THE PRICE WE PAY.
READING Miss Cobbe's clever paper in this month's Con- temporary on " The Fear that Kills," we were struck, as we have often been struck before, with the new form of Utopianism which is manifesting itself among the cultivated and benevolent. They are all wanting to secure improvements in the world without paying their price, whereas it has been arranged ander a fiat stronger than theirs that everything, good and evil, the new virtues as well as the old vices, shall be paid for. Miss Cobbe, for example, who often exhibits in her writings a masculine sense, is quite irritated because, with the modern care for sanitation, there has come in a modern care about sanitation which she thinks not a little cowardly :— "More temperate diet, more airy bedrooms, better drained houses and more effectual ablations, are real improvements on the habits of our ancestors. But the excess to which hygienic precautions are carried, the proportion whioh such cares now occupy amid the serious interests of life, is becoming absurd, and conducting us rapidly to a state of things wherein, if we are not killed' by Fear, we are para- lysed by it for all natural enjoyment. The old healthful, buoyant spirit seems already fled from the majority of English homes. Aged people (from this and, no doubt, other concurrent causes) seldom exhibit now that gentle gaiety which so often brightened with hues of sunset the long calm evening of a well-spent life, after the 'six days' work' was done. The middle-aged are one and all hag-ridden by anxiety ; and as to the young, if we may trust the reports which reach na from the great schools, a very marked change has come over them, curiously indicative of the sensitiveness of young souls to the chill breath of the Zeitgeist. The lade have grown colder and harder, and are interested in pecuniary profits rather than in nobler professional ambitions. Nay, we have been told (it is a large demand upon credulity !) that English schoolboys have almost ceased to be reckless about heat or cold, about eating indigestible things, about climbing trees and precipices, about going on deep water in unsea- worthy boats ; in short, shout all those pursuits which excited the perennial alarms of their fond mothers. Many boys are to be found, it is stated (I write always under reservation), who may be described as Molly-coddles, so cautious are they about their health and their limbs. Urchins in round jackets speak of the danger of checking perspiration after cricket, and decline to partake of unripe apples and pastry on the never-before-heard-of ground of dyspepsia. Invited in the holidays to the ecstatic ' lark' of a long excursion on horseback, they have declined with reference to the playfulness of their pony's heels ; and have been seen to shrink from a puppy's caressing tongue, murmuring the ominous word, ' Rabies.' In short, our girls, who axe jest acquiring physical courage as a new virtue, are sometimes braver than their brothers, who think it 'good form' to profess disinclination to risk their valuable persons."
In substance, of course, that statement is an exaggeration. The boys are just as brave as ever they were, and as reckless as ever they were, and nobody need be afraid that his sons will not kill themselves, if they can, by a neglect of the commonest precau- tions for personal safety. Miss Cobbe should read the sporting journals for three months under the headings "Football," ommissioners, founded upon an accumulation of varied Cycling," and Boating," and she would find her apprehen- sions effectually dispelled. In form, however, the statement is true. There is a new and most marked feeling in society, and especially rich society, about health, as being, like wealth, a grand essential of pleasant life, and the feeling has filtered downwards to the children, who, though they do not shirk danger more than they did, even when it comes in the shape of wet feet or bad smells, are immensely much more conscious that danger exists, and therefore, when they can, are more willing to avoid it. We question if that is an evil, not seeing how manli- ness is developed by a willingness to eat unripe apples ; but supposing it is, how is it to be avoided ? Miss Cobbe would allow in the fullest degree, being altogether on that Bide of the house, that good hygiene is a good thing, that nobody gains, and women least of all, by the prevalence of typhoid, and that though it may not be expedient to keep so many weaklings alive as we do, sound health is a moral as well as a physical benefit to humanity. She would also admit that though Municipalities and doctors can do something, health can only be protected by a diffusion of knowledge about the laws of health ; that although a Government can order good drains, only individuals can secure themselves against the influence of malaria. Such knowledge can only be propagated by discussion, by teaching, and by a mental attention which must of necessity produce in some men caution, in 80/120 anxiety, and in some a tendency to be molly- coddles. That is the price, the inevitable price, we pay for success in a very valuable department of modern effort. To avoid paying it is quite hopeless, as hopeless as to imagine that we can in all constitutions produce increased thoughtfulness without increased melancholy ; and to complain about it seems to us a waste of pity. If we diminish the causes of death, we shall save weaklings, and must just maintain them ; if we abandon the old, and, as Miss Cobbe will probably agree, the criminal carelessness we formerly manifested of the laws of Nature, we shall produce attention to those laws, and must put up in some few people with a little over-attention. The rich are coddling themselves, often to a rather absurd degree ; but that is only the natural result of intelligence as to the consequences recklessness will yield. If a man, or a boy for that matter, is taught to understand what manner of disease small-pox really is, and what vaccination will do for him, he inevitably, if he does not live in Leicester or Keighley, considers whether he is vaccinated or not, and if he is not, becomes "anxious, it may be, if he is of that tempera- ment, unreasonably anxious. So much the better, if vaccination ought to be universal, even though a little healthy indifference to the chances of disease disappears in the process of enlighten- ment. Anxiety is the price of safety, and we are required to pay some price of the same kind in every direction. Children, as Miss Cobbe will heartily acknowledge, are indefinitely happier than they were in the last generation, relieved of all manner of sufferings and tyrannies ; and the price we pay is that they are more presuming, less " hardy," less inclined to bear the discip- line which made them men and women early. The price is worth paying, though it is a heavy one in money, in parental authority, and in the reverence due to the old; but its payment is as inevitable as the expenditure of energy in effort. Take thrift. We are all—at least, those among us who have the didactic tendency—preaching thrift. Gradually we are succeeding, and, so far as we can judge from the great mass of evi- dence accumulating, we are extinguishing in about one Englishman in three the readiness to waste his resources, and developing in one Englishman in four a positive dis- position towards accumulation. That is very good, at least, if plenty is good,—which we suppose is the case, as a Bishop recently said so in a most eloquent sermon, though we could, if we tried, show cause on the opposite aide—but in securing that good we destroy finally the old English freedom from care, we reduce the general cheerfulness, and we diminish indefinitely the old pecuniary courage. Nobody boasts now, except in an inn-parlour, that he dare spend his last penny ; or at least, if he does, some good woman or other will tell him, quite truly, that he is an unthinking fool. We have so far succeeded in our preachments, that recklessness about money has come to be con- sidered a vice; but we have to pay the price in a certain small- ness of nature and low greed which we can see creeping among the population. There is no help for that, the good quality must have its " lining " as the French say; and to resist or murmur is bat to lick against a force stronger than ourselves, and one which, if not divine, is at least natural. We may wish as much as we like for carefulness without care, but we shall no more get it than we shall get long-sightedness without liability to flatness of the cornea. No anxiety, no thrift —that is the law we have to obey, and be as happy under it as we can. If Mr. Blackley prevails, as he will one day, the aged poor of England will have happier lives ; but the young and the middle-aged will be more anxious and more afraid of being out of work.
We want fortitude to bear the attendant consequences of our successes. The Spectator rages every now and then at some of the consequences which follow from the exaggeration of modern philanthropy. Men have grown so weak from very sympathy, that they forget the lot of men was intended to be hard, that there is no evidence that the " ultimate purpose " is man's physical comfort, and that it is nonsensical to believe that a race of beings who live under the certainty of capital punishment, and who must waste two-thirds of their force in painful labour only to keep alive, can enjoy lives of unbroken serenity. We are always bringing forward, in very irritation with the philanthro- pists, that uupleasing side of the matter, yet we probably are three-quarters wrong. The tendency towards philanthropy is indefinitely better than the tendency towards callousness, and in the screamy rubbish which sickens us every evening, and often makes social debates in Parliament read like the chatter of old women in a laundry, we have but to pay the necessary price for what is in essence good. It is impossible to develop in all sympathy for all, which is the root of modern philanthropy, with- out developing it in the fools as well as the wise, and for very nu. worthy objects ; and in complaining we do but reveal a weak- ness of another sort, want of fortitude to accept humbly the conditions made by unerring wisdom—for if there be a governing mind, it must be beyond error, and if there be not, cause and effect cannot be proved to err—for the administration of the universe. The virtue which entails no cost is non-existent, and that cost will sometimes be as offensive to the reason- able as it often is to the good. Cruelty is dying among us, God be thanked ! for that is perhaps the one clear moral gain this age is achieving ; but as it dies, a softness is begotten which renders it most difficult to repress crime adequately, and nearly impossible to deal with those purely social crimes which, like treason or the promotion of anarchy, may destroy the hopes of the human race. We must pay the price, and be content when, because Englishmen have developed an international conscience, their national policy has become not only undecided or weak, but, as in Egypt, positively oppressive to the feeble. We do not mean, of course, that we must be con- tent when we see an evil result ; but that when resistance fails, we must bow, and not hate the new virtue one result of which has been a mischief. The benefit of the virtue will, if God may be trusted, in the end outweigh the price, which neverthe- less it is so painful to pay. The horror of killing without a reason must be good, even though it develop an unreasoning horror of killing when true reason would command us to slay and spare not. Tolerance is a good quality, and a great quality, even though there comes with it for a time a hesitation in being intolerant to the intolerable which threatens the whole world in every department of life with a momentary immunity from utter evil. Miss Cobbe is perfectly justified in protesting against mollycoddles, though against them ridicule is a more efficient instrument than protest ; but having protested, she most just bear with the fact that when men discuss sanitation, and provide for sanitation, and make sacrifices for sanitation, some boys will think sanitation more important than careless freedom from fear. We pay for good drains in anxiety, just as we pay in some similar way for every new good thing. "A kind man be be, our parson ; but, Lord ! how he do spoil the poor !"
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