At first the baby lies fiat on his back, eyes staring up at the
ceiling.
By and by he gets tired of lying on his back. DISCONTENT with
his condition makes him wriggle and wriggle. At last he succeeds
in turning over.
If he were contented then, there would be no men on earth--only
huge babies. But DISCONTENT again seizes him, and through
discontent he learns to crawl.
Crawling--travelling on hands and knees--satisfied lower forms of
animal life. It used to satisfy us, in the old days of early
evolutionary stages.
But the human infant--thanks to inborn cravings--is DISCONTENTED
with crawling. With much trouble and risk and many feeble
totterings, he learns to walk erect. He gets up into a position
that takes his eyes off the ground. He is able to look at the
sun and stars and takes the position of a man. DISCONTENT is his
mainspring at every stage. ----
What discontent does in the limited life of a child, it does on a
much larger scale in the life of a man--and on a scale still
larger in the life of a race.
You can always tell when a man has reached the limit of his
possible development. He ceases to be discontented--or at least
to show discontent actively.
Contentment, apathy, are signs of decadence and of a career ended
in either a man or a nation.
If a baby lies still, no longer wiggling or trying to swallow his
toe, you may be sure that he is seriously ill. The nation that
no longer wiggles is in a condition as serious as that of the
motionless infant. ----
The man or newspaper which imparts dissatisfaction--wise
discontent to a nation or to individuals, gives them the motive
power that brings improvement.
Ruskin as a young man declared that his one hope in life was to
arouse "some dissatisfaction."
The constant aim of men in talking to each other, in writing for
newspapers, even in writing novels, should be to arouse
discontent.
In this column, as our readers will have noticed, the constant
aim is to make the great crowd dissatisfied.
Only through discontent can changes come and are there not causes
enough for discontent and need enough for changes?
A majority of the people half educated, and tens of thousands
half fed.
Children run over daily because they have no playground but the
gutter.
Men of noble aspirations kept down by hard work and poverty.
Children left locked up alone all day while their mothers work
for a pittance.
Men, uncertain of their future and of their children's future,
engage in a constant struggle for wealth that is not needed--a
struggle that develops in the end a passion as useless as it is
degrading.
Unless you believe that the world is perfect because YOU happen
to have enough to eat and to wear, you should be discontented.
You should remember that the world's achievements and great
changes have all come from discontent, and you should be, in as
many ways as possible, a breeder of discontent among the human
beings around you.