Place.
The trite maxim, *A place for everything, and everything in its place*, so
commends itself to the sense of fitness, as hardly to need exposition or
enforcement; yet while no maxim is more generally admitted, scarce any is
so frequently violated in practice. In duty, the elements of time and
place are intimately blended. Disorder in place generates derangement in
time. The object which is out of place can be found only by the waste of
time; and the most faithful industry loses a large part of its value when
its materials are wanting where they ought to be, and must be sought where
they ought not to be.
Apart from considerations of utility, order is an æsthetic duty. It is
needed to satisfy the sense of beauty. Its violation offends the eye,
insults the taste. The æsthetic nature craves and claims culture. It has
abundant provision made for it in external nature; but so large a part of
life must be passed within doors, at least in a climate like ours, that it
is starved and dwarfed, if there be not in interior arrangements some
faint semblance of the symmetry and harmony of the universe. To effect
this needs neither abundance nor costliness of material. A French man or
woman will charm the eye at a cost which in England would be represented
by bare and squalid poverty. A Parisian shop-window will make with a few
francs’ worth of goods an exhibition of artistical beauty which might
challenge the most fastidious criticism. These effects are produced solely
by prime reference to fitness of place,—to orderly arrangement,—to a
symmetry which all can understand, and which any one might copy. Our very
capacity of receiving gratification from this source is the measure of our
duty in this regard. If with the simplest materials we can give pleasure
to the soul through the eye by merely assigning its fit place to every
object, order is among the plainest dictates of beneficence.
*Order is essential to domestic comfort and well-being*, and thus to all
the virtues which have their earliest and surest nurture in domestic life.
There are homes at once affluent and joyless, groaning with needless waste
and barren of needed comfort, in which the idea of repose seems as
irrelevant as Solomon’s figure of lying down on the top of a mast, and all
from a pervading spirit of disorder. In such dwellings there is no love of
home. The common house is a mere lodging and feeding place. Society is
sought elsewhere, pleasure elsewhere; and for the young and easily
impressible there is the strongest inducement to those modes of
dissipation in which vice conceals its grossness behind fair exteriors and
under attractive forms. On the other hand, the well-ordered house affords
to its inmates the repose, comfort, and enjoyment which they crave and
need, and for those whose characters are in the process of formation may
neutralize allurements to evil which might else be irresistible.