How far our Happiness depends on Others.
A student of human affairs has observed that it is very difficult to find happiness within oneself, and impossible to discover it elsewhere. Were the witticism reversed it would be equally true. “Imperfect happiness,” observes the philosopher Kant, “arises from man’s unsocial passions.” Man’s only enemy is man, but he is also his only ally. In the pursuit of happiness each must aid himself with all his might, but all his might will prove of no avail without the aid of others.
The well-being of the individual depends directly on the social organization around him. From it alone can he obtain safety, freedom, and the means of knowledge; in return, it demands respect for its rules,—that which we call Morality.
For security, safety, man is absolutely dependent on his fellows, on society. Deprived of it, a prey to well-grounded fears, he can neither develop his own powers nor enjoy the fruit of his labors. If you know the bloodhounds are on your track, the most beautiful landscape will lose its attractions. When the courtier Damocles praised Dionysius to his face as the happiest man on earth, the tyrant seated the sycophant at a luxurious repast with a sword suspended above his head by a single hair. The story is familiar to all, because its moral is a universal truth. The king stood alone on the giddy height of his power, and the dread of the inevitable fall was the vampyre that sucked the blood from all his pleasures and left them corpses before his eyes.
Men have always felt that the only security is to become members of a social organization. The savagest horde has its own, its totem, clan, or gens. But in pursuit of safety, men are apt to sacrifice freedom. To escape the fire, they plunge into the water; but neither element is their right abode. Society stands opposed to the individual. It governs by rules and averages, demands conformity, restricts liberty, dislikes personality.
Thus arises the ceaseless struggle, to and fro, over the earth, through all history, between the social and the individual theories of happiness. The constitution of the ideal civil society should realize the conditions necessary for the highest personal enjoyment. But where do we find such a constitution? Not even in theory have we reached it. On the one side are the moral tyrants, afflicted with what Mirabeau called the mania of governing, la fureur de gouverner, who would make men happy against their will by prescribing for them what they should eat and what they should drink, on what days they should work and on what days play. Over against them is the camp of the disclassed, unable to govern themselves, and, therefore, hating to be governed by any.
Both are equally impotent to the end both profess. Nothing but a distorted growth can result from a conformity to moral standards brought about by external compulsion. Only what a man does or leaves undone of his own free will develops and strengthens his nature. Freedom makes him a man, compulsion an animated machine. Good soldiers are not trained by fighting behind ramparts, but by exposure in the field to the enemy. What if some perish in the fray? The success of the day is cheaply bought by the fall of the few.
Limitations, restrictions, however, there must be, and that man alone is truly a freeman who recognizes and respects them. Liberty is not lawlessness; it is the ability to make the law our servant and not our master, an ability which we must acquire through our own efforts. The rights of men are equal, but they can enjoy them only so far as they qualify themselves so to do. All citizens of the United States have an equal right to pre-empt a portion of the public domain; but to secure the land they must make certain personal efforts. So it is with all other social advantages and conditions of happiness; men deserve them only so far as they cultivate a capacity for them; and not equality, but justice in their distribution, must be the final aim of every sane social compact.
The only use of this excellent government of ours, or of any other on the face of the earth, is—what? The preservation of your liberty and mine. Nothing else. Never forget this. Any government is worth paying a dollar to support, or lifting a finger to defend, only so far as it secures to each woman and man her or his greatest possible personal liberty. To the extent that it falls short of this or goes beyond it, it is worthless and an enemy. The limits of a government are plain enough, when we thus define them from the vantage-ground of individual freedom. It should protect from external enemies and internal dissensions, and from violence to person or property; it should enforce justice between man and man, and woman and man; it should extend its direct care to the weak, the immature, and the incapable; and it should supply to all the means of self-culture, of education, in its widest sense. Here its action should end. All else should be left to the individual.
There is another theory of government than this. It would treat all men as if they never come of age, or remain forever feeble-minded. It would supply them with work, take care of their pay, dictate their amusements, prohibit doubtful indulgences, and deliver from temptations by removing them. Such a government would make grown-up children, not men. It is the ideal of all priests, of most women, and of dreamers. It has at times been partially realized, and always with disastrous results to the strength of the individual character. I have seen more drunken men in one week in the State of Maine, where the sale of intoxicants is prohibited, than during three months in Italy, where their sale is unrestricted.
The advocates of all such attacks on personal liberty—be they priests or social dreamers—are not less opposed to free thought than to free action. The defense of their opinions, not the discovery of truth, is to them the purpose of research. The logical ultimatum of the one is the stake, of the other the dynamite bomb. Both would restrict the untrammeled and unbiased pursuit of knowledge.
Knowledge, however, is the twin brother of liberty and the provider for the treasury of happiness. Much more than a fine phrase is the poet’s line, that “He is a freeman, whom the truth makes free.” Not what he is, or what he has, but what he knows, gives the individual real power, and, through power, freedom and the ability to use it for the gratification of his desires through the unrestricted employment of his faculties.
The materials of knowledge are represented by the degree of civilization possessed by a nation. Their distribution should be through education—unbiased, secular, universal—co-extensive with the demand of the governed, equal to both sexes. This is within the plain province of government. Children cannot educate themselves, and ignorant parents see no need of learning. Yet the period of childhood is the golden age for instruction. It is the epoch of permanent impressions, dear and indelible, like the initials of a loved one cut on the bark of a young beech, remaining legible even when the solid heart of the aged tree is decayed.
Inertia denies the possibility of improvement. Obscurantism dislikes it. Let them pass on. Whatever a man is, there is the power for better within him; we know not how much better. Faculties trained turn from bad to good. What is a weed in the fields becomes a flower in the garden. The State cannot afford to leave education to the people. Grass grows of itself, but grain needs tillage.
How strongly this is shown in the lamentable education of women in all civilized countries! Sedulously confined to empty accomplishments and conventional moralities, they are everywhere found to be the chief supporters of decaying dogmas, serfs to social opinion, frittering away their lives in vanities which men have left centuries behind them. Both sexes are to blame for this. Men love to rule, and they fear the increased knowledge which freedom would bring to women; and women are jealous of the eminence which learning gives a sister and seek to belittle its value.
What if I refer again and again to this subject? I have too often witnessed the exceeding unhappiness of women in all grades of society not to have it frequently in my thoughts. They are more unhappy than men, as I have said before, and I believe it is mainly because they are worse educated. I know the instruction in the best schools for girls in the United States, and to what is it directed? To two ends, to be “good,” and to shine in society. What they should be taught is to understand the hygiene of their own bodies, to take care of their own money, to govern their decisions by justice and reason and not by impulse, to occupy their thoughts with facts and not with fiction, and, more than all, to be independent in thought and deed, and not to allow either society or sentimentality to cast the final vote in the direction of their actions.
Such doctrine may sound heretical; so I hasten to bring to its support a reputable endorser in the person of a clergyman of the Church of England, that writer who so charmingly combines the best of humor with the best of sense, the Rev. Sydney Smith. I take it from his essay on “Female Education,” an essay that ought to be read and pondered by every woman in the land, the whole burden and spirit of which is expressed in the following most pregnant sentence,—“The happiness of woman will be increased in proportion as education gives to her the habit and the means of drawing her resources from herself.”
How much better this than the following insufferable twaddle of Thomas de Quincey: “It is more in harmony with the retiring graces of their sexual character that they should practice a general rule of submission to the traditional belief of their own separate Church, even when that belief has long been notoriously challenged as erroneous”? He is in earnest, too; and the late Poet Laureate in “In Memoriam” said nearly the same. Blind leaders of the blind! who think that falsehood and ignorance are going to point the way to light and truth.
The fact is, the moral side of woman has been educated, and thus educated, out of all proportion to her other faculties. What is not “very stuff of the conscience” makes little or no impression on her. The Good, the Fit, the Conventional are for her the True; which is a grievous error, and retards her real progress.
Education is not only the foundation for happiness; it should and it can be made a pleasure in itself. This will sound strange to those who are principally familiar with such institutions of education as those of the Mr. Squeers or Dr. Blimber type. But the schoolmaster has himself been to school, and after flogging children for several thousand years, and thereby developing a healthy hatred of books which it is a wonder did not hurl the race back into barbarism, he has learned from Froebel and Pestalozzi and others that it is actually possible for a sane mind to study with pleasure if the chance is offered. Indeed, a learned writer who has many admirers in this country, Mr. Herbert Spencer, is able to say,—“The usual test of political legislation—its tendency to promote happiness—is beginning to be the test of legislation for the school and the nursery;” and elsewhere,—“As a final test by which to judge any plan of culture should come the question,—Does it create a pleasurable sensation in the pupil?”
This is good counsel; but, like many good things, it is also old. Two thousand years ago or so Plato wrote,—“In education, direct boys to what amuses their minds.”
Security, liberty, and the means of knowledge,—these, therefore, are the conditions of happiness which every government should, and all in some measure do, offer the individual. For them, he is entirely dependent on others. In whatever delusion to the contrary his ignorance or his arrogance may plunge him, he can obtain these inestimable benefits in no other way than through the social organization, and he cannot therefore escape his liability for them. If he denies it or refuses it, the consequences will be as inevitable as they will be disastrous. He who wisely consults the conditions which determine his own happiness will not seek in isolation or self-sufficiency these elements, which can alone be obtained through the co-operation of his fellow-man.
Social progress is advanced far more by strengthening the weak than by chastising the wicked.
The sense of safety implies not merely absence of fear, but also freedom of action.
Justice should be the motto of the State; prudence that of the individual.
Self-recognition is a part of happiness; but the recognition by others of what we pride ourselves upon, is another and a large part of it.
Man is a social being; but the true aim of his social activity is to learn how to be solitary.
He who thinks it necessary to seek solitude for self-improvement often finds there is still one too many persons present.
The purpose of law is liberty; of obedience, independence; of submission, emancipation.
The well-being of the individual, not of the class, should be the aim of government. It should not be “by the people for the people,” but by the people for the person.
The true moral education is that which makes every intellectual question a matter of conscience, and every matter of conscience an intellectual question.
An explanation which demonstrates the impossibility of knowing is about as satisfactory as one which imparts the knowledge desired. But there are some who call everything incomprehensible which they do not comprehend.
Many children and nearly all girls are educated by equivocations and taught truths by means of falsehoods. What have the teachers to expect when their pupils discover this fact?
There are a good many branches of education about which it is sufficient for most to know that they exist.
That moral strength is alone real which has been acquired by repeated exposure to temptation and repeated successful resistance.
We never fully acknowledge to ourselves how very human we are. We each secretly think that there is something in us not shared by any other man or woman.
Women love too deeply to be able to judge justly.