5 88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the material prosperity of the "Western Giaours, he interrupted him 

 with a less expected question. 



" The happiest people on earth, you call them ? What age do 

 they generally attain to ?" Vambery seems to have returned an eva- 

 sive reply, though he admits that the query was not altogether irrele- 

 vant, at least from the stand-point of an Oriental who values existence 

 for its own sake. But, even in the less unpretending West, longevity 

 is not a bad criterion of happiness. Misfortune kills ; Nature takes 

 care to shorten a life of misery for reasons of her own, too, for, in a 

 somewhat recondite (but here essential) sense, the survival of the hap- 

 piest is also the survival of the fittest. The progress of knowledge 

 tends to circumscribe the realm of accident, and with it the belief in 

 the existence of unmerited evils. In spite of prenatal influences and 

 unprecalculable mishaps, the management of the individual is the 

 most important factor in the sum total of weal or woe, If we could 

 see ourselves as Omniscience sees us, we would probably recognize our 

 worst troubles as the work of our own hands, and we thus recognize 

 them now with sufficient clearness to be half ashamed of them. Most 

 men nowadavs dislike to confess their bad luck. We have ceased to 

 ascribe diseases to the malice of capricious demons, and even in Spain 

 the commander of a beaten army would hesitate to plead astrological 

 excuses. Polycrates held that a plucky man can bias the stars, and 

 the popular worship of success may be founded on an instinctive per- 

 ception of a similar truth. Sultan Achmed went too far in his habit 

 of strangling his defeated pashas, but the world in general agrees 

 with him that there must be something wrong about a generally un- 

 successful man. After two or three decided defeats the partisans of a 

 popular leader will give him up for lost, and after a series of disasters 

 the damaged man himself generally begins to share their opinion and 

 loses heart, or, as the ancients expressed it, admits the decree of fate 

 i. e., his own inability to prevail in the struggle for existence ; and it 

 is curious how swiftly a physical collapse often follows upon such a 

 giving way of the moral supports. The storms of every political, 

 social, and financial crisis extinguish hundreds of life- flames ; lost 

 hope is a fatal (though a silent and sometimes an unconfessed and un- 

 suspected) disease. Good luck, on the other hand, tends to prolong 

 life ; the longevity of pensioners and sinecurists is almost proverbial, 

 and there are men who continue to live in defiance of all biological 

 probabilities, merely because existence somehow or other has become 

 desirable, as a liberal supply of external oxygen will nourish a lamp 

 in default of the inner oil. At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian 

 War, King William and his chancellor and staff-officers were already 

 gray -headed veterans, and it is no accident that they are all alive yet ; 

 while nearly all the ministers and marshals of the exploded empire 

 have followed their leader " weary of life and tired of buttoning and 

 unbuttoning," as a captain of H. M. S. explained his suicide. 



