Importunity

“ One association of special import remains, the most spontaneous, the deepest rooted, so old that all others derive from it, so essential that in any attack upon it we see even the substance of the social body decaying and diminishing. ”

“ No truth is more certain than this, that the dawn of the imagination, and of the scientific reason, always follows, and never precedes, the epoch in which a nation is assured of a commodious physical subsistence; and that not only must a people be supplied with necessaries, but also with many of the superfluities of life, before its sense of the beautiful and the true can be developed. But by what means can a nation be supplied except by the hands of strenuous and successful industry. ”

“ Can it be possible that the force of custom should ever make me deaf to all these reflections, and as insensible to the injustice of that trade, and to their miseries, as the rich inhabitants of this town seem to be? What then is man ”

“ The base nation asking for base things sinks daily to deeper vileness of nature and of use; while the noble nation, asking for noble things, rises daily into diviner eminence in both; the tendency to degradation being surely marked by ἀταξὶα, carelessness as to the hands in which things are put, competition for the acquisition of them, disorderliness in accumulation, inaccuracy in reckoning, and bluntness in conception as to the entire nature of possession. ”

“ For here comes in our faith in the staunch mechanical pursuit of a fixed object, and covers itself with that imposing and colossal necessitarianism of The Times which we have before noticed. And this necessitarianism, taking for granted that an increase in trade and population is a good in itself, one of the chiefest of goods, tells us that disturbances of [237] human happiness caused by ebbs and flows in the tide of trade and business, which, on the whole, steadily mounts, are inevitable and not to be quarrelled with. ”

“ It is a sufficient answer, for him, that, however useless or hurtful a given practice may be, it is the "custom" of the country; and the belief that all the customs which have descended from generation to generation are, for that very reason, incapable of improvement, renders him a very hopeless subject to deal with. ”

“ The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Every body partakes, every body confesses, — with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet none feels himself accountable. ”

“ It is not easy to say what are the articles either of necessity, comfort, or luxury, which we cannot raise, and which we therefore shall be under a necessity of importing from abroad, as everything hardier than the olive, and as hardy as the fig, may be raised here in the open air. ”

“ Now so far, I say, the actual dependence of the individual upon society for the content of his beliefs about the external world is so obvious as to need here no further comment. But while all admit this prevalence of the social element in the formation of the substance, the stuff, of our current beliefs about the outer world, probably not all of you are prepared to follow me in the thesis to which I shall next be led. For my thesis will now refer, not merely to the material of which our external world is composed, but to the very conception of externality itself. ”

“ He shows, therefore, that disparity of external possessions among men was for the sake of society: 1. To promote the harmony and happiness of a system; because the want of external goods in some, and the abundance in others, increase general harmony in the obligor and obliged. ”

“ But there is this difference : in other, nations the things of a man are put before the man himself; so a materialism which exalts the accidents of the man—rank, wealth, birth, and the like—above the man, is not inconsistent with the general idea of England or Austria. In America it is a contradiction. ”

“ Among the possessions which are ever desirable and the privation of which is ever dreaded, there is one, however, which, directly desired, and for itself, becomes, through the progress of civilization, more and more cherished, and of which the privation becomes, through the progress of civilization, more and more grievous. ”

“ Shall we form our customs on the principle that labor is degrading, and indolence genteel? Shall we assume, by our practice, that the interests of the great mass are to be sacrificed for the pleasures and honors of a privileged few? ”

“ Deficiencies in individuals, as in States, have their value and import. Indeed, that sublime impulse of perfectibility, always vivacious, always working under various forms and with one underlying purpose, would be futile without them, and fatuous. ”

“ Those customs which have their foundation in wants that are common to the whole human species, and which are confined to the contrivance of means to relieve those wants, may well be supposed to bear a strong resemblance, without warranting the conclusion, that they who use them have copied each other, or have derived them from one common source; human sagacity being the same every where, and the means adapted to the relief of any particular natural want, especially in countries similarly uncultivated, being but few. ”

“ There must be all the thousand requirements that are begotten of a pampered and luxurious civilization, and all the faults and frailties that grow out of these. Your well-bred scoundrel trades upon the follies, the weaknesses, the foibles, rather than the vices of the world, and his richest harvest lies amongst those who have ambitions above their station, and pretensions unsuited to their property,—in one word, to the "Dodds of this world, whether they issue from Tipperary or Yorkshire, whether their tongue betray the Celt or the Saxon!" ”

“ It seems scarcely too much to assert, once for all, that meaningless customs must be survivals, that they had a practical, or at least ceremonial, intention when and where they first arose, but are now fallen into absurdity from having been carried on into a new state of society, where their original sense has been discarded. ”

“ Now, this process of integration, of the specialization of functions and powers, as it goes on in society, is, by virtue of what is probably one of the deepest laws of human nature, accompanied by a constant liability to inequality. ”

“ Yet men thus ingenious and inquisitive were content to live in total ignorance of the trades by which human wants are supplied, and to supply them by the grossest means. Till the Union made them acquainted with English manners, the culture of their lands was unskilful, and their domestick life unformed ”

“ Trade conditions which would permit to the toiler but a bare sustenance, the bare means of a livelihood, would be a hindrance to human progress, a hindrance not to be removed by all of the maxims of the philosopher or the theories of the doctrinaire. ”

“ In addition to the influence which this characteristic in him, had on me and others, we found all the opinions to which we attached most importance, constantly attacked on the ground of feeling. Utility was denounced as cold calculation; political economy as hard-hearted; anti-population doctrines as repulsive to the natural feelings of mankind. ”

“ Let us for a moment then take ourselves as being on this side of the vast space which must lie between a pure state of nature and that in which languages had become necessary, and, admitting their necessity, let us inquire how they could first be established. ”

“ I can see now a significance back of these seemingly trivial things: they reveal an unenviable complexity of nature. In first one thing, then another, I have stood out against conforming to customs, if my own ideas of right and wrong prohibited me, but alas! so often has come the ultimate defeat—concessions to conventions, customs, overpowering circumstances, or instincts. ”

“ To-day, the discovery of America, the facilities of transportation, the ruin of social distinctions which has paved the way for the ruin of apparent distinctions, has reduced the trade of the furrier to what it now is,—next to nothing. ”

“ Metrical composition, therefore, which, in a highly civilized nation, is a mere luxury, is, in nations imperfectly civilized, almost a necessary of life, and is valued less on account of the pleasure which it gives to the ear, than on account of the help which it gives to the memory. ”

“ If you demand of a man, living in a country imperfectly civilised, for what reason he works, he will answer, that he may purchase food. But put the same question to a man in a state highly civilised, and he will reply, that besides the purchase of food, he requires good clothing, lodging, and other comforts which have become habitual to him, and in which custom would make it disreputable in him not to indulge. ”

“ It is obvious that, in regard to this over-production, a new trade possibility lies open; it is obvious that there is a new business to be done in little ideal idols and obedient "idealists"—don't pass over this tip! Who has sufficient courage? We have in our hands the possibility of idealising the whole earth. ”

“ Why does his nature, in its full development, tend to that state of society in which wants multiply, and the business of supply becomes more complicated, and requiring constantly more thought and attention, and bringing the outward and seen into a state of constant friction and pressure on the inner and spiritual? ”

“ The basis of this theoretical contradiction, just as the practical antagonism in social life, lies in the unequal development of the various classes of humanity, in the relations between the dominant and subservient races and classes, in the division of material and intellectual labor, and in the acquisitions resulting from this division. This inequality of development, advancing with the progress of civilization, was the rock upon which ancient society foundered. ”

“ The economic conditions—which are the resultant of the ethnical energies and aptitudes acting in a given physical environment—are the determining basis of all the moral, juridical and political phenomenal manifestations of human life, both individual and social. ”

“ Their physical characteristics and their language, which have no bearing upon the state of transition from customary law to modern competition, are omitted, since they may be studied in the pages of Williams, Waterhouse and Hazlewood, which the author has freely consulted. All that is aimed at is a study of the decay of custom in a race that is peculiarly tenacious of its institutions—the decay that has now set in among the natural races in every part of the globe. ”

“ But the varieties, inconsistencies, and contradictions of human manners are so numerous and glaring that it is scarcely possible to fix any general principle that will apply to all the incongruous races of mankind, or even to conceive an irregularity to which some or other of them have not been accustomed. ”

“ Of the century following we read, that "the vast admixture of foreign elements produced boundless self-indulgence, and general faithlessness and corruption. New vices were imported, mainly from Greece and Asia, new creeds from all parts of the world." ”

“ The tools indeed of civilization may be imported into a half-civilized, or barbarous country; such importation, however, does not render the country civilized, although it may assist greatly in the attainment of that result. ”

“ There are a few natural wants that require no knowledge in order to be felt; such as hunger and thirst, and the other appetites which men have in common with all animals, and which are linked, as it [end of page #14] were, to their existence. {16} But while nations satisfy themselves with supplying such wants, there is neither wealth nor power amongst them. ”

“ Fresh from the press, there lies on my table, as I write, a review of an important work on immigration, in which the reviewer refers to the “sincere idealists who still cling to the superstition that it is opposition to some predestined divine purpose to suggest the rejection of the ‘poor and oppressed.’” It is just such teaching as that, which discards as so much sentimental junk the ideas that made our great men great, that is pushing us inch by inch into the quagmire of materialism. ”

“ Most people hide their indigence as if it were an ugly sore, or if they speak of it, speak softly, apologetically, or with an assumed lightness, as if their poverty were not really poverty, but only a genteel limitation of means, implying none of the shortcomings of actual want. ”

“ Like a true Platonist, he set before his countrymen, in glowing language, the beauty of the eternal Ideas or absolute Values, pleaded that there was no necessary connection between equality of production and equality of remuneration, and instituted various experiments, not all unsuccessful, in restoring the old handicrafts and the temper which inspired them. ”

“ They are ‘subject-creatures’ in the human code, and what they may suffer, or may not suffer, is of no import; of less import even than the dying out of the Maoris, or the dwindling away of the Red Indian tribes, or the death of African porters on the caravan routes. ”

“ This hint, however conveyed, upsets our politics, trade, customs, marriages, nay, the common-sense side of religion and literature, which are all founded on low nature,—on the clearest and most economical mode of administering the material world, considered as final. ”

“ So far, the dilution of the original character of the people by the injection of the foreign elements has been curiously slight, and while recognising that the inflow of the last few years has been more serious, both in quantity and character, than at any previous period, there does not seem to me any reason for questioning the ability of the country to absorb and assimilate it without any impairment of the fundamental qualities of the people. ”

“ The civilisations from which our own is sprung were poor indeed. They set limits to their desires, their ambitions, their spirit of initiative, their audacity, their originality. They brought forth slowly and a little at a time, and suffered continuously from the insufficiency of their material resources. ”