Chapter I: Mention These Tricks (4)

in his intense love of self. Society in general regards him as useful, and pities him. The older women generally suppose he would marry the first girl who would have him, and he himself hopes to sooner or later to come across a lady who is superior to all others, and who has money enough to pay her share of the expense of living. I wish him success, for

HE IS GENERALLY A GOOD FELLOW,

and strictly a creature of circumstances. If we catch the small-pox nothing is surer than that we will have it in spite of our pride. If a man is cast into a mold of events where he is bound to be taught nothing but selfishness, and to see nothing but the selfishness of others, the wonder is that he will assume, in the matter of self-denial, those relations, even for a day, which he so assiduously avoids for life.

SCHOLASTIC OPPORTUNITIES.

The single man has a fine chance to be "a scholar and a ripe good one." Having been denied the joys of a household all dependent on him, he may surround himself with books, he may pursue investigations, he may gather the ideas of the wits and the thinkers, and he may thus broaden his brains until he is the honored associate of the best minds in his region. This form of happiness is, to those who are within reach of it, one of the most satisfying within the gift of God. There is no reaction, there is no sorrow.

MAN LIVES TO LEARN,

after all. If the mind goes on in the culture of those high qualities which have been inwoven with his weak frame, it seems to me his selfishness has been well disposed of. The dollar which, in the cautious mind, was begrudged to a wee toddler who never lived, for a pair of shoes, has been placed where it has brought new knowledge of the power and wisdom of God, the Creator and Conservator of the Universe. The wisdom thus born out of selfishness will inculcate in those to follow him the folly of selfishness, and the tastelessness of its brightest apples of gold.

BE KIND TO THE OLD BACHELOR.

When he tries to be friendly, give him a lift. His mode of life has left him with many advantages for usefulness which married people have not got. On committees and in preliminary work he is often the best man in the neighborhood. At funerals, in sickness, he has been known to be almost the very instrument of the merciful Father. Teach the young ladies that he is harder to "catch" than they suppose, and perhaps they will turn toward him a portion of their character which will please him better with womankind.

TO HEAR SOME MEN TALK,

and from experience, too, you would think that a breed of creatures born from such women as are now living would be a herd of monsters, incapable of civilization and refinement. And yet the world will go on, and we know, almost, that our posterity will bring about wonders in the arts and sciences, and perhaps even in society itself,--wonders which will even surpass the triumph of our own generation. We are on the eve of both traveling and talking through the bare air. We are in a way to avoid the worst of our wars. It cannot be that the women who will bear the men who will do all these things are to be

JUDGED AS THE BACHELORS VIEW THEM.

The bachelor sees as through a glass, darkly. Being, for the time, incapable of the passion of love, having failed to exercise it when it came upon him, he thus rails at woman. If you are young enough, watch the events of the next thirty years, and see how they will give the lie to such a tirade as this, from

THE SAME BACHELOR

I quoted at the start: "Not one-half of our marriages have unbiased love as a foundation on both sides. (The love is usually on the man's side.) A woman marries for money, position, spite, pride, contrariness, fear of being an old maid, or for a home which she thinks will afford her more pleasure than the one she leaves. Love is the last thing to enter her head, and never her heart. Men of real sound judgment in business throw this judgment entirely aside when they come to select a wife. A man might better remain single than marry with the chances nine out of ten in favor of his making a mistake for life."

SEE HOW LITTLE KNOWLEDGE

of anybody's good points this gentleman displays. The young woman who has worked at ironing in the forenoon until her feet were swollen and her head has got dizzy, comes into the parlor in the evening, all frills and tucks, all "highty-tighty," all full of fun and God's good humor, and impresses my friend with the belief that she has never done an honest hour's labor in her life! Pshaw! she has got more pluck, and nerve, and "sand," than half a dozen men, when it comes to where the need is! She is going to be

THE MOTHER OF AN AMERICAN,

and Americans are not noted for their servility, their laziness, their mediocrity, or their lack of brains! For shame, then to judge a young woman as she appears to you when she is anxious to get rid of you! How would you like to be judged solely at those times when you were "carrying on," and "didn't care whether school kept or not"? That is precisely the way this gentleman has spoken of young women a page back. He thinks they love no one because they have never loved him! He never loved them, and how could he expect them to be swindled? Read his remarks over again, and see how events themselves deny his correctness.

HOW MANY HUSBANDS HAS HE SEEN

follow a drunken wife into a gutter? And, on the contrary, has he not seen the reverse of this sad picture many a time? I heard a Judge say to a poor woman once,--she was all scars: "I would send this woman-beater to the work-house for two hundred days if I did not know you would starve yourself to pay his way out." And then the poor, foolish, faithful heart appealed to his Honor to "spare the man, just once more;" she was sure he was a little the worse for drink when he misused her. What does our friend call this thing in woman, if it be not love? The being capable of a wife's love, and a mother's love, and a sister's love, is not much in danger of the criticisms of a man who has only a front-porch knowledge of all her sex!

SICKNESS.

Even with the best of our philosophy we who are well are unable to command at will the feelings of those who are ill. We lie on a bed, racked with the pains of some passing affliction, and the chasm which separates us from the hale and hearty seems prodigious. We are led down the stairs, out into the sunlight. The very rays themselves sit heavily upon our shoulders, and nearly crush us to the earth. With those vivid impressions of the terrors of illness, we feel that our brains will remain steeped in memories such as will enable us to appreciate our health if we ever get it again, yea, though we have hardly a crust of bread to spare. But lo! behold us once well again, and we have forgotten our good fortune; at the slightest turn in our personal affairs we bemoan our fate as sharply as though the whole night had been rolling in upon us through some fever, or all the blasts of the arctic world had crept through our bones in some frigid chill. There is no boon so great as health. Of course everybody _admits_ that. But why can we not attach meaning to it? If a man rise in a public gathering and say "I will give a hundred dollars!" he knows exactly what he is saying, and so do his hearers know. But if he rise behind a pulpit or on a rostrum and say

"PRESERVE YOUR HEALTH

at all hazards!" no significance so deep attaches, though the one statement is a thousand times as important as the other. I cannot understand why we are so oblivious to the sufferings of illness while we are well unless it be a provision of nature to keep us from that suffering through sympathy which we would surely undergo if we really had any vivid feeling for the sick. On this earth each one has to do his own suffering--the King in the palace of the royal family and the baby in the hut of the miner. All who are well go their way rejoicing, even having no momentary realization of the state of mind of the disabled associate. It may be that this has not always been so, for we inherit a salutation among our other traits which implies a desire to be informed as to the physical condition of the body of the person addressed. Two men of affairs meet. One says:

"HOW ARE YE?"

The other responds: "How are ye? Are you going to be at the meeting to-night?" etc., the conversation being now under full headway. The words indicate that, at one time, they carried a meaning which they have lost. Yet we are not worse than our fathers before us, and are not exceeded in the milk of human kindness. It may be that the old form was such a cumbrous piece of hypocrisy that latter-day people have thrown it off in disgust. Anyway, there is nothing more certain nor more astonishing than that a well man cannot conceive the feelings of a sick man, even though he try, and that those who are sick have to grin and bear it all without any very great affliction falling to the lot of those who stand at the bedside.

BEHOLD THE STRONG MAN IN THE FEVERISH AIR

of the sick-chamber. Last week all his clock-wheels worked with ease, and merrily struck the hours of feast and sleep. Afterward the wheels dragged a little and annoyed him some. Suddenly a whole handful of sand was thrown into the cogs, and the cogs have been grinding it and the hammer striking continuously ever since. His brain is distracted, his soul is sorely perplexed, and his mind is like an infant in house-cleaning time, strangely in the way and infinitely aware of it. Here lies proud-riding vanity, thrown from his high saddle. Kindnesses are showered on him of which he feels that he deserves few, and yet wants more.

SYMPATHY IS EXPRESSED

for him which greatly moves him, for he is accompanying the words he hears with the ills he feels, while the speaker is speaking a conventionality which he would feel had he the ability. The sick man mentally resolves that all the mistakes of his life shall be corrected if he shall survive, and yet there are few who are able to fulfill the programmes thus formulated--frequently the thriftless man is more prodigal after an illness which has stabbed his pride with an advertisement of his indigence than he was before his great vow of future economy was recorded up on the ceiling, where,

IN THE RIFTS OF THE PLASTER,

the Missouri River flows into the Mississippi! Perhaps if the would-be reformer would take a look frequently at those objects in his whilom sick-room which so riveted his fevered attention, some of their old association would return upon him, and do him good. The ancients practiced the memory in this way. After a course of meanderings through a garden, each object represented and recalled some piece of knowledge which it was important the pupil should retain in his mind. "Few persons," says Thomas a Kempis "are made better by the pain and languor of sickness; as few great pilgrims become eminent saints." Here lies your bachelor now. He has always felt that when he got sick he could get his gruel stewed as well by the hired girl of his landlady, as the French say, as by a wife. He lies up there, O, so in need of care and kindness!

HIS BRAGS WERE MADE IN TIME OF STRENGTH,

and he expected to have strength to keep himself stoical. But now he is weak,--weak and truly miserable. He hears the people come in to their supper, go to their rooms, wash, run gayly down-stairs, chat, go down another pair of stairs,--and then come the jarring sounds of plates and knives and spoons, and, worse, the sickening smell of victuals. How can they laugh and joke when he, a man and a brother, lies sick of a fever? Ah! my friend, it would not be so were you the head of the house. All would be changed. The supper-hour would come with a hush instead of a clatter. The light stol'n forth o' the building would leave the whole house in gloom. And in your selfish soul you would be glad, for God so made all of us! Now you turn yourself to the wall, and marvel at the lightness of human words and

THE GREEDINESS OF HUMAN WANTS.

You are little to be pitied in justice--greatly, in mercy! Lie there and pity humanity, for they would be all like you, did not they follow in nature's paths, where the roses of the wayside hide more of their ugliness. All I would impose is that you walk where you will look least hideous, even in your own eyes.

As, in Paradise, when Milton was all ablaze with poetic glory, he waved his more than kingly sceptre and thus ushered in the night--

Now came still evening on--
Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires: Hesperus that led
The starry host rode brightest--

--So does woman, soft as still Evening, shining as all the starry hosts with goodness and with mercy, come into the night of disease, and soften its harsh desert with the dews of her kindness. Sickness teaches us how good and true is woman, how useful in the world, how necessary to our welfare and proper destiny. If any man have learned this on a sick bed

HE HAS NOT BEEN SICK FOR NAUGHT.

He is a man of progressive ideas and unfolding nature. Sir Walter Scott has put into words a thought that has ever had man's approbation:

O woman! in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light, quivering aspen made;
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!

"It is in sickness," says Hosea Ballou, "that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent one upon another for our comfort and even necessities. This desire, opening our eyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing." "Sickness," says Burton, "puts us in mind of our mortality, and while we drive on heedlessly in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear, and brings us to a sense of our duty." "It is then," says Pliny, "that man recollects there is a God, and that he himself is but a man. No mortal is then the object of his envy, his admiration, or his contempt." "In sickness," says Shakspeare, playing with his prepositions, "let me not so much say, 'Am I getting better of my pain?' as 'Am I getting better for it?'"

LET US THEREFORE GIVE UP THE IDEA

of those great reformations which we formulate upon our mattresses of misery, and rather confine ourselves to a few betterments of our lives which are possible. If we are spendthrifts, we should vow to spend our money for goods of more solid worth than a taste of this thing, a whiff of that, or a sight of the other. If we are proud, let us resolve to speak kindly at least to those who have been lately ill. If we are stingy, let us make ready to give, notwithstanding, to those who need as badly as we have needed. If we are doubtful of the goodness of the gentle sex, let us at any rate thereafter except forever their qualities as a faithful succor of

THE MOST MISERABLE OF CREATURES,

a sick man who cannot move from his bed of pain and discontent. If we are impenitent, let us arise out of our wearying couch respectful to those who worship God, and reverent also before God in the presence of other worshipers. Perhaps if we aim our sudden goodness at a lower mark, we may make a record that will not entirely proclaim (as the quick eye of Pope has cynically perceived) our unpromising folly, and our unteachable ignorance of human nature.

SORROW.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.--Shakspeare.

But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.--Campbell.

Gathering clouds crowd thickest round the tallest mountain, yet do their summits, far up above, forever gaze out upon the undimmed sun. So is it with the great heart smitten with deep sorrow. There is no soul upon whom the glory of God's love falls more serenely and uninterruptedly. There is no better friend, no lovelier associate. "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." And comfort does come, in the broad and kindly love and mercy toward humanity which those who have known suffering so frequently evince, "Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls;" says Chapin, "the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation robes glittering with fire, and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gates of heaven." "The echo of the nest-life, the voice of our modest, fairer, holier soul" says Richter, "is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the nightingales warble when one veils their eye." "Every noble crown is, and on earth will ever be, a crown of thorns," says Carlyle "Sorrow", says Haunay, with rare knowledge, "turns all the stars into mourners, and every wind of heaven into a dirge." Sometimes all nature seems to condole with animate woes:

One weeping heart may tone a rural scene
To sadness. Reverently the trees will bend;
The little stream will sigh, with heaving pulse,
And swans, in soft and solemn silence float--
Grief's snowy celebrants.

It is a manifest peculiarity of the human mind to believe that its sorrows should be more enduring than they really are. We have in this phenomenon some of the clearest views of our weakness and inconsistency, for though we deplore the destiny which deals out so much misery to us, yet we despise ourselves, and are also thought somewhat less of by our associates, if we do not embalm our griefs and remain a sort of mummy-house above ground until the memory of our friends has grown faulty and unreliable when applied to our affairs. Thus,

A WIFE LOSES HER HUSBAND.

The grief which she feels nearly crushes her spirit and evokes the sympathies of her neighbors, as well it may. She finds a bitterness within her heart which it is difficult to sweeten into resignation. Why should the blow have singled her as its object? Then, with the lapse of the days, comes a change of the season, and the wonderful climatic effects on both mind and body accompanying them. She wanders into the woods, and the rustling of the leaves beneath her feet betrays her from her dead husband for the first time, and her

CONSCIENCE, THE SOLEMN OFFICER

of her moral nature, suddenly arrests a little girl wandering in the woods in search of a butternut tree which lives like a hermit in the deep of the forest. It is a stray memory of herself in the long ago! It has wandered into her house of grief, and when it falls under the hand of the law she feels great guilt for having harbored it. "O, my poor, dear husband, have I so forgotten you?" she cries in mental sackcloth and ashes. And then the frailty of human reason and action appear before her and appall her. The time flies by. Soon still another season is here, with

A TROOP OF LITTLE TRAITORS, HAPPY MEMORIES,

carrying her "over the hills and far away" into that dim past whence she emerged, all happiness and health. The conscience now has loosened its harsh rule. The memories play in her brain like children on a lawn, and their merry music often drowns the dirges still sadly chanted in her deeper soul. And thus the winter passes--not in a whirlwind of grief as did the summer, whose days she never saw, or will not know she saw, until they come again hot and heavy with the association of her bitterness. But it is safe to say her dread of those days will exceed the actual grief they cause her, and she can soon look back upon her sorrow, and say that she has mourned

RATHER NOT ENOUGH THAN TOO MUCH.

If there be joined to this a new association, one that nature and God have both approved, then there is lifted up the sneer of the world, and again the weakness of woman, the frivolity of humanity, is deplored by those who demand that grief shall co-survive with remembrance. We do not suffer so much as we think we ought to, and yet, foolish and illogical, we call upon our fate in a grand monotony of complaint at the heaviness of our ills. The young man falls in love. His love is not returned. He has believed himself capable of undying and unalterable affection for a maiden. Unselfish, therefore, it must endure, whether she love him or not, for

HAS HE NOT PROCLAIMED IT TO HIS OWN SOUL?

She loves him not! The test is come. He must despise himself as a shallow-hearted hind, or dwell in extacies of adoration over one who will resign herself into the keeping of another, a thing most detestable to this young man. Either horn of the dilemma shows him life, true life. Not a poem or a dream, but as a range of mountains would form if they were piled down from some other world; first a row of little peaks, then monster heights arising where valleys hid, and valleys forming on the points of peaks.

THIS YOUTHFUL PEAK OF GRIEF,

the young man finds in after years, is but the more substantial bottom of two slopes which rise sublimely toward the zenith of his life. He banishes his false conceptions of the grandeur of the human mind. He banishes an attachment which had not a substantial girder under it, and within a few years his heart is all the broader, gentler and more charitable for his young sorrow. Do not think me underrating the poignancy of ill-requited love. It is no mean sorrow. But no great mind ever was crushed under it. No great mind ever was crushed under any sorrow dealt out to humanity.

TRUE GREATNESS,

after all, lies in true humanity, true understanding of the feebleness of our nature and our capacities. We do not overload an animal, merely because it evinces a willingness to make an effort. We therefore must not overweight our soul with sorrow. We must not nurse our woe. We must not have that grand, conceited idea of our nobility which demands of us a great long future of melancholy; but rather must we nurse our bodies, suspecting our liver if our soul be heavy, and blaming our chamber if our brow be clouded. Then, if a high intelligence wait at the couch of our sick soul, as does faithful woman by an invalid, soon will vanish all the clouds, soon will come a brighter vista in the journey of our lives. We are as God has made us, weak, miserable and sinful. Let us expect from ourselves conduct becoming a being weak, sinful and miserable. It would seem that this is the secret of those great lives who profit by adversity. They have charity, for they have erred. They have hope, for it has been their true anchor, never failing. They have withal more consistency than have we, though they have

NEVER MADE SUCH HIGH-SOUNDING REQUISITIONS

on their untried natures. Where they have stepped into the stream of their existence in some new fording-place, they have gone with great caution, not with an immature confidence born of naught save foolish audacity. Their river of life is an open water before their pleasant eyes; they prepare not for a flood in the fall, neither do they make ready to pass over dry-shod when the waters come down in the spring. Though they have the more mercy, they make the lesser appeals for mercy; though they have the more strength, they pray the oftener for aid. Sorrow has brought it about. Affliction has stretched their heart-chords

INTO TRUE HARMONY.

"The safe and general antidote against sorrow," says Dr. Johnson, "is employment. It is commonly observed that among soldiers and seamen, though there is much kindness, there is little grief; they see their friend fall without any of that lamentation which is indulged in security and idleness, because they have no leisure to spare from the care of themselves; and whoever shall keep himself equally busy will find himself equally unaffected with irretrievable losses. Time is observed to wear out sorrow, and its effects might doubtless be accelerated by quickening the succession and enlarging the variety of objects."

THERE IS ANOTHER AND AN UNHAPPY PHASE

of sorrow. "When it is real," says Madame Swetchine, "it is almost as difficult to discover as real poverty. An instinctive delicacy hides the rags of the one and the wounds of the other." "The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue hath it," says the Talmud. "Light griefs do speak," says Seneca, "while sorrow's tongue is bound." "The wringing of the hands and knocking of the breast," says Dr. South, "or the wishing of one's self unborn: all are but the ceremonies of sorrow, the pomp and ostentation of an effeminate grief, which speak not so much the greatness of the misery as the smallness of the mind."

NOW COMES RELIGION,

shining down into this Alpine valley of grief, not as the sun of the Alps, but as a continual orb of light; not between a few short hours in a "long, long weary day," but as a constant illumination of the soul, irradiating its beams out upon the countenances of God's afflicted, and setting them before mankind as a beacon for groping humanity. I know of no more perfect expression of the power of sorrow to chasten the soul and draw it nearer the Maker than is contained in

MARIA LOWELL'S "LAMB IN THE SHEPHERD'S ARMS."

I quote it as giving that lesson which my humble prose would never teach:

1. After our child's untroubled breath
Up to the Father took its way,
And on our home the shade of death,
Like a long twilight, haunting lay,

And friends came round with us to weep
Her little spirit's swift remove,
This story of the Alpine sheep
Was told to us by one we love:

2. They, in the valley's sheltering care,
Soon crop the meadow's tender prime,
And, when the sod grows brown and bare,
The shepherd strives to make them climb
To airy shelves of pastures green
That hang along the mountain-side,
Where grass and flowers together lean,
And down through mist the sunbeams glide.

3. But nought can tempt the timid things
That steep and rugged path to try,
Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings,
And seared below the pastures lie;
Till in his arms their lambs he takes
Along the dizzy verge to go,--
Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks,
They follow on o'er rock and snow;

4. And, in those pastures lifted fair,
More dewy soft than lowland mead,
The shepherd drops his lowly care,
And sheep and lambs together feed.
This parable by Nature breathed
Blew on me as the south wind free
O'er frozen brooks that float unsheathed
From icy thralldom to the sea.

5. A blissful vision, through the night,
Would all my happy senses sway,
Of the Good Shepherd on the height
Or climbing up the starry way,
Holding our little lamb asleep;
And like the burthen of the sea,
Sounded that voice along the deep,
Saying, "Arise, and follow me."

POVERTY.

'Tis a little thing
To give a cup of water, yet its draught
Of cool refreshment, drained by fevered lips,
May give a shock of pleasure to the frame
More exquisite than when nectarean juice
Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.--Talfourd.

Real poverty, it may not be impossible, is to the individual, more of a question when directed to his country than to his actions. In Ireland or Italy, it seems to me, the greatest of individual excellence in sobriety and economy may not shield the citizen from abject want, which is a terrible thing. But in America the man who is often called "poor" gets as much rest for his body and quite as beneficial food for his stomach as the man whose wealth is the wonder of the world. It is a magnificent land where there is so much food raised and so many clothes made that a man calls himself poor if he have only plenty to eat and wear! Our definition of the word "poverty" is a marvelous corruption of the word. To be poor in the true sense of the word, in this great land, one must have either been sick or criminally negligent. Many a clerk eats as much and dresses as well as Vanderbilt. What does Vanderbilt do with the great number of millions which he controls?

HE FEEDS AND DRESSES AN ARMY

of about one hundred thousand other men. If he kept his wheat, it would rot. If he kept his clothes, they would pass into speedy decay. By spending one hundred and fifty million dollars he is enabled to secure services which return an aggregate result of about one hundred and sixty-five million dollars in a year. Men have eaten up his first one hundred and fifty million dollars, but their works are worth one hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and he has fifteen million dollars profit. Suppose the men took his one hundred and fifty million dollars away from him and ate it up and wore it out in a year, doing no work in the mean time. At the end of the year they would begin starving if they relied on him alone, and he would have neither one hundred and fifty million dollars capital nor fifteen million dollars profit.

VIEWED AS IT IS,

Vanderbilt is really only richer than other people to the extent that he can gratify rational desires more than others, and this at once puts him alongside hundreds of thousands who have money enough to purchase everything they can rationally want. In the system of labor for wages, Vanderbilt is only a commander, having the largest force intrusted to his supervision--or paid with his money; the thing is the same. Almost all

THE ENORMOUSLY RICH MEN OF THE WORLD

have lived in the apprehension of having the bulk of their possessions seized by envious rulers or fellow citizens. Not many years ago Vanderbilt suddenly bought fifty million dollars of four per cent Government bonds, simply, it is believed, for the purpose of shifting the enormous risk of active employment upon shoulders which would be less apt to excite popular manifestations of greed should the Commune bring about its foolish and chaotic reign. The cares of great wealth are a class of the most serious burdens borne by humanity.

THEY SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN

in making up the account between the citizen who has all he needs and the citizen who has to spare for others who will pay him a profit. Men who have lived in constant dread of poverty have been astonished, upon being stranded on that shore of ill-repute to find the sun shining more brightly and the birds singing more cheerily than when, driven with the ever multiplying engagements of business, they had no slumber which was not an imaginary hurrying into a bank-president's parlor, and no conversation which was not distressing some impatient caller in an ante-room.

BUT ACTUAL, HARSH, GRINDING WANT

is a nightmare, a delirium of misfortune. It lowers the human being at once to the condition of a brute somewhat of the order of the cats. Men on board a ship, driven to despair by hunger, enter the most wretched state conceivable. The qualities of faith and mercy disappear at once. No man trusts anybody else. Each expects the others to pounce upon him to eat him, and none of them would dare to sleep if he could, owing to the certainty of his peril should his vigilance be relaxed. From this baleful picture of the lowest depths of poverty we may rise to comparatively stupendous heights, and yet be relatively poor as to the consideration of other conditions of life still above us. Let us, then, view poverty as

A REAL, ACTIVE, "INCONVENIENCE,"

as the French wit has put it. "One solitary philosopher maybe great, virtuous and happy in the depth of poverty," says Isaac Iselin, "but not a whole people." "Poverty" says Lucian, "persuades a man to do and suffer everything that he may escape from it." "It requires a great deal of poetry to gild the pill of poverty," says Madame Deluzy; "and then it will pass for a pleasant dose only in theory; the reality is a failure." "A generous and noble spirit" says Dionysius, "cannot be expected to dwell in the breast of men who are struggling for their daily bread."

"HOW LIKE A RAILWAY TUNNEL

is the poor man's life," says Bovee, "with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!" "Poverty," says Euripides, "possesses this disease--through want it teaches a man evil." "Poverty," says Saadi, "snatches the reins out of the hands of pity," which is true only in one sense.

MANY PEOPLE ARE GOOD

who would not be so good were they poorer, but the Irish in Ireland are perhaps the poorest and at the same time the most pious people of whom we read or hear. "Poverty makes man satirical, soberly, sadly, bitterly satirical," says Friswell. "Men praise it," says Alexander Smith,

"AS THE AFRICAN WORSHIPS MUMBO JUMBO--

from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate it." "It oft deprives a man of all spirit and virtue," says Ben Franklin; "it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright."

THE SCENES OF DARKEST POVERTY

in this land of ours are surely the results of ignorance and folly. With the crops which follow each other in our favored region of the earth, and with membership in any mutual aid society, the industrious poor man of America has an assurance that no picture so black can be drawn of his lot "in the rainy day." We cannot reform human nature. When men cheat, steal, lie, and remain idle, they must suffer the results of their deeds, and, at present, those whom they drag down with them must also suffer. But, with industry and sobriety assured,

THE FANGS OF POVERTY

have been drawn, for the poor man in sickness receives his support, and in health contributes his small share to his sick brother. In leaving this painful branch of so vital a portion of any book devoted to the improvement of humanity, let us abjure each other to fly from the sins of idleness and waste, that make this dark panorama in a world which could be bright, and which, rolling along in its foolish fashion, even now gives promise of exceeding joy in the future. Work and save and give work! This is the light of the world, the open sesame of the millennium? Let us come again to the follies of

FALSE POVERTY.

How ridiculous that one should _suffer_ from want of a frill or a furbelow! "I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind and vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man _poor_," says the eloquent Edmund Burke; "I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because they are men." "It is the great privilege of poverty" says Dr. Johnson, "to be happy unenvied, to be healthy without physic, and to be secure without guard." Is it not ridiculous for the poor man, by aping the habits of the rich, to spurn some of the greatest blessings attaching to our life? Thus, as Dr. Johnson says:

"POVERTY, IN LARGE CITIES

is often concealed in splendor and often in extravagance." The tendency of people in comfortable circumstances to move out of a pleasant cottage into a brick house with two inches of marble-front is a sorrowful one. We can progress only through this same sad tendency, but how many happy homes are thus ruined! It requires much brains to count the ultimate cost. There is hardly an article of furniture in the old home which does not look out of place in the new. There is additional work to be done which had been entirely overlooked. The servant is a grievious expense. We do not get the result of her work--only the profit. If she earn the one hundred and fifty million dollars we get only the fifteen million dollars. She must be "kept"--must add her clothes to the wash, her meat to the dish, her bed-room to the house. She breaks with a smile. She scatters as the sower who goeth forth to sow. From every conceivable cranny creep forth disbursements--the expenses of the rich man creeping like tigers upon his poor but vainer neighbor. O, pshaw! why will men and women do it? If those two fine spirits, Prudence and Economy look down upon us, such houses must attract attention only by seeming to mark out upon the earth they cover the writing at Belshazzar's feast--

THE MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,

of the nineteenth century. I know of an actual instance of a family being forced to eat the bread of charity within the walls of a house for which they had engaged to pay, and had so far paid, the sum of two thousand dollars a year as rent! What foolish thing a vain human being will not do is a more difficult problem than what he will do. If we had no rich people to fire up our self-conceit, we would be happier, though we rose more slowly; yet are we to be despised for being willing to throw the blame so freely from our shoulders. "Poverty is," says Cobbett, "except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty--the shame of being thought poor--it is

A GREAT AND FATAL WEAKNESS,

though arising in this country from the fashion of the times themselves." Let us shake off this fatal weakness. That man is a coward who, from whatever reason, keeps up the expenditure of a rich man a moment longer than his income will warrant it.

"POVERTY IS ONLY CONTEMPTIBLE

when it is felt to be so," says Bovee. "That man," says Bishop Paley, "is to be accounted poor, of whatever rank he be, who suffers the pains of poverty, whose expenses exceed his resources; and no man, properly speaking, poor, but he." "The poor are only they who seem poor," says Emerson, "and poverty consists in feeling poor." Doubtless you are familiar with the story of the unhappy Sultan to whom the Magi, traveling from the East to his relief, could give no hope unless he could get and wear the shirt of a happy man. Proclamation went forth to all the lands of the empire, offering glittering rewards for a happy man. At last learned doctors and experts, who had gone out into the outer regions, brought in a shepherd, who was vowed to be an entirely happy man. But lo! when he came before the Magi, it was found that

HE HAD NO SHIRT!

The men who have caught this circling planet in the palms of their hands, as God grasps the inconceivable universes, were born poor and struggled in adversity; the men who have throttled the fiery lightning, and chained the fire and the water into willing servitude, were poor boys; the men who have developed the human imagination into a thing almost perfect and unapproachable were poor boys; the men who have led millions of their Maker's feet, were poor both in youth and age. Bear it then, in mind, that all honorable endeavors to ease the yoke of life are good; that all repinings whatsoever are totally ridiculous, and mostly dishonorable.

FACTS ABOUT PROGRESS.

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Tennyson.

One of the pillars upon which the atheists and social iconoclasts and demolishers base their erroneous philosophy is a seeming belief that the men of to-day work harder for a living than the men of olden times. Now I will lay hold of this pillar, and, although I be not Samson, I may yet hope to rend an ill-constructed edifice. With the aid of a few figures and a little history the mind may possibly discern, through the centuries behind us, some evidence of that progress which Victor Hugo has called "the stride of God."

It is reasonable to suppose that the poor man, during the period of his veritable history, has always, when not suffering severe privation, eaten nearly the same amount of food in any given number of hours. We may, I think, judge of the amount of work cast to his lot if we can find the ruling values of several of the articles of food which have contributed to sustain his life. I have chosen the earlier civilization of England in my examples, not because the Book of Exodus, the Pyramids, and the temples of Baalbec and Karnac fail to betray the needed evidences of almost super human toil, but because the authorities at my disposal touching upon earlier times fail to furnish me

THE SATISFACTORY COMMERCIAL DATA

also needed as a parallel. Let us, then, put our laborer in England in the year 1350. He had at that time so far progressed that, under certain very restricted circumstances, his life was preserved, and he was allowed to earn wages for his labor. He worked fourteen hours for a legal day's work in winter and fifteen hours in summer, but I have everywhere in the following statements computed his hours as fourteen. If he were a common laborer he received one penny. If he were

A SKILLED FIELD HAND,

he could earn three times as much money. The English penny is to-day a very large copper coin, being worth two cents, but in those times it weighed three times as much as to-day, as did all current coins. In addition to this great weight, money was very scarce, and fully six or seven times as valuable in many commodities as to-day. We will not err far in calling the laborer's penny forty American cents. In 1350, then, the skilled laborer earned 3 pence in a day. He paid of his dear money, 1 shilling 10-1/2 pence for a bushel of wheat, and £1 4 shillings 6 pence for an ox. This means that he paid eight days' (112 hours') labor for his bushel of wheat, and 98 days' (1372 hours') labor for his ox. The ox would to-day rate far below a "scalawag" at the Stock Yards of Chicago or East St. Louis, weighing, perhaps, 400 pounds.

TWO HUNDRED YEARS LATER,

in 1550, the same kind of a laborer earned 4 pence in a day. He paid 1 shilling 10-1/2 pence for a bushel of wheat and £1 16 shillings 7 pence for an ox. This means that he paid nearly six days' (about 80 hours') labor for his bushel of wheat, and 110 days' (1540 hours') labor for his ox. The high price of the latter was justified by its great improvement in weight and quality.

IN THE FORTY-THIRD YEAR OF ELIZABETH

the coinage was lowered to about its present weight. In 1675, therefore, we see the laborer getting 7-1/2 pence for a day's service. But he was compelled to pay 4 shillings 6 pence for a bushel of wheat, and £3 6 shillings for an ox. He thus was going backward, for temporary reasons, however, and had to pay seven days' (98 hours') labor for his bushel of wheat and 110 days' (1540 hours') labor for his ox. The ox had twice as much beef on him as the ox of 1350.

AND STILL FOR ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS,

the march of the laborer upward was retarded by wars, famines, and "deaths," as their plagues were called. In 1795, one of the darkest of those dark years, we find the skilled laborer receiving 1 shilling 5-1/4 pence per day (still of fourteen hours in winter, fifteen in summer). He paid 7 shillings 10 pence for a bushel of wheat and £16 8 shillings for an ox. This means that he paid five days' (70 hours') labor for his bushel of wheat and 119 days' (1666 hours') labor for his ox. The ox was what is technically called "a fair critter."

TO-DAY THE SAME LABORER,

working ten hours a day--counting all the perquisites which have fallen to his lot,--the crumbs from the tables of his prosperous superiors,--the same laborer, I say, gets 3 shillings a day. He pays 6 shillings for a bushel of wheat and £12 for an ox. This means that he pays two days' (twenty hours') labor for his bushel of wheat and 80 days' (800 hours') labor for his ox. The ox rates better than a butchers' "beast," as the English say. In the meantime,

THE CHILDREN OF THE LABORER

have sailed across the ocean and settled in a land where the fields yield steady harvests and where the genius of the inventor has exceeded with its results the wonders of the Arabian Nights. In this land of freedom and plenty the day laborer gets $1.50 a day. He pays 90 cents to $1.30 for a bushel of wheat, and if he desire such food, he can pay $80 for a monster ox weighing 1600 pounds. He thus pays less than a day's labor of ten hours for his bushel of wheat, and about fifty-three days' (530 hours') labor for his ox. He does not need this high grade of meat, however, as few English laborers ever buy from even the round of such beef, and no ordinary American householder in city or country gets as good once a year.

PROGRESS IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.

We thus see the condition of the laboring man rise, in five hundred years, from 112 hours' labor for sixty pounds of wheat to about six or seven hours' work, and from 1372 hours' labor for 400 pounds of beef to 267 hours' labor for the same weight of better food!

But the atheist will say that the laborer of the olden time _did not work_, and got along by hook or crook; that, as it was a miracle if he lived with such wages, anyway, he had every inducement to become a vagabond. But all this had "been seen to." Such things are never unforeseen.

FOR INSTANCE:

"Here is a package of worm-medicine which, for one dollar will save the life of your child. Will you have it? No!! you will not pay one single dollar to save the life of your little child! Here is a man, who, for one standard dollar, in silver, worth intrinsically less than 90 cents, will let his child be lowered into the grave--will listen to the clods falling on its little coffin! But ah! I am provided against such men! They cannot escape me! Here is a smaller package which will save your child's life for fifty cents. It is yours. Death has missed his mark!" Now, with the inevitable forethought of

THIS VERMIFUGE FIEND

whom I have quoted, the law-makers of those days also saw to it that the laborer should not escape the original terms of Eve's surrender to "that first grand thief who clomb into God's fold." Under a statute of Richard II. the laborer was forbidden to remove from one part of the kingdom to another, or to otherwise seek to raise the price of his labor. This law stood for centuries, and was reiterated in the seventeenth George II. and the thirty-second George III., along with fixed wages for services rendered. Personal liberty was held to be the privilege of the proprietary class. By a statute of Henry VIII. (1536), children of five years and up, were compelled to labor. A man able to work who refused a proffer of work was, according to law, dragged to the nearest town on a hurdle, stripped, and whipped through the town until his body was covered with blood. For a second offense his right ear was cut off and he received the bastinado. For a third offense he was put to death. An act passed under Edward VI. (1555) provided that the able-bodied laborer refusing work should be branded on the breast with the letter V and adjudged to the informer as his slave for two years. The master might fasten a ring about the neck, arm, or leg.

REFORM.

Under William IV., by the act of 1832, the laboring hours of children were reduced to _ten hours_. By the act of 1847 women were included in the ten-hour law. By 1867 the power of the English working man had secured the permanence of a custom making ten hours a day's work. In the factories of Nottingham, England, the men make as high as fourteen dollars a week. Improved machinery has raised their wages. At the spinning machines which formerly required two men, who each received $4.50 a week, there is now required one man, who gets $6.25. At the beginning of the present century the workman in these mills earned 4-1/2 shillings a week. At the present day he earns 10-1/2 shillings, with twenty-four hours' less labor.

THE ENGLISH FIELD-LABORER

who now earns 3 shillings a day spends, for a family of eight, 15 shillings a week in bread, cheese, butter, washing, tea, sugar and schooling. How much cheese, tea, butter, washing, sugar and schooling did our friend and his cubs of the fourteenth century enjoy?

Invention and economy are keeping far in advance of the effects of growth in population. In 1766 England and Wales had but 8,500,000 inhabitants; now, there are 25,000,000. The same thing is

TRUE OF AMERICA.

I have for authorities "England, Political and Social" by August Laugel, private secretary of the Duc d'Aumale, Notes and Queries, No 283, Green's "History of the English People," "Froude's History of England," and current numbers of the _Mark Lane Express_.

In the terms applied to the laborer, from pariah, helot, servus, serf, knecht, thrall, slave, villain, peasant, and laborer, to artisan and working-man--there is a vision of progress as bright as the light which fell upon Saul of Tarsus as he journeyed toward Damascus.

To the man whose whole mind is given to the work he does, the time goes swiftly. Many a man whom success has translated from the grocery, the plow-factory, the farm, to the matting and the yellow bedsteads of the seaside hotel, finds that he was happier at home, when he was poor, and that he was then often far more comfortable in body.

THE ATHEIST

does not "look upon a beautiful face and see a grinning skull." He must not, then, gaze upon the freest body of workingmen of all the ages and see but a chain of quarry-slaves scourged to their dungeons.

"God is a worker, He has thickly strewn
Infinity with grandeur. God is love;
He yet shall wipe away Creation's tears,
And all the worlds shall summer in His smile."

FAILURE IN LIFE.

Macbeth. If we should fail--
Lady Macbeth. We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail.--Shakspeare.