in which the prostitution of girls is considered a meritorious act.

When Adam Smith laid down the three requisites for individual happiness as health, freedom from debt, and a clear conscience, he framed a sensible prescription; but should have explained that a clear conscience in nearly all cases means simply conformity to the standard of our age and nation, not at all to any higher or abstract ideal. So far from the devotion to a lofty or unusual virtue bringing happiness, it always entails proscription, pain, and sorrow on him who advocates it. The crowd ever cry out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Every one of the noble army of leaders in ethical progress was in his own day branded as an infidel, cursed by the Churches, and driven forth from the enjoyments which a less developed moral sense would have permitted him to indulge. He who rises above the law is ever against the law.

Hence it is that with perfect truth, though with a lurking satire on the commonplaces of moral doctrine, Professor Bain writes,――“To realize the greatest happiness from virtue we should be careful to conform to the standard of the time and place, neither rising above nor falling beneath it; we should make our virtues apparent and showy, and perform them with the least sacrifice to ourselves; we should hold our associations with duty, as well as our natural sympathies with our fellows, only at a moderate strength.”

In certain natures the satisfaction of the moral sense yields a happiness worth all sacrifices, just as in others the feeling of unrestrained liberty will be gratified at the expense of everything that the majority hold dear. Both are exceptional, and there are quite as many who suffer nothing from a violation of the sense of duty or from the loss of liberty.

No platitude is more erroneous than this,――“To be vicious is to be miserable;” for were it so, we should not have the hordes of the vicious infesting society. Far more correct is the observation of that acute observer of life, Vauvenargues, that virtue cannot make the vicious happy, La vertu ne peut faire le bonheur des méchants. He might have added that virtue can never make the virtuous happy, for the really virtuous man is always above the standard of his time, and is sure to suffer in consequence from the antagonism he develops, and from his sorrowful appreciation of the sentiment that prompts it.

The education of the moral sense has hitherto been retarded by two popular but mistaken doctrines; the one that the moral life is “the chief end of man;” the other that it means obedience to a code of laws.

Again I repeat that the chief end of man is the symmetrical development of all his powers and faculties and the enjoyment which he will derive from their activity, and not at all the exclusive or preponderant attention to one or the other element of his nature. His moral sense is merely the guide of the duties he owes to others, duties indispensable to his own life and liberty, but by no means exhaustive of his nature; rather, merely giving him the opportunity for the higher aim of developing himself. The moral life is but a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

The confusion of the moral life with obedience to a moral code dates back beyond history, and is almost as active to-day as ever, in spite of the efforts of such teachers as Buddha and Christ to show the falsity of it. Both proclaimed the absolute independence of the moral sense from moral laws. Such laws are either religious, expressing supposed duties to God, as the Jews believe that He forbade them to eat pork, or, as they and the Christians, that He decided that one day in seven is more sacred than the others; or they are conventional or civil, which are merely the customs, mores, of the nation or community.

Independent of all these codes, which for the most part are survivals, and in the present day absurd, are the Benevolent Emotions, the gratification of which to the properly developed individual constitutes a large element of personal happiness. They arise not from a sense of duty, because they do not have reference to what is due the social compact, but from sympathy, acquired or inherited. The relief of the pain of others, the administration of efficient consolation, the diminution of the sorrows of those around us, yield to ourselves a pleasurable satisfaction, a sense of appropriate activity, which is so real that it is a wonder it is not more diligently cultivated. Too many, perhaps, look for a part of their return in the gratitude of those assisted, instead of in the pleasure of the act itself, and, being disappointed, find the field of charity less flowery than they anticipated. They commit the common error of placing the end of enjoyment external to themselves instead of the means only.

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The only sure method to distinguish good from evil is first to learn to discriminate true from false.

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A sincere lover of truth is never wholly in the wrong; chiefly because he never claims to be wholly in the right.

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The finest thought I found in Chamfort’s writings――and it is wonderfully fine, deserving to be the motto of every work on the Art of Happiness――is this,――Le plaisir peut s’appuyer sur l’illusion, mais le bonheur repose sur la vérité, “Errors may yield us Pleasure, but truth alone can give Happiness.”

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Only through fulfilling his duties to society can man secure from society that which is essential to his own welfare. This is why the inward realization of the moral law becomes a part of the Art of Happiness.

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A moral act is simply one which, at the time and under the special circumstances, is useful to the society in which it takes place. Hence it has nothing to do with individual Motive, which is the only Mentor recognized by the educated moral sense.

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The ancient Greeks believed that the laws of human society are laws of nature, and therefore absolute. In Sophocles’ tragedy, it is no excuse for Œdipus, when he kills his father and marries his mother, that he does so in absolute ignorance of the relationship. His remorse and punishment are not abated.

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One school of modern writers maintains that all virtues are but vices disguised; another, that all vices are but virtues misdirected. As these terms are entirely relative, both schools are right,――and wrong.

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So long as war is possible, a perfected social life is impossible; but when Justice will not be listened to in any lower notes, she must speak through the mouths of cannons.

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Peace, not happiness, is the reward of virtue.

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The man who professes duty as the sole guide of his life is either hypocritical or ignorant.

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Weaklings and hypocrites like to extol the goodness of men; the former to allay their own fears, the latter because it reflects flatteringly on themselves.

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It is no proof that a sentiment is noble because men are willing to die for it. More men knowingly sacrifice themselves to pleasure than to duty.

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The lines of morality, observed Burke, differ from those of geometry; they have breadth as well as length, and for that reason will not form set and angular figures.

III. The Practice of Business and the Enjoyment of Society.

Let us grant that the true aim of the individual is his own highest development: he can reach it only through the ministry of his fellow beings. Vain the effort to seek expansion or happiness apart from his kind. The soul rusts in solitude; to be bright and keen it requires friction with others. Alone, it starves and pines, grows misshapen and distorted; in company, it gives and receives, assists others, and is in turn assisted. Let us do no injustice to the balm and the blessings of solitude; but the growth of the world is due to the blending and the striving of mind with mind.

The word which expresses this is Association. It conveys various degrees of intimacy, from the lowest, that of the ordinary intercourse of Business and Society, through the increasingly closer ties of Fellowship, Comradeship, and Friendship, up to that dearest of all, wherein the two sexes unite to cast the rays of life into the infinite future, Love and Marriage.

There is nothing in any of these that demands the sacrifice of the individual. The gauge which marks the high-water line in them all is one and the same――the maintenance of the utmost freedom of the individual along with the utmost sympathy and accordance with the individuality of others. As it is only through these, through participation in all of these relations of association, that the highest degree of personal happiness can be attained, I shall consider each in turn very briefly, little more than hinting of those maxims and principles which stand approved as contributing to a reasonable success and a wise enjoyment of them.

Dealing with men is the daily business of life; but a knowledge of human nature, even in this restricted relation, is the latest knowledge which one acquires.

The first maxim is to distrust.

“All men are liars,” said the Psalmist; and there is no stronger proof of the saying than that all men deny it. History and sermons and sympathy combine to conceal or to modify the truth, in order that we may walk in peace with our fellow-men. Be it so. But at least, in our own minds, let us acknowledge facts. We are none the better ourselves for believing others to be better than they are. “The transacting of business,” observes Bacon, “is chiefly a commerce with fools;” my comment upon which is, that he will be the worst fooled who thinks he is the only wise man; of which my Lord of Verulam is said to have been a conspicuous example.

Insincerity has no limit. If a man does not show what he is when first you meet him, wait a year to decide. The insincere aim most to deceive by what most they show. Concerning them, therefore, follow the Italian maxim, believe the incredible and doubt the probable. The very pious cashier, not the thoughtless clerk, will be the one to run away with the money.

The second maxim is to trust.

Confidence in others is the corner-stone both of fortune and felicity. It is the grateful dew which fertilizes the flowers of sincerity, of truthfulness, and honor; and even common honesty will wither if exposed to the scalding breath of suspicion. Reputation lives in the minds of others, and if we know ours has no fixed abode there, but is harbored as a doubtful and distrusted intruder, our staunchest argument for preserving it is gone.

He who can happily combine the oil and vinegar of these two maxims in his dealings with men, will carry with him a charm which will guard him from the bitterest disappointments to which we are liable in the hard contest for material aims.

Business intercourse we cannot avoid; but we seek it for other ends than pleasure; social intercourse is that which we pursue for enjoyment only,――or, at least, pretend to. Hence, we call it specifically “Society;” and we distinguish it into certain fanciful grades, as “good society,” “the best society,” and “high life.” Men and women enter it equally, and the spirit of it is held to be apart from, even quite the reverse of, that of business life. Many men and all women look upon it as the field in which the chief victories of their careers must be won and the main elements of their happiness discovered.

Why sneer at such sentiments? The drawing-room, the only stage on which the two sexes meet on equal terms, is the innermost sanctuary of civilization, and the hostess is high priestess of the shrine. Its development registers the epochs in the history of culture. Francis I has two special claims on the praise of posterity; the one, that he proclaimed himself honored by the friendship of Titian; the other, that he was the first to admit women to the court society of France. The drawing-room confers the last degree in the liberal arts. No education is complete which has not received its finishing touches at the hands of a refined woman; and enlightenment will first deserve its name when her rights are everywhere as much respected and her influence as freely acknowledged as they are now in her own parlors.

Good-will is the basis of good society. He who quits a company, pleased, and conscious of having pleased, is its model member. There is nothing derogatory in this. Conceal it as we may, the secret motive of our every effort is the hope of pleasing somebody else. The interchange of kindly courtesies and approving expressions is a commendable pastime. He who prides himself on being “beholden to nobody” is a pseudo-philosopher. The true philosopher enjoys society, but is not dependent on it for his enjoyment.

Would-be superior men have inveighed against society because its members are and must be for the most part “ordinary people,” and its topics common-place. Really superior men prefer ordinary people, because, as Goethe so well said, “They are more human.” Nobody was common-place to the eye of that great master, because each represented the species. It is certainly true that in the long run, and for “human nature’s daily use,” ordinary people are the most agreeable. We really should not desire high thinking in high life. People fraternize more readily on lower levels because they are broader. Nations gather together on plains, not on mountain tops. These are suitable for star-gazers and eagle-hunters.

Those who dislike society are usually those who are not at ease in it, from lack of early training. Few enjoy dancing who have learned from an awkward master, and a lifetime is not long enough to comb the hayseed from a farmer boy’s hair.

The one maxim for success in society is to be agreeable; and the agreeable man is he who agrees with others. Society expects persons to offer enjoyment and pleasure, not improvement. One should accept men as they are and not seek to change them; it is a less task to adapt yourself to others than them to you. One that enters a company that he likes, is liked by it; but nothing is so justly exasperating as a show of superiority.

The aim of society is to bring about a closer union of its members by having them meet on planes of thought and emotion which are common to all. The expression of discordant ideas and feelings, be they higher or lower, is, therefore, out of place. On the other hand, a company is harmonized, and its elements happily fused together, by some general impression made on all at the same moment, and the enjoyment of all is correspondingly heightened. This may be by a strain of music appropriately introduced, by a few apt remarks on a topic of general interest, or by the exhibition of curious or beautiful objects. The sense of a sentiment in common is at once established, and the company feels that each knows the other better for this property in commonalty. The skillful hostess knows how often and by what devices thus to promote the unity of her guests. Multiply the ties which bind society together and you multiply the pleasure it yields and the benefits which are derived from it.

Really good society is not selfish, nor does it encourage selfishness. Rather it is based on a certain sacrifice of self. Those circles offer little enjoyment where each aims at nothing but his own; amusement is absent where no one endeavors to amuse others. Nor is it unjustly censorious. Its judgments are generally recognized as fair, and nothing so fortifies the moral sense as the approval of the society in which one is accustomed to move; while the terrors of the Hereafter are small compared to its disapproval. The stoutest minds have acknowledged this. “Who can see worse days,” asks Bacon, “than he who yet living doth follow at the funeral of his own reputation? I can desire no greater place than in the front of good opinion.”

It is quite true that this power, like that of all irresponsible autocrats, is sometimes abused to the injury of the worthy; but the harm is slight compared to the results which are good. True, also, that general society is a poor test of a man’s real nature. One may possess many agreeable qualities and yet fail to be agreeable, through lack of good taste or early training in their use under social conditions. Or, again, though a kindly disposition makes a man popular, it by no means follows because a man is popular that he has a kindly disposition. We must accept society with these deficiencies, for in spite of them all it is a potent auxiliary in the pursuit of happiness.

Genuine kindliness of heart,――this is the sweetest trait of human nature. Unfortunately, it is one of the rarest; so that society, which appreciates it so highly that it cannot exist without at least its semblance, substitutes for it――Politeness.

Though a semblance only, it is a noble counterfeit. Urbanity presages perfected Humanity. It is the outward and visible sign of what should be the inward and spiritual nature. It is a prophecy of the Golden Age and is based on the Golden Rule. When some one asked Aristotle how we should conduct ourselves toward our associates, he replied,――“We should treat them as we wish them to treat us.”

Politeness is the only currency which costs nothing and buys much. Its tenders are counters and yet pass as coin. Who but a fool, therefore, would refuse to use them liberally? Such fools there are, however, and in abundance. It is a key which has the pleasant power of both closing the doors below and opening those above us; for there is no bar to the unwelcome familiarity of inferiors equal to scrupulous politeness, and no passport so sure to the esteem of our superiors in age or station.

Cheap as it is, it is too precious to be wasted, and like the free gifts of nature, water or sunlight, there are occasions when it must be doled out in small quantities, and at all times be dispensed with a provident hand. Few social blunders are more painful than to display a warmth of manner which is not reciprocated; and there are rude natures who cannot distinguish kindliness of behavior from weakness of purpose.

The common lien of society is Talk; and the talk must be essentially small talk. No greater blunder could be committed than to suppose that society wants, or ought to want, Conversation, in the dignified sense of that term, in which an idea is introduced and expanded, a proposition developed, or an argument stated. Nothing of the sort. “The best conversation,” observes Mr. Malloch, “is never worth remembering.” Perhaps he had in his mind the remark of Talleyrand, who said that the finest converser he ever heard was his own mother, but that he was unable to recall a single pointed or brilliant expression she had used.

Small talk is in society what small change is in the daily affairs of life,――you need it twenty times for your gold-piece once. It is no such easy matter to master the art of it. To talk much and to say little one must be very clever or a fool; and the still higher art of putting others to their best paces, so that you act only as starter in the race while others win the purse, asks an amount of tact which is equaled only by the self-denial involved.

The expert in talk will aim to please and not to instruct; he will not disturb the convictions of elderly persons who have made up their minds; nor the self-complacency of any by a display of superiority, especially in his judgment or reasoning powers; if he boasts, it will be of his luck and not of his cleverness; he may compliment a woman on her beauty, but never a rich man on his riches; he will contradict only those who disparage themselves, and if he dips into a deep question, he will only stir it and not settle it; he will avoid allusions to his own ailments, but sedulously inquire about those of others; but his chief aim will be to find out first whether the person whom he addresses prefers to talk or to listen, and scrupulously let him have his way.

* * * * *

When all are of one mind, what is left to say worth hearing?

* * * * *

Save your best thoughts for your best friends.

* * * * *

Frivolity is the armor of good society, worn to protect it against the violence of passions and the ennui of enthusiasms.

* * * * *

Subservience to society is in man what “protective mimicry” is in insects,――an unconscious tendency to imitation for the purpose of self-preservation.

* * * * *

Youth looks to be received in society with greater sympathy than it finds; age will find more than it generally expects.

* * * * *

Acquaintances rate us first at the value we put on ourselves; later at the value we prove to them.

* * * * *

Those who visit you, find out how you live; you must visit them to find out how they live.

* * * * *

Forgive if you can, but do not forget. Characters change little, and a base action is a landmark worth remembering.

* * * * *

A lie comes readier in society than in solitude; but for all that, it is easier to deceive oneself than others.

* * * * *

Only those of violent prejudices violently attack the prejudices of others.

* * * * *

It is a rule in polite society not to refer to three subjects――a man’s false hair, his religion, or his politics; and for the same reason――because neither is his own, but merely borrowed from others.

* * * * *

Curious inconsistency! People talk willingly about their physical ailments, but unwillingly about their moral defects; though the former cannot be mended by discussing them, and the latter might be.

* * * * *

Silence is often sanatory. There are subjects, thoughts, and memories which, like certain bodily functions, cannot be avoided, but should not be talked about.

* * * * *

Reserve is a great help to reputation. I know a shallow scientist who has gained a fine position mainly owing to his knack of leaving his hearers with the impression that he knows much more than he has told.

* * * * *

It is a noble trait to be above the temptations of fortune; but those who care least about money are not therefore the most honest.

* * * * *

Nothing is more interesting than self-revelation; nor more tedious than self-publication.

* * * * *

If you avoid disagreeable people, and cease thinking about them, for you they will have no existence.

* * * * *

Society is the jury impaneled to try the causes of which the law takes no cognizance.

* * * * *

The worst of an unfounded accusation is its foundation.

* * * * *

Never hit at a hornet unless you are sure of killing it. Never notice a social scandal about yourself unless you can refute it absolutely. A weak defense is more damaging than silence.

* * * * *

It is a much admired art to turn the weaknesses of others to our own profit. How sublime would be the science which would direct their strength to their own true interests!

IV. On Fellowship, Comradeship and Friendship.

Man is slow to understand how human he is. He thinks he can measure himself by other standards than himself, but all his circuits lead him home again; his most positive knowledge is of himself, and by analogy of his own kind. With a wise recognition of the limits of his own nature he should seek happiness in the conditions of existence known to him and especially among his own species, where alone he can find beings whose endowments are the same, and whose affinities and sympathies respond to his own.

Society, as I have said, is the common field of intercourse in civilized life, and it makes for itself its own various limitations and restrictions. Other methods of Association are based on quite different principles, but have all been organized with the aim of increasing happiness, and all therefore deserve the cultivation of him who is sedulous about his own. The two motives which give them origin are, the one, Interest; the other, Sympathy. The former I may call Fellowships; the latter, Comradeships.

Fellowships, composed of those who follow the same business, trade, or profession, and thus have an interest in common,――this is what the word means. They are the guilds, unions, lodges, clubs, societies, associations, companies, which swarm so in our day, whose members are held together by a desire of mutual assistance in making money, or raising wages, or providing against misfortune, or maintaining privileges, or buying cheap, or paying each other’s funeral expenses, or in a thousand other ways advancing the interests, and thus relieving the burdens and increasing the enjoyment, of their members. I knew a man who belonged to over three hundred such associations, and as he was in other respects a sensible person, he probably found a profit in this multiplication of ties.

It is a discovery of modern times of no mean importance that after several thousand years of open trial, government and religion and friendship and love have all failed in relieving the misery of human life, but that the intelligent recognition of the mutuality of interests does not fail; and, when properly organized, may be counted on with utmost confidence to prevent most of the disasters and to secure most of the essential material blessings of life,――far beyond the dreams of the most sanguine reformers of earlier generations. There is no reason why we should have the poor always with us, except the ignorance of men as to their own material interests or their indifference to them; and these difficulties must in time diminish, if not disappear. Through association for mutual aid in buying and selling, in labor and investment, in defense and assistance, in credit and insurance, and the like, the date is almost calculable when the deserving poor will as a class no longer exist, and extreme indigence will mean either idleness or crime.

The rock on which most such schemes have shattered has been that in their blind effort at mutuality they have overlooked the prime import of individuality――the freedom and autonomy of each member. It should never be forgotten that the only value of any scheme of association is the development of the individual. Any society which does not make this its first and clearly announced purpose is doomed to a deserved failure. There is no sentiment in such associations. They classify men like bricks or boxes, according to the externals or accidents of their professions or places. They pay no heed to personality beyond the one element in it which they are formed to take cognizance of. For that very reason they are apt to demand disproportionate sacrifices for this, and to encroach on liberty by unjust demands on the member’s time, labor, leisure, or money. They are liable to reach a point where the benefits they confer are not worth the sacrifices they require. This is the history of many labor unions in the United States, and it is the characteristic of all the so-called socialistic schemes for improving society. In all of them society is looked upon as paramount to the individual, instead of the individual as paramount to society; whereas, his development is that alone for which society has any right to exist.

Comradeship differs from Fellowship as social does from business life. In it there is no question of interests in common, but only of tastes in common――a mutuality which exists often to the sad injury of interests. Comrades are birds of a feather, who assemble because they resemble――in accordance with the French proverb, Qui se rassemblent, s’assemblent. They all like dogs, or whist, or yachts, or music, or old books, or four-in-hands, or spectral analysis,――any of the occupations of choice which are pursued for the pleasure they yield.

In modern life this form of Association has largely taken the place of Friendship as it was understood by the ancients. It is better adapted to the bustle and scurry of these days, when the busy worker has not time to cultivate the amenities of sentiment, but desires to find others who share his favorite tastes, and a ready-made sympathy which he need not be at the trouble of looking after, but which is always at hand when he wants it. This he finds in such comradeships, where each comes because he has likings similar to the others, and is therefore sure to be a pleasant arrival. Each thus gratifies his own taste and increases its capacity for gratification; for tastes are like magnets,――the more they are used the stronger becomes their power of attraction.

The higher grades of comradeship are seen in artistic, literary, and scientific societies, which pursue their objects for the love of the subject, and not for commercial or other material ends. The intellectual communion which they yield to their members is a pleasure of a very high order, and an additional and valuable advantage which they possess is that they bring workers in the same fields of unselfish pursuits together, soften the asperities which ignorance of each other’s personalities might allow to remain, and often pave the way for warm and abiding friendships. Those men of science or artists who hold themselves aloof from such reunions usually do so through self-distrust or undue sensitiveness, and sin both against their own happiness and the prosperity of their favorite employment.

Both the religious and the moral life――they are not the same――should find their chief activity in the sphere of comradeship. It was the beautiful ideal of George Fox that the Church of the future should be a Society of Friends. The ideal is too lofty for human nature; but it is quite possible and should be a daily occurrence that the members of a church or a society united for the development of the benevolent or religious sentiments should display as much mutual good feeling and as warm a personal interest in the common purpose, as, say, dog-fanciers who belong to the same kennel club.

Friendship is far rarer than Comradeship, because it is more delicate and requires a higher type of character. Most men are incapable of it, and therefore cannot distinguish it from a mere community of tastes. It goes much farther, embracing the whole nature, and lifting the relation out of the plane of interests or tastes into that of sentiment and spiritual sympathy. No one is capable of friendship who thinks what use he can make of it. Friendship is free trade, and knows neither charity, robbery, nor reciprocity. It keeps neither a debit nor a credit account, and it leaves no room for ingratitude, because the credit of each party is unlimited.

The completest friendship is that in which the utmost sympathy is united with the utmost independence. The differences must not be so great as to prevent a thorough understanding, nor so small as to do away with admiration for the personal qualities of each other, and some desire to emulate them.

These phrases do not mean that we should look for perfection in friends. Quite the contrary. What could be more fatiguing than perfection? Its monotony would be unendurable. The affection for friends is not a tribute paid to their merits. Their very faults often endear them. We do not wish them removed. For ourselves, it may be well to retain some of those defects which give our friends pleasure; though this is to be taken with reserve; for, on the other hand, a great charm in a friend is that he brings us not what we expected, but something equally pleasant which we did not expect.

Friendship is strengthened by a certain amount of reserve. Few persons, to use the slang of the studio, “strip well.” Every one gains by veiling some of his parts. For the same reason we should not ask nor desire complete confidence from a friend. There are always secrets which it is better not to know. We may inquire the cause of his despondency, for sympathy and aid are natural to the sentiment of friendship; but should wait to be told the sources of his elation.

In a similar manner absence for not too long a time strengthens friendship by allowing its value to be felt, and the imagination to clothe the absent in some of the fanciful and beautiful garbs of the ideal. But too prolonged a stay leaves friendship a memory rather than a passion.

“But what!” some one will exclaim. “Are we to set about making and keeping friends with the same attention as if we were raising hot-house fruit?” Yes, precisely so; but if a friend is not in your estimation worth as much as a bunch of Hamburg grapes, I assure you it will be time wasted for you to try. When people complain that they have no friends, inquire what efforts they have made to get and keep them. True friendship is rare because it is rarely sought for. When Lord Bacon wrote, “There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals,” the great Chancellor unwittingly testified to the truth of those charges of perfidy which posterity has brought against his name. Friends must be diligently sought for, and when found must be sedulously cherished. Dr. Johnson never said a wiser word than when he gave the advice, directed especially to those who are advancing in years, “to keep our friendships in constant repair.”

Such a relation of sentiment between men can scarcely be formed in later life. As trees grow old their fibres become rigid, and their branches cannot be interlocked to arch a bower. But, by a delightful compensation of nature, it is precisely at this period of life that the sweetest friendships of all are formed――those between men and women. Some have doubted these, and I grant you most are incapable of them; but in facts and friendships there is no such thing as gender. There are too many beautiful examples in history to allow room for scepticism here.

Need I count them? Need I refer to the friendship between Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier, extending over thirty years, during which she was the guide, consoler, and confidante of the great statesman and author; not as a learned woman,――for that she was not,――but as a truly sympathetic soul? Need I quote from that charming volume of letters, the Briefe an eine Freundin, which testify to the long, the loving, and the pure bond that united Wilhelm von Humboldt to Charlotte Diede?

Or is there occasion to dwell on that instance which enshrines elements of sweetness even beyond these, the friendship between Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna? Think of the inspired and self-centred artist, living alone with his dreams of matchless beauty, meeting no man worthy of admittance even to the threshold of his affections, he who could write from Rome to his nephew in Florence, “I have no friends; I need none and wish none;” finding at last in the noble and tender soul of this distinguished woman the sentiments and sympathy for which he had been unconsciously longing, and which were necessary to complete the symmetry of both his own life and hers!

* * * * *

The burden laid on Beauty is, that it can have many lovers but no friends.

* * * * *

A very positive character is at first pleasing. We ourselves are troubled by so many problems that it is a relief to think,――“Here is one who has solved them all.” But we soon find that such characters merely slam the door in the face of importunate inquiries.

* * * * *

Men’s characters are polar forces; the stronger they repel some, the stronger they attract others.

* * * * *

The society of those who enjoy is alone enjoyable.

* * * * *

Be select in your friends, but miscellaneous in your acquaintances. Ask not sympathy from the latter nor assistance from the former.

* * * * *

If you would keep friends, shun explanations.

* * * * *

If you doubt the persistence in adversity of what is called friendship, make friends with an impecunious debtor.

* * * * *

Men admire women who try to please them; women admire men who, they believe, have qualities worthy of admiration.

* * * * *

We like those who can be useful to us, and love those to whom we can be useful.

* * * * *

The secret of gaining friends is to cultivate within ourselves the capacity for friendship.

* * * * *

New acquaintances cannot take the place of old friends; but when your teeth wear out, an artificial denture is a vast advantage over bare gums.

* * * * *

Be sure that the man who boasts of a hundred friends, has none.

V. Love, Marriage, and the Family Relation.

“It is not good that the man should be alone.” Venerable maxim! First reflection of the Creator on the species! Standing condemnation of all schemes of celibacy, of all orders of monks and nuns, vestals and spiritual eunuchs!

The character of any man or woman who leads the single life is incomplete, lacking in fullness of sympathy for certain aspects of our common nature, not perfectly rounded to the orb of man’s whole life. All examples, even the highest, give evidence of this. No man who has not had a wife whom he loved can understand what love is; he who is not a parent, can never appreciate the feelings of a father.

The fruition of life, even on the lowest terms, is impossible without the union of the sexes. The first Napoleon, in one of his letters, describing the essential needs of man, numbered them as three,――food, shelter, woman. All doctrines and social theories which conflict with this primordial law of the life of the species are unnatural, and their tendency is lowering to the progress of the race. Maternity, not virginity, is the holier state. Celibate orders have proved as sterile in intellectual as in physical offspring.

Love, marriage, children, the family,――the emotions and feelings, the affections and the ideas, which centre around these foci of human activity are essential elements in every life which is lived to the full measure of its powers. Nothing can take their places. Happiness without them is not human.

The emotion of Love belongs to those whose aims are ideal, because it is concerned with the future evolution of the species. In the iridescent glow of this master-passion its object never seems a mere human being, a man or a woman, but is invested with a charm unseen by the eye, not expressed in form or color, endowed with the power of exciting the soul to an indefinite and passionate expansion. It is the inaudible appeal of unborn posterity for its share in the world of Being.

Hence it is that Love is so powerfully excited by Beauty, by the symmetry and traits which foreshadow the final physical perfection of the race, the unconscious but unceasing struggle of organic nature toward nobler transformations, toward the building of a tabernacle fit to be a shrine for the activities of a higher life.

Though hundreds of volumes have been written in poetry and prose on the subject of Love, it remains unexhausted, because it is inexhaustible. Its seed-field is the boundless future, its message concerns all posterity. There is something in it deeper than the emotion of any single heart, farther reaching than any individual effort. There is a secret about it which can never be wholly told, which it were a profanation to try to express. Even between loving ones, it is better not to talk much of it, nor too curiously to think about it. When true and pure, it will be manifested without words in ennobling the character and elevating its aims and actions.

The attraction of woman for man is her invisible presage of motherhood. This it is which lends the nameless charm to the maiden and the sacred dignity to the matron. Around her, centre all those sentiments which constitute the Home, the family, and the parental affections. These find their proper expression in Marriage.

The history of the institution of marriage is a curious narrative. Every conceivable relation of the sexes has been established by one community or another, and sanctioned by the moral sense of the time and place. There have been hordes where the relations have been communal or miscellaneous; others, where a man had many wives; others, as in Thibet to-day, where the woman would have many husbands; sometimes the woman selects the man, at others the man the woman, and elsewhere the marriage is arranged by third parties; in some, marriage is indissoluble, in others, more or less easily annulled; while in certain religious societies in our own country the method of selective and temporary unions has been practiced. The result of all these experiments has been to show that the happiness of both parties is best consulted by strictly monogamous or pairing marriages, where each exerts a certain amount but not entire freedom of selection, and where the lien can be canceled when it proves clearly detrimental to the felicity of either.

Very few words will be necessary to defend the first of these three conditions. Under whatever form we find polygamy, whether legalized, as in Mohammedan countries, or sanctioned by religion, as among the Mormons, or winked at by usage, as in mistress-keeping, it inevitably results in the degradation of the woman and her subjection to the dominion of lower impulses. To every one who believes that her happiness demands equal attention to that of the man, all schemes of polygamy stand condemned.

The second condition I have stated will need more defense. Especially in our country is it unpopular to oppose the course of love. “Let me not,” exclaims the great dramatist, “to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.” Yet all will admit certain impediments. The laws of many States prohibit the marriage of near of kin, of first cousins, and of uncles with nieces, although in Germany unions of the latter class are very common.

Immature age does legally, and should always, act as a bar to marriage. At what period of life marriage is likely to prove most happy is a curious question, which has never been properly studied. The physiologist, basing his opinion on grounds of his science, would say that the woman should be between twenty and thirty, and the man between twenty-five and thirty-five. Dr. Johnson, regarding the question from another point of view, made the wise observation,――“Those who marry late are best pleased with their children, and those who marry early with their partners.”

Apart from questions of immature age and near relationship, marriages in the United States are generally contracted without restriction. The young of both sexes are usually conceded full liberty to make their own selection, the burden of the support of both being generally assumed by the husband. The consequence is that such unions are frequently entered upon with slight real acquaintance of each other, the wife is wholly dependent, and the husband has a heavy load to carry,――conditions calculated to intensify the struggle for existence and diminish the happiness of home.

From considerable observation of family life in both countries, I believe that the French system is superior to ours. In a French family of the middle or upper classes, the parent who desires to marry a daughter, for instance, takes pains to introduce and recommend young men of suitable station. No coercion is used on either side. Only when an affection naturally springs up is the union decided upon. A marriage-settlement is drawn by which each of the young couple receives a certain amount of property, wholly independent of the control of the other. Thus they are freed from the severest pressure of monetary anxiety, and, what is especially valuable, the wife has a recognized place of power, and secures her rightful prestige in the family circle. I have often observed how superior is the position of the wife in France to what it is in this country. The reason is in the better method of forming marriages.

A sympathetic marriage is the happiest condition of human life; but one without sympathy is a hateful servitude. How distressing to be obliged to live for those whom we cannot bear to live with!

The number of unhappy marriages in the United States may be guessed from the records of the divorce courts, which register only some of the most unhappy. The divorces granted annually sever nearly thirty thousand couples, and this although in many States such separation is costly, slow, and difficult. These figures represent, therefore, but a small fraction of the marriages which are galling the backs of one or both of the parties concerned.

When we reflect what the true foundations of the marital relations should be,――love, affection, sympathy,――it would appear wholly foreign to its character that it should be made an obligatory fetter and a continued curse by any law, civil or religious. The moral sense, personal affection, parental feeling, and the sentiment of society, would seem to be sufficient to preserve all those unions which should be preserved. Their severance should be left to the option of the parties concerned alone. Surely the happiness of the individual would be better consulted by such an arrangement than by that which now prevails.

Marriages, so far from being entered upon with greater recklessness, would then be more cautiously undertaken, because their durability would depend on mutual satisfaction. The woman would have full equality of rights, and not be a miserable sacrifice to unjust laws, as now she often is. It would be a step toward the ideal of the marriage state, which is a union based on love, in which each party has absolutely equal rights and stands pledged to equal duties, and neither is bound to the other longer than love and duty are respected. Neither government nor religion should put obstacles in the way of the dissolution of marriage other than those safeguards of the interests involved, which attend the termination of all important contracts.

Deep thinkers on the relations of life in goodly number have long advocated these views. They have been those of John Milton, of William von Humboldt, of John Stuart Mill. Nor is there anything in them which an enlightened moral or religious sentiment should oppose; rather the contrary. As Milton so well says in his Treatise on Divorce,――“Where Love cannot be, there can be left of wedlock nothing but the empty husk of an outside matrimony, as undelightful and unpleasing to God as any other kind of hypocrisy.”

The object of marriage is the Family. Love claims immortality through posterity. The hidden though ever-present purpose of the union of the sexes is the perpetuation and evolution of the species. Any union which avoids this object is destructive, and not creative of true happiness. We are told of the ancient ascetic sect of the Essenes that the sexes united in marriage, but remained chaste; and had families of children, but gathered them from among the foundlings and homeless orphans of the highways. Their impossible example does not merit the praise, as it has not enlisted the imitation of, later generations. The maternal and paternal affections, the love of family and the pleasures derived from the ties of kindred, are enjoyments which the properly constituted individual will never be willing to sacrifice unless constrained thereto by mighty and exceptional conditions. The tacit assumption of mutual aid and confidence between brothers and sisters, and the intimacy which is fostered by even remoter degrees of relationship, are beneficent elements of the social compact, and contribute largely to the happiness of the individual.

The Family, as we understand it, is distinctly a product of high civilization. In savage tribes the ties of consanguinity are quite different. In many, for instance, the father is scarcely regarded as a relation, blood kin being counted through the mother only. The rise of the paternal or patriarchial form of the family appears at a higher stage of culture; and when, as among the Etruscans and Romans, it was coincident with a recognized equality in marriage, society advanced with rapid strides.

Some believe that the theory of the family, as it has so long prevailed in Europe, is inappropriate for this country, and hence that it is disappearing among us, as unsuited to the development of our forms of culture. Children desire their liberty earlier, and parents are ready to comply with their requests. No ties other than material ones are recognized as constituting a family unit. It will be for the future to decide whether the greater personal independence thus secured has been of more value to the happiness of the race than the elements of affection sacrificed in obtaining it.

* * * * *

Law is the bond of the state, love, of the family. The former rules best by precept, the latter by example.

* * * * *

Those marriages are ominous which transmit miseries.

* * * * *

The family tie differs from the tie of friendship in that it binds together interests rather than sympathies.

* * * * *

Love, says Michael Angelo in one of his Sonnets, is the mental impression of ideal beauty:――

Amore e un concetta di bellezza Immaginata, cui sta dentro al cuore.

* * * * *

The aims of the child centre around his maturity; those of the man around his posterity.

* * * * *

The generations unborn are the sovereigns of the world, and the goals we are running for are invisible. Posthumous aims are the potent.

* * * * *

The heart of every woman is like a page written with sympathetic ink. It seems blank, but warm it sufficiently, and you will find a love-letter written on it.

* * * * *

Cara amica, beware of that tendency in your nature to repose utter confidence. Learn that nought is so fragile as Faith. It is like those delicate vases of Venetian glass which a single drop of poison is said to shiver into atoms. Better the homely ware which will toss it out, and fill again with wine. It is a law of reasoning that full belief is disproved by a single event, but partial belief only by a series of events. But what have you to do with reasoning? you who must trust “not at all, or all in all”? and bless you for it, fated, foolish friend.

* * * * *

A man weeps for the lost loved one; a woman for the lost love.

* * * * *

Love is the language in which the gods speak to man, observes Plato. Unfortunate is he who hears it not; doubly unfortunate he who hears, but comprehends it not.

* * * * *

True love is love of love; not love of the pleasures of love.