THE DIFFERENCES OF THINGS. 



59 



orchestra, from the low thunder of the big Boston organ to the shrillest 

 wail of the Cremona fiddle. Nor do you want the major chords alone, 

 you must have the minor tones, and discords, even. Can you spare 

 the lowest octave from the big organ ? If so, you bring the extremes 

 an octave nearer, and so far restrict the range of the instrument, and 

 by repeating the removal of the lowest notes you would at lasttind it 

 impossible to play even the thinnest of tunes. So with human society. 

 As you bring the extremes together, you take from life that which 

 makes life worth having. The extremes in deep-water oyster society 

 are very near each other, but each member of tbat society is only an 

 oyster. 



But how about the reformers ? If things are all right as they are, 

 why try to change them? My dear, short-sighted brother, the re- 

 former can do no harm. He is a benefactor. He is only helping 

 Nature out. He may cut off now and then a low note, but by adding 

 two high ones he widens the range of the instrument. Society as a 

 whole advances, but its extremes are probably farther apart than ever 

 before. Moreover, if we take the world as a whole, we can still better 

 understand the value of the reformer. Compare unreformed Africa, 

 with its cannibalism and slow travel, with America, the land of the 

 Grahamite and the home of the telegraph, and see if the various re- 

 formers have not made it a glorious thing to be a Caucasian ! Every 

 step in the moral world secured by the reformers makes greater the 

 distance from the top to the bottom of the moral ladder. The day 

 of the Inquisition and witch-burning has gone by; but the history of 

 them still remains. We have only to read the old records, to find out 

 what nice folks we are at the present day. I admit the conceit of 

 some of these troublesome people, who believe they have a mission; 

 but they are a necessary and important variety of the race. It is 

 very plain that this world is the proper stamping-ground of the re- 

 former. 



Hence, variety is a necessity of life. The man that lives upon one 

 kind of food only must deteriorate in body ; the student who gives all 

 his thought to one idea, will become crotchety ; while the devotee to a 

 single phase of religion will in time be a bigot, which is but another 

 name for monomaniac. Sameness is the border-land of insanity. 

 Have you ever been "possessed" by a whimsical idea, or a bit of 

 poetry that would give you no let-up? If so, you can form some 

 notion of the lunatic who was haunted with the idea that he carried 

 in his stomach the twelve Apostles ! There is many a man living a 

 life of excessive toil or of idleness, of so fixed a routine that he is par- 

 tially insane. It should be the aim of every man to so arrange his life 

 as to bring into it a good degree of variety if he would secure physi- 

 cal, mental, and moral health. In this particular, division of labor 

 often works mischief to the individual, however advantageous it may 

 be to the community. Imagine the stupidity that must creep over 



