habits of contemporary Americans are very curious--the motor-car habit
so conspicuous just now, their travel habit, much cultivated by farmers
in winter and by city people in summer. They are remarkable habits;
instructive, no doubt; expensive, but somehow at present there is money
for them. Cordelia says she has traveled, and need not go on the road
again for some time. I haven’t, but I am content to wait until it is
convenient. This town of New York is trying to live in in some ways,
but it can be said for it that here a great many things are brought to
the door. There are pictures here, and very pleasing objects in the
shop windows, and a variety of people, and spoken languages enough
to satisfy the most ambitious, and a mighty interesting assortment
of architecture, and more making while you wait. Some Americans in
time past have been to Europe to good purpose--as witness our newer
architecture--and some keep going there to pretty good purpose every
year. That makes it the easier to stay at home and say _Cœlum non
animum_ to oneself, and grub along. Cordelia and I bestow some of our
spare attention on the growth of characters. They don’t seem to grow
so very much on the road. Intelligence and powers of comparison may
get a boost in the school of itineracy, but character not so probably.
Corlear Van Terminal has been to Europe once or twice every year since
I can remember, and gads constantly when at home, and all but sleeps in
a motor-car, and yet, so far as I can see, he’s always just the same as
he was the last time. I can’t see that he’s got ahead one lap. Chapman
says the soul of man requires to be fed on the Bible and the Greek
poets. One can do that at home, and one can work at home, and have
faith and endure and plug along--all quite useful to character, and as
developing in some ways as travel and Europe can be in others.
Cordelia and I have been reading about the Wesleys and the characters
they got and how they got them. There were eighteen children or
thereabouts, and a dozen or so grew up. Fine people, too; admirable
stock and developed by discipline, privation, and pious training, all
tempered by affection, humor, and lots of quality in the trainers. It
makes you feel that character is a very expensive product, and hardly
to be had at the ten-cent store where we and our contemporaries are
prone to go for it.
The Wesleys were poor; very much poorer than is thought at all suitable
in these times, even for the reverend clergy or for the teachers
of our youth. The father was a clergyman; the mother was a lady of
excellent abilities and education, and they lived in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Food was plain and hard to get in that
family, and raiment was only slightly related to embellishment, and
sickness was frequent and poverty perpetual; but with what audacity
those Wesleys took hold on life! It makes our timid overtures look
like mill-pond voyaging. Really it is wholesome to sit by the window,
within ear-shot of the rattle of the street-cars and the chug-chug of
the automobiles, and read of the past straits of the straitened and the
courage of the bold, and observe on what shoulders of men and women,
and through what bogs of privation, civilization has come along.
Not that the Wesleys had a preference for privation. The Reverend
Samuel scrambled actively to maintain his family, but the increasing
family outran his best diligence. We have changed all that. Families
are less apt to outrun the paternal diligence in these days. So far as
numbers go, they trudge along respectfully behind the census man and
look over his shoulder at the figures. But that change is all in the
day’s work, and springs out of changed conditions. People in our time
are not curious enough about the processes of nature to raise very
large families in order that they may watch near at hand the workings
of the rule about the survival of the fittest. What they can observe
of the application of that rule in written biography and among the
neighbors seems to suffice, and in their own personal speculation they
seem to care for no more progeny than they think they can contrive
survival for, whether they are fittest or not. So butts in man, and
tries to adjust the processes of nature to match his judgment and his
taste in expenditure.
When it gets hot Cordelia will be going off to her father’s country
palace in Connecticut, varying that experience in due time by a sojourn
in my father’s country palace in New Jersey, and I shall spend with
her so much of the time as my urban duties permit. That will save
us from dependence on any fresh-air funds this year. Parents are a
considerable convenience, especially nowadays, when so many of them
have learned their place, and especially in this town of New York,
where it costs all you can earn to provide a winter habitation, and
where the young wives of earnest workers like me are apt to be a good
deal out of a job in summer. Much more systematic provision is made
to carry my kind of man through the summer than for Cordelia’s kind
of woman--the clubs, for example. For man and wife at our stage of
life parents, duly qualified and equipped, are a very suitable and
timely provision. Indeed, I feel sometimes that the worthlessness and
miscellaneous degeneracy of parents in these times is exaggerated. I
don’t say this by way of casting an anchor to the windward, nor out
of mere magnanimity, but because I honestly think so. People say that
parental authority is all gone. Some think it good riddance; others
lament. Since democracy came to be the fashion everybody wants his own
way more than formerly, and gets it rather more, children included. But
parental direction is still a factor in life, and parental influence
is enormous, and influence gets to the springs of action and character
even more effectually than dogmatic authority. It is much harder
for a fool father to blight a Mirabeau nowadays, and those Wesley
parents that I spoke of might in our time have meddled less with their
daughters’ marriages, thereby, possibly, avoiding some disasters; for
the Wesley girls chose ill, but their parents, in choosing for them,
chose still worse. Parents doubtless realize the limitations of their
calling better than they did, and a good deal more is done in these
days than formerly to piece out their deficiencies and help them with
their duties. Doctors give them better advice than the Wesley parents
got; schools in this country--in spite of the constant stream of
criticism and deprecation which schools endure--average surely a great
deal better than schools did fifty years ago. The raising and training
of the young, being as important a matter as there is in sight, has had
protracted attention from some of the best minds, and has had money
showered on it in a huge profusion. All that has been more or less
helpful to parents, but it does not warrant the idea, so popular among
current commentators, that parents have come to be supernumeraries on
the public stage. That is a ridiculous notion, the absurdity of which
would be demonstrated in about half a day if parents universally should
quit work and take a half-holiday.
We ought to save a little money this summer living on our fathers. It
is a grand way to save. I don’t know of a better. It makes frugality
possible without self-denial--at least without privation. They say
there is excellent sport to be got out of self-denial, and I read that
saving money and the repression of the impulse to spend it make like
everything for the development of character. I dare say that is so.
It is all a part of self-control, and of government by intelligence
instead of by impulse. And self-control, including timely and suitable
repression of expenditure, means freedom, and power to give, and
the power to do, and the power to jump in and seize an opportunity.
Possibly I can acquire the accomplishment of not buying some things
that I want, even though I have the money to pay for them. That will be
a wonderful acquisition to me, though I have got so far as to be mighty
particular about what I buy on credit. One has got to get as far as
that if he is going to get married on such an income as ours.
That was a great stroke--getting married. I don’t see how I had the
nerve to do it. Probably I hadn’t. I dare say we got married on
Cordelia’s nerve, for when you come down to the facts it was she who
took most of the chances, and really made the choice. To choose and to
decide things seem in our day to be very largely women’s work. I am
more and more impressed with that as I go more and more to Cordelia
to get her views. I get them on pretty much everything except points
of law. I am the specialist on that and on the earning of money, but
she is the specialist on the arrangement of life. I guess she is an
obedient wife, but in practice I seem to make suggestions and she to
make decisions. She makes them with great consideration and indulgence
for me, and with a degree of judgment that saves me much mental effort.
The opportunities of mental effort that I enjoy below Canal Street,
between ten o’clock and six, suffice to keep my mind exercised, and
I am no glutton about making unnecessary mental efforts after I get
uptown. Perhaps that simplifies life for Cordelia. I wonder what women
do whose husbands don’t have to work!
III
COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT
We have been out to Orange County to spend a week-end with the
Peytons. They are about our age, but differ from us in condition in
that they have adequate means of support. Archie Peyton got them by
inheritance, and they are very ample and enable Archie and Eleanor to
have all the desirable things and do everything they want to. They try
conscientiously to live up to their opportunities, making pretty hard
work of it, but that’s natural, for it _is_ hard work. They went abroad
in the summer, and now they are providing country lodging and food and
sport for their available friends. This sport is golf and tennis and
road exercises, relieved by dabs of riding after hounds, for the Orange
County Hunt meets out in their country. Eleanor says it’s nice, except
that they have to invite too many people who have had too much to eat
and are trying to get thin, whereas it would be more satisfactory to
be inviting people who have had too little to eat and were trying to
get fat.
That’s not why they asked us, for we had been living on our parents all
summer and were quite plump. They have got motor-cars, horses, butlers,
valets, chrysanthemums, greenhouses, and all the apparatus of pride.
For us on sixty dollars a week it is rather expensive even to nibble
at it. We can’t do it often, but we saved money living on our parents,
and the fall is a grand season, and to fill one’s lungs with the air
of it and one’s vision with autumn colors is worth some fiscal strain,
and it always does me good, too, spiritually even more than physically,
to get over a little easy country on a horse. Besides, Archie is my
client, and that’s important. I have discovered that one of the great
secrets of prosperity and advancement in this world, especially in the
profession that I affect, is to have one’s coevals grow up and prosper
and have business, especially law business, that somebody must be paid
to do. When people have these opportunities of lawful gain to bestow
they seem to like to bestow them on habitual friends, provided that
they have any and can persuade themselves that they are competent. A
great deal of opportunity goes by association--is bound to.
To be honest, I did not make all these discoveries solely on my own
hook. Though they are simple enough. Major Brace expounded some of them
to me after dinner. He gave me great encouragement in the effort to
exist. Promotion, he said, cometh neither from the East nor the West,
but from the cemetery, so it was almost sure to come to any one that
could hold out; and in the long run a man who was sober, competent and
diligent, and intelligent about his associations couldn’t very well
miss it. There were so many advantageous jobs to distribute and each
generation had them in turn, as the world and what is in it came to be
its property. Moreover, as things go now and with us, each generation
has a lot more things and opportunities and good employments than the
generation that preceded it, not only absolutely, but _per capita_,
because the increase of wealth and business is outrunning the increase
of population. It wasn’t a scramble, the Major insisted, for a share in
a limited quantity of goods, but for an unlimited quantity, and the
harder the scramble the more there was to distribute.
All that came out of a discussion whether we should restrict our wants
or try to satisfy them. Try to satisfy them, the Major said. Effort
in that direction enriches and develops civilization. It tends to
increase the supply of commodities. It is not the satisfied people,
nor the people who are content to go without, that make civilization
go forward, but the unsatisfied ones, who want a lot of things they
have not got, and get out and go after them and build railroads and
factories and improve agriculture and invent machinery and multiply
automobiles and take an interest in aeroplanes and try to accumulate
money and keep it employed.
“Are you doing all those things, Major?” said I.
“Me? Oh no! I belong to the police. My job is to help to keep order
and protect property. I never had one of the large-sized appetites
for commodities--just food, clothes, shelter, money in the bank, and
something to give away, and protection against rainy days, and enough
to keep my wife and children off the Charity Organization when I get
run over by a motor-car--that’s all I want. You see, I’m a lazy man and
like to read the newspaper and invite my soul, and everything I can’t
get by working five or six hours a day I go without. Don’t take me for
a pattern. I haven’t got the progress of civilization really at heart.”
“The express-drivers help it on, I suppose, Major, when they strike for
more pay?” They were striking at that time.
“No doubt. All that should help distribution, provided the funds they
are all striking to share exist in sufficient quantity. Distribution
is next in importance to production. You’ve got to have something to
distribute, and strikes are not immediately helpful to production, as
you may have noticed, but the organization of labor ought to be helpful
to distribution. Only nowadays when an important strike is won the
cost of it is immediately shifted onto the general public by a gentle
elevation of prices.”
The Major is a lawyer and practises considerably as a trustee, and is
doubtless more concerned with the philosophy of business than if his
energies were enlisted in selling goods and wresting a profit out of
it. “Mankind can be eased considerably in this earthly competition,”
he went on, “by great increases of production, great extensions of
agriculture and manufacturing and transportation, and great economies
in all of them, provided that distribution fairly keeps pace with
production.” It comes nearer to doing so, he thought, than all the
exhorters and socialist people admit, because products have to find a
market; but when it comes to that, this is a fairly roomy world, with
many mouths and backs in it, and transportation is cheap and markets
are world-wide, and goods as yet don’t necessarily pile up on any of us
because there are a lot of them produced.
And so the Major argued in effect that one way to help bring on
the millennium was to increase the production and distribution of
commodities. I suppose that _is_ one way. There must be some connection
between the millennium and civilization. The millennium isn’t going to
swoop down on a world that has no meat in the house and where half the
people live in trees. It is true that it was not a lack of commodities
that drove Eve to eat the apple and brought on working for a living,
and most of us realize that man cannot live by bread alone, and that
with binsful of commodities on every corner free for the taking the
world would not be saved nor the folks in it satisfied and happy. What
an interesting simplification of wants would happen in that case, and
how quickly people would come to ascertain what they really needed and
refuse to be loaded up with anything else! Still, there is a connection
between human progress and wants and the commodities that appease them.
A missionary’s daughter told me once about her father’s experience
with the South-African blacks. Now and then he would make a convert,
and always, if it was a thorough job, the convert would begin to reach
out after civilization--some clothes, a bigger dwelling--presently,
I dare say, a top-hat. It wasn’t all mere acquisitiveness, either,
for some of the incidents of conversion were inconvenient, especially
the troublesome domestic readjustment called for by the theory of the
sufficiency of one wife. Of course, the millennium may swoop down and
find us running about in skins or less, and living on roots, but I bet
it won’t. It is much more likely to be welcomed by flocks of aeroplanes
to an enormously productive earth, worked for all it is worth by
people intelligent enough to have abolished poverty and solved the
problem of distribution.
What does man want here below, anyway? Room and bath, food, clothes, a
newspaper, and a job and fair opportunities to better himself. He has
got the newspaper already. In this country, at least, there are enough
newspapers to go around, and in the cities any one who declines to buy
one can supply himself out of the first ash barrel. There is nothing
so cheap as newspapers, and that is a consequence of the pressure of
commodities on the market. The advertiser pays all but a cent’s worth
of the cost of the newspaper, and would gladly pay that, no doubt, but
for the fear of arousing the reader’s suspicions. How much this has to
do with the fact that I hear of likely young men who come out of the
nurseries of learning and look wistfully at the newspapers and fail to
see attractive jobs on them and go away and do something else, I don’t
know. It may be that likely young men never did troop in large swarms
into newspapering. Banking usually looks better to them, because men
get rich at it, and law because a knowledge of it is no hindrance in
any calling.
The supply of rooms and baths is not so nearly equal to human needs
as the supply of newspapers, but it is gaining on the population. Out
there at the Peytons’ house, for example, it has caught up. In all the
newer country houses hereabouts the great architectural feature is
room and bath. In a Long Island house just completed that I inspected
last spring before the family moved in there were between twenty and
twenty-five bathrooms. There were three in the family, with a liability
to guests if the owner’s wife ever succeeded in getting rested. I
thought this marked a considerable forward stride in civilization.
Church unity still hangs back a bit, but we are getting pretty strong
on plumbing, and the millennium may find us with a bath apiece.
The Peytons hadn’t so many bathrooms, because their house was not so
large as the Long Island house, and they had to save part of it for
clothed appearances; but they had many, and Cordelia and I admired
them very much. Living in a six-hundred-dollar New York flat makes
marvelously for the appreciation of space, light, air, and running
water. Of course the Peytons’ country house had all these blessings,
and, besides, was delightfully fresh and clean and embellished with
very pleasing adornments. “No doubt, Cordelia,” said I, “you might
have had a set of things like this if you had shown a little timely
judgment.” “Possibly;” said Cordelia; “this is a nice set, too. How
many bathrooms shall _we_ need, Peregrine?”
“One--two--four--six; six will do us, I think, with a little management
and a few extra sets of bath-robes and slippers. We don’t want to keep
a plumber. To have more than a dozen makes a home too much like a
hotel.”
But there are a number of things that we shall want before we have
even one house with even six bathrooms in it. I do not greatly
covet a superfluity of bathrooms, though enough of them is one of
the great luxuries of our time. Hot water is one of the leading
valuables of life--one of the things that help to reconcile humanity
to civilization and to offset its interference with such privileges
as living out-of-doors and not having newspapers. That has long been
appreciated. I believe the Greeks liked hot water and made provision to
have it. Certainly the Romans liked it and went in strong for baths.
The English have liked it and had it in fair quantity, along with daily
deluges of cold water. We Americans delight in it and have more of it
already, I suppose, than any people ever had before, and our supply
is constantly increasing and constantly spreading from the cities to
the country. It is cheap, as things go, and there is fair prospect
that there will eventually be enough to go around. To have a universal
supply of hot water and newspapers and a long start toward a universal
supply of what we call education is doing not so ill as things go. I
can wait for the six bathrooms, or even three. We have one now. One is
a great blessing. I suppose it is our egotism that makes us more or
less indifferent to what is not ours and cannot be for the present.
What most of us want is the next thing--the thing almost within our
reach. We don’t think about the things that are altogether beyond the
scope of our fortunes. We do not covet them, nor are we jealous of our
neighbors who have them, unless we conclude that we have too little
because they have too much. If the competition seems to us fair, we
rather like to see prizes go to those who can win them, for a life with
prizes in it for winners, even material prizes, looks richer and more
attractive to most of us than a life planned on the principle of a
division of the gate money among all who come in.
Do you notice how strong the propensity is among all the fairly
comfortable people to consider their own condition and their own
standards as normal and truly desirable, and those of other folks,
whether they have more or less, as a little off? I think that
propensity is a wonderful provision for human happiness. We value, as
a rule, what seems the best thing obtainable for ourselves. Whether it
is abundance or a stimulating degree of privation, we incline to think
it is a good thing for us and a better thing than other people have who
have something different.
“Cordelia,” said I, while we were talking about the bathroom, “you
might have got a better set of things with some other man, but he
would not have the experience or the discipline that I shall have by
the time I have acquired the set of things that you ought eventually
to get with _me_.” There you are! We think we’re better off than the
Peytons because we haven’t got so much as they have, and better off
than the Goves because we’ve got more (mostly prospective) than they
have. _We_ are the standard. We laugh at ourselves, but surely it’s a
fine thing to have so strong a bent toward toleration of things as they
are, and expectation of being pleased with them as they’re going to be.
I suppose it is just a different form of this same self-satisfaction
that makes the teetotalers want to vote away everybody’s grog, and
the college authorities insist that all the boys shall want to be
high scholars like themselves, and the appeased women deprecate the
agitations of the unappeased for woman’s suffrage.