5 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ties felt to be in some way serviceable to others, brings kindred evils 

 an absence of certain positive pleasures of a high order, not easily 

 exhausted, and a further falling back on egoistic pleasures, again tend- 

 ing toward satiety. And all this, with its resulting weariness and dis- 

 content, we may trace to a social organization under which there comes 

 to the regulating classes a share of produce great enough to make 

 possible large accumulations that support useless descendants. 



The bias of the wealthy in favor of arrangements apparently so 

 conducive to their comforts and pleasures, while it shuts out the per- 

 ception of these indirect penalties brought round on them by their 

 seeming advantages, also shuts out the perception that there is any 

 thing mean in being a useless consumer of things which others pro- 

 duce. Contrariwise, there still survives, though in a weaker form, the 

 belief that it is honorable to do nothing but seek enjoyments, and 

 relatively dishonorable to pass life in supplying others with the means 

 to enjoyment. In this, as in other things, our temporary state brings 

 a temporary standard of honor appropriate to it ; and the accompany- 

 ing sentiments and ideas exclude the conception of a state in which 

 what is now thought admirable will be thought disgraceful. Yet it 

 needs only, as before, to aid imagination by studying other times and 

 other societies, remote in nature from our own, to see at least the pos- 

 sibility of this. When we contrast the feeling of the Feejeeans, among 

 whom a man has a restless ambition to be acknowledged as a murderer, 

 with the feeling among civilized races, who shrink with horror from a 

 murderer, we get undeniable proof that men in one social state pride 

 themselves in characters and deeds elsewhere held in the greatest de- 

 testation. Seeing which, we may infer that, just as the Feejeeans, be- 

 lieving in the honorableness of murder, are regarded by us with aston- 

 ishment ; so those of our own day who pride themselves in consuming 

 much and producing nothing, and who care little for the well-being of 

 their society so long as it supplies them with good dinners, soft beds, 

 and pleasant lounging-places, may be regarded with astonishment by 

 men of times to come, living under higher social forms. Nay, we may 

 see not merely the possibility of such a change in sentiment, but the 

 probability. Observe first the feeling still extant in China, where the 

 honorableness of doing nothing, more strongly held than here, makes 

 the wealthy wear their nails so long that they have to be tied back 

 out of the way, and makes the ladies submit to prolonged tortures 

 that their crushed feet may show their incapacity for work. Next, re- 

 member that, in generations gone by, both here and on the Continent, 

 the disgracefulness of trade was an article of faith among the upper 

 classes, maintained very strenuously. Now, mark how members of 

 the landed class are going into business, and even sons of peers becom- 

 ing professional men and merchants ; and observe among the wealthy 

 the feeling that men of their order have public duties to perform, and 

 that the absolutely idle among them are blameworthy. Clearly, then, 



