I4?l CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library BJ1481 .M16 Promotion of general happiness : a utili olin 3 1924 029 199 689 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029199689 rrm PROMOTION of ■ GENERAL HAPPINESS A UTILITARIAN ESSAY BY MICHAEL MACMILLAN, B.A, OxoN. ^F THE BOMBAY UNIVERSITY, AND PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY AT ELPHINSTONE COLLEGE, BOMBAY nnot expect to agree in our utilitarian estimates, at least without much debate. n'e^Htt agree to differ, and though we are bound to argue fearlessly, it should be Hkjlw consciousness that there is room for wide and honCifide difference of opinion. j^eHuipt consent to advance cautiously, step by step, feeling our way, adopting no lypai conclusions, trusting no single science, expecting no infallible guide. — kyoKs : The State in Relation to Lahour, i LONDON 4f j"' / ^WAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. PATERNOSTER SQUARE I 1890 I 6j PREFACE In the following pages I have borrowed from Professor Henry Sidgwick the useful word " felicific," and doubtless I have in many passages been consciously or uncon- sciously influenced by the same writer. It would indeed have been impossible for me to read his Methods of Ethics for ten successive years in the ordinary routine of my Indian work, each year with increased admiration for the Aristotelian thoroughness of the discussions it contains, without having my opinions on many subjects, and my way of looking at all questions, considerably affected /^CORNELL thereby. UNlVERLriY LIBRARY X THE PROMOTION OF GENERAL HAPPINESS CHAPTER I. Utilitarians regard the increase of the happiness of the world as the only reasonable end of conduct, as the only object desirable in itself. According to them even virtue itself would not be desirable unless it joromoted the happiness of the world, and, if it had the contrary effect, would be the reverse of desirable. This extreme opinion is only held by a fraction of civilised men, a large number of whom consider that not only virtue but also knowledge and art are desirable for their own sake. But even those who regard virtue, knowledge, art and other objects as desirable for their own sakes regard general happiness as also desirable for its own sake. Some might possibly prefer or think they prefer in certain cases in- crease of virtue, knowledge, and art to increase of happi- ness, but, if they saw that a certain action would increase happiness and would have no prejudicial results in any other directions, they would think such an action ought to be done. Even the sternest moralists and religious teachers, who show us the admirable discipline afforded by pain, do not appear to be exceptions. For, though they think pain sometimes desirable in the interests of virtue and religion, they would prefer happiness if it A tJ THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. were equally conducive to tlie same end. If beautiful] music promoted virtue as much as a trying bodily dis-j ease, who would not prefer the former to the latter ?j Thus it appears that everyone, or at any rate ever^'onej whose opinion is worth taking into consideration, prefersj general happiness to general misery either absolutely or! ccBteris paribus. Therefore we may well consider it a question of universal interest whether the general happi- ness can be promoted by any means, and if so, by what means. There is one general argument against the possibility of promoting happiness, which, if accepted, will finally close the question we are considering. It maj^ be argued that all ha ppi n fl Hil dpp°n'^° npnn nr.mpov;cr.r| nf nna'a U'^'", p ossessiong with another's, that^ if a man is happy, it DC because ne possesses or thinks he possesses a larger supply of health, wealth and other generally de- sired objects than other men have. If this is the whole truth of the matter, it might be argued that_Lifl_iuiaiaii effort can increase the happiness of the world . Certainly in that case it would be useless to try to increase the world's happiness by making the human race wealthier, healthier, or longer lived. Under the supposition the human race would be thereby no more benefited than the candidates in a competitive examination would be by hav- ing all their marks doubled. Nevertheless, there would still be other conceivable means bj' which happiness might be increased. Supposing the human race could become firmly convinced of the existence of some other previously unknown class of beings, say, the inhabitants of another planet less provided with the usual objects of desire than themselves, then the happiness of the human race would be increased, as the happiness of the saints is supposed by some of the ancient fathers to be enhanced by con- templation of the punishment of the damned. But this discovery must not be mutual or else happiness would still remain unaffected. For the happiness of the in- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 3 habitants of the other planet would be decreased by tlie discovery as much as the happiness of the human race would be increased, and the positive and negative quantities would cancel each other. Therefore the utilitarian would have to do his best to defend the in- habitants of the less fortunate planet against the in- felicific consequences which would result to them from the knowledge of our better fortunes. But owing to the little probability of being able to discover a new un- known race of beings, and the equal probability of such a race if discovered being more and not less fortunately cir- cumstanced than the human race,the utilitarian, convinced of the comparative nature of happiness, would try to find other means to increase it. He would perhaps try to affect not the facts contemplated but the contemplating mind, and would strive to divert his fellow men from the contemplation of those superior to themselves in the possession of objects of desire, to the contemplation of the many who suffer most from poverty, disease and other evils. Much might be done by disseminating among the multitude at cheap prices the works of Voltaire, Leopardi, Schopenhauer and other pessimists, in order that by reading their descriptions of the misery of the human race, and recognising themselves to be less miserable than the average human being is supposed to be by philosophic observers who have carefully studied the matter, they might feel their superiority over the average man and thereby become happier. So far we have been considering the consequences that would follow if happiness depended entirely on compari- son of one's own condition with tliat of contemporarjr men. We also sometimes compare our condition with that of previous generations, and this comparison affects happiness to a certain limited extent. So far as this is the case, it is possible for ordinary human effort to in- crease happiness by, for instance, endowing each successive generation with sources of pleasure unknown before or THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. with an additional supply of the old sources. For thus men would see that they have sources of pleasure un- known to their ancestors, and would derive pleasure from the fact. This consideration is however, though worth noticing, not important, as men are much more apt to compare themselves with their contemporaries! whom they see around them every day, than with their forbears whose lives they dimly realise through the medium of books and traditions. But thei-e is a different kind of comparison on which happiness depends. Men may be happy not merely be- cause they compare themselves with other men and think themselves happier, but also beiwi pp. fliey (?.Qiripa.m fbpir . jresent state with a nrevipu s state in which they w ere less_happyr~ lITe human race has often anticipated and repeated Dante's judgment that the greatest grief is to I'emember in misery past happiness. It is equally true that happiness is intensified by comparison with one's ; own past misery. Virgil makes storm-tost ^neas look I forward to a time when the agonies endured in a tem- 1 pestuous sea will be a subject for pleasant reflection, and the number of times that the words, Forsitan haec olim raeminisse juvabit, have been since quoted shows that the truth of the idea has been generally recognised. This same close connec- tion between pleasure and pain liad been recognised long before by Plato. Socrates.in tlieP/(cef?o,being released from his chain as a preliminary to his execution, remarks : " How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it ; for they never will come to a man to- gether, and yet he who pursues either of them is gener- ally compelled to take the other. Their bodies are two, and yet they are joined to a single head ; and I cannot help thinking tliat if ^sop had noticed them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their THE PROMOTION OF HAFPINE^. S strife, and how, when he could not, he fastened their heads together ; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows, as I find in my own case plea- sure comes following after the pain in my leg which was caused by the chain." ^ The fact of the origination o f ha. ppinp.RS from p ii^Vi pnin pa.risnn o f <^no'a p-^ry| pggt^ pain with present pleasure , "li'-'" tbp pmyip^yignn of the misery of past ages with present pleasure , is compatible with the increase of general happiness by human effort. But it affords the means of increasing general happiness to a much greater extent. For men much more often and more vividly compare their present state with their own past state than their state with the state of previous generations of mankind. If the whole human race or any portion of it, owing to the discovery of some new agricultural or other productive machine, increase the production of the earth, and consequently are much less pressed for want of food than they were a few years before, the consequent comparison of present plenty with past want decidedly increases happiness for the time, that is until increase of population restores the normal state of want. The discovery of now sources of pleasure will have the same effect. Thus, so far as human happi- ness depends upon this kind of compai'ison, ordinary human effort in the invention of new pleasures and in the increase of man's power over nature increases happiness. We have now seen that of the three ways in which comparison effects happiness only the first reveals a source of happiness which almost entirely mocks utili- tarian effort. It will be shown further on in detail how the consideration of the very large extent to which happiness depends on this first kind of comparison inter- feres with the happiness which would otherwise be secured by the progress of mechanical science. But we have also seen thatthe effects of theother two kinds of com- ^ Jowett's Plato, THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. parison are not so disheartening to the utilitarian. And after all there are many other sources of happiness besides these three kinds of comparison. In fact if we consider the matter carefully we shall find that comparison rather intensifies than originates pleasure and pain. Comparison is strongest and most frequent when we rise to the full grown civilised man, the highest point in the evolutional scale. In his case, no doubt, each pleasure is often intensi- fied by comparison with past pain or with the pain suffered by other men. But it is merely a case of intensification, not of origination. If comparison were the only source of pleasure, the reflective man would enjoy far more and far keener happiness than the animal world. But this does not seem to be the case, but rather the contrary. The happiness enjoyed by the lowest classes of living beings it is hard or impossible to estimate. Ants, and bees, and flies, and worms, still more such minute organisms as bacteria, are so unlike us that we cannot interpret their signs of emotion. But when we come to the consideration of the animals whose feelings we can more easil}' conjecture, they seem to enjoy keener or at least as keen pleasure as human beings. The pig at his trough, the dog leaping wildly in anticipation of a walk with his master, the horse galloping over green turf all seem to show manifestations of greater joy than that of which their lords are capable. So does the unreflective child, although he, like the pig, the dog, and the horse, is for the most part absorbed in the present moment and is not readily inclined to think of the happiness of other children. But if the premisses of this argument are not convincing, if it is thought that, after all, the undemon- strative civilised man enjoys greater pleasure than the child with joy beaming in its face orthanthe dog expressing its exuberant delight by bounding and barking, we must ap})eal to our own consciousness to settle the question. Do we always, whenever we feel happy, contrast our present state with our own different state in the past or THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. with that of other people ? Surely we must answer this question in the negative. The man with a good appetite enjoying a good dinner does not necessarily at the moment of enjoyment think of hungry men or of his own previous hungry state. The virtuous man can feel the glow of self -approbation consequent on a good act without mak- ing a comparison in his own favour of himself with other less virtuous men, nor does he think of other moments of his life when he was not engaged in virtuous action. Indeed, if he did make such comparisons, they would cause him pain rather than pleasure. Nor does the astronomer, into whose ken some new planet swims, make any such comparison when he is full of the joy of his great discovery. If he does, it is rather an after- thought, a possible concomitant of his elevated pleasure, than the cause of that pleasure. Thus we may easily convince ourselves that happiness is not altogether the result of comparison. And even if it were, it is clear from the consideration of the three kinds of comparison affecting happiness that the general happiness would not be as impracticable an object of endeavour as perpetual motion or the construction of a triangle with its three angles less than two right angles. Nevertheless, as we consider the various sources of happiness we shall find that again and again the promotion of tlie general happi- ness is retarded and rendered impossible by the strong inclination that men have to continually compare their own position with that of their fellowmen and by the all powerful effect on happiness which necessarily follows from this comparison. Another objection to the possibility of aflecting happi- ness, rests on the effects of custom. There is a vulgar saying, that we can get used to anything as eels get used to being skinned. Mammon in the great debate held at Pandemonium, discussing the practicability of obtaining happiness among the fires of hell, plausibly remarks : THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. " Our torments also may, in length of time, Become our elements, these piercing fires As soft as now severe, our temper changed Into their temper ; which must needs remove The sensible of pain. " Experience gives support to these views. H. Drummond, speaking of the Ilala steamer which plies on the shores of tlie African Lake of Nyassa, ten degrees south of the equator, remarks : " Singularly enough, while deck hands are often enlisted after some persuasion, the com- petition for the office of fireman — a disagreeable post at any time, but in tlie tropical heat the last to be coveted — is so keen that any number of natives are at all times ready to be frizzled in the stoke hole. Instead of avoid- ing heat, the African native everywhere courts it. His nature expands and revels in it ; while a breath of cold on a mountain slope, or a sudden shower of rain, trans- forms him instantly into a most woebegone object." On the other hand, we find many strong Northerners like Kingsley who revel in the cold blasts of a British north easter. In war, soldiers become accustomed to continual danger and the frequent deaths of their comrades. In bombarded towns, civilians and women come to look with indifference upon bursting shells. Many instances might be quoted of persons who, though their life was one long disease, yet reconciled themselves to their situation and seemed to enjoy as much happiness as their neighbours. Even leprosy can lose its horrors from Jamiliarity. Travellers who have visited the leper "settlement" at Molakai in the Pacific, describe the in- habitants as not utterly miserable, although they are all doomed to die of their loathsome disease sooner or later. On the other hand, familiarity also breeds contempt for sources of pleasure. Most boys thoroughly enjoy eatino- jam tarts. But aljqw a_^yi2_eat-jam_±aj;ts al-fixery meal in the dayj_ajid„ he Aw-Ll-soxMi^cease to regard them asVery~^eIigHtlul. ■""* THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINliB8. There is, then, n q^doubt that familiari ty flops in a wonde rfnl wny hlnnf nnr sensibility to sources of plea- sure and sources of pain, and this fact tends to make the balance of happiness throughout the world far more equal than it would otherwise be. But it by no means produces perfect equality of happiness. It may, indeed, in some cases, produce inequality. By the operation ot this law, the unfortunate man who always suffers from the same pain, is less unhappy than the unfortunate man who is always plunging out of the flaying pan into the fire, and so varying his sources of pain. On the other hand, the fortunate man may increase bis happi- ness through knowledge of this law by continually varying his pleasures. On this account Mill recommends variation between the pleasures of repose and the plea- sures of activity, as the best means of securing happiness. Also there are, no doubt, many sources of pleasure that are always pleasant. A healthy man may all through his life at every meal derive I'eal enjoyment from his food, even though each meal may not give him quite as much pleasure as it would give a man who has never sat down to a good meal. And it is the same with many sources of pain. It is quite possible for a deaf man to go on being irritated every day in his life by his failure to hear properly what is being said in his presence. Custom does much to alleviate the pain of the unfortunate, and to lessen the pleasure of the fortunate, but it is far from producing a dead level of happiness among all the members of the human lace and of the brute creation. In spite of the effect of custom, it is quite possible for one man to be happier than another, and for the average happiness at one time to Vje greater than at another time. After this preliminary discussion we may proceed to discuss the various means by which men confidently hope that the general happiness may be promoted. Before going farther it is, howevei", necessary if pos- lo THE. PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. Bible to remove ambiguity in the terms of the discussion, such as is so frequently due to the confusion of individual and general happiness, against which we are warned by Mr. Henry Sidgwick in his Methods of Ethics. In the following pages, happiness, when used without quali- , fication, will mean the genei'al happiness of all sentient beings, which may, of course, be promoted by increase of the happiness of one individual, if such increase is not secured at the expense of the happiness of others. Thus, if I make myself or any other individual happier, and see no reason to believe that my or his gain is some other man's loss, I naturally assume that not only one individual's happiness, but also happiness without qualifi- cation is promoted. The same assumption must be made with regard to the happiness of unknown creatures of other worlds, if such there be. By promoting happiness in this world we either do not affect at all the happiness of other worlds, or, if we do, we are so entirely unable to calculate whether our actions will affect the happiness of those other worlds favourably or unfavourably, that, as reasonable beings, we leave such possible effects out of consideration, just as we very often leave out of consider- ation, owing to similar ignorance, the effect of our actions on beings of this world. For instance, a utilitarian in choosing his residence knows that his choice will affect the happiness of the various tradesmen living round the two houses one of which he intends to select. If he settles at A, he will by his custom affect the happiness of the tradesmen of A ; and if he settles at B, he will affect the happiness of the tradesmen of that town. But as he pro- bably has no possible data to determine whether the tradesmen of A or of B would derive more happiness from his settling in their midst, he will leave all this out of consideration, and confine his calculations to the effect likely to be produced on the happiness of himself, his relations and friends. When effects are so unknown as to be beyond the power of our intelligence to calculate, and THE PROMOTION OF HAFFIiVlSSS. ii others are well enough known to be estimable by experi- ence, wo disregard the former and determine our conduct entirelyby the latter. If.followingthis method of exclusion, we fall into results that we did not desire, we do not incur the charge of folly. Suppose tliat, of two men equally desirous to reach the same destination, one chooses the road that he knows to be hillier and longer, while the other chooses the shorter and more level road, the latter shows himself by his choice to be the wiser of the two, even though, owing to circumstances which neither of them had any possible means of calculating beforehand, he is gored to death on his w^ay by a mad bull, and never reaches his destination. CHAPTER II. Let us begin by trying to estimate bow far happiness can be increased by increasing knowledge. This enquiry naturally divides itself into two parts. We must first consider whether the mere possession of icnowledge makes each individual happier, and then whether the results of knowledge increase the happiness of the multitude of ignorant and learned who make use of these results. In considering the former part of the question we are immediately met by the difficulty arising from the imperfection of knowledge. Various degrees of know- ledge are after all only more or less near approximations to ignorance. The most learned man more clearly recognises his real ignorance than the untaught clown. Newton describes himself as like a child picking up a few shells by the seashore of knowledge. Not only experience but all knowledge is " an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever as we move." Therefore, as far as the consciousness of having everything explained to one's satisfaction is concerned, the self-confident village ignoramus is often better off than the profoundest philosopher who ever tried and tried in vain to solve the riddle of the universe. Perh aps_the happiest of all then are those who ha^e >never~He sired any more knowledge than th at which enables jSe m to 11^ . Men in such a condition are "enfifely'E^ee from the feelings of dissatisfaction felt bj' those who would like to know everything and are dis- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 13 appointed of their ardent desire for jierfect knowledge. Intelligent observers Lave imagined that they found tlie greatest happiness among the South Sea Islanders and other ignorant men, if only they live in a fertile country under sunny skies. The negroes of the West Indian islands are very destitute of anything that we should call knowledge, yet Mr. Froude gives a most glowing account of their happiness. " They are," he writes, " perfectly happy. In no part of the globe is there any peasantry whose every want is so completely satisfied as Her -Majesty's black subjects in these West Indian Islands. They have no aspirations to make them rest- less. They have no guilt upon their consciences. They have food for the picking up. Clothes they need not, and lodging in such a climate need not be elaborate. They have perfect liberty and are safe from dangers, to which if left to themselves they would be exposed, for English rule prevents the strong from oppressing the rt^eak. In their own country they would have remained slaves to the more warlike races. In the West Indies their fathers underwent a bondage of a century or two, lighter at its worst than the earliest form of it in Africa ; their descendants in return have nothing now to do save to laugh and sing and enjoy existence. Their quarrels, if they have any, begin and end in words. If happiness is the be all and end all of life, and those who have most of it have most completely attained the object of their being, the ' nigger ' who now basks among the ruins of the West Indian plantations is the supremest specimen of present humanity." Or hear the description of this same race of men in a still more ignorant state before they have been torn away from their native soil. "Here in his virgin simplicity," says H. Drummond, describing his central African experiences, " dwells primeval man, without clothes, without civilisation, without learning, without religion — the genuine child of nature, thought- less, careless and contented. This man is apparently 14 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. quite happy ; he has practically no wants." Such men have never been much troubled by unsatisfied yearnings for knowledge. Confining our attention to those who have had such yearnings, we have no reason to believe that the world in the nineteenth century enjoys more mental satisfaction from its greater but imperfect know- ledge than any previous century derived from its lesser knowledge. Therefore, it seems plain that the increase of knowledge does simply nothing to I'emove the unhap- piness of mental unrest, and will do nothing unless it becomes absolutely perfect. But, as far as we can see, absolutely perfect knowledge is beyond the reach of human endeavour. It may, however, be urged that, though the learn ed m an is equally dissati.sfied or more dissatisfied with b is ig norance than the unlearned , he _ will~ l7'^ reVinPTvacI liaj)] 2ip,r hy the nnnscinusness of superior ity. This is iruewith limitations. The unlearned man often thinks he knows more than the learned, and the Jearned__flian is , "ft'^" f"^ .xaqfrl aa i. t. L.a£ , Jif>.-Iia-i-inf r;nr>an\m-ia r»f ]^jj^ f^wn Superiorit y. . But, nevertheless, as a rule not without exceptions it may be allowed that the unlearned man recognizes the superior knowledge of the learned man, and that the learned man recognizes his own superiority. Therefore, as the feeling of superiority gives happiness, this fact tends to make the learned man happier than the unlearned. Here, however, we have individual happiness due to comparison of a man with his fellowmen, which scarcely ever, as we have seen, affords a fulcrum for raising the general happiness to a greater height. However much we increase the knowledge of the world, there will always be, as far as we can see, a certain fraction of mankind superior to the average in knowledge, and another probably equal fraction inferior to the average. The happiness of superiority in knowledcre can scarcelj^ be enjoyed by more than half of the human race, and the most successful effort to increase know- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 1 5 ledge only raises the standard of average knowledge, and so makes more knowledge to be required to gain that superiority of knowledge which constitutes happiness. It may, however, be supposed that knowledge in another way promotes happiness, that a wide intelligent survey of the universe shows a great predominance of happiness over misery, and that he who can make sucli a survey will enjoy happiness through sympathy with his happy fellow men and fellow creatures. This how- ever can only be an argumentum ad hominem. It will be convincing to the optimist, but excite the scorn of the pessimist. There are probably as many pessimists as optimists in the world, and most men steer a middle course between these two doctrines, being optimists in good health, and pessimists when they suffer from de- rangement of the liver or toothache. The majority of mankind will have to be convinced of the truth of op- timism before they can be expected to allow that extended knowledge gives clearer recognition of the happiness of the world. Thus it appears plain that the mere possession of know- ledge cannot be clearly seen by any one but a confirmed optimist to promote happiness. We must therefore now consider whether the results of knowledge are such as to promote happiness. In the first place it is clear that, if it is possible to pro- mote happiness byhuman action, the increase of knowledge on the part of utilitarians will enable them to carry out this desiiuble object more successfully. For by increase of knowledge they will see more clearly by what means the great end at which they aim may be best attained. Also the utilitarian will expect that increase of know- ledge will lead to the more universal adoption of utilitarian morality. So that for those two reasons, he will be inclined to support the cause of education and spread knowledge over the world with all his power. 1 6 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. There is also a strong political argument in favour of education. It is popularly supposed that education in- creases the tendency to riots, rebellion and sedition. This popular fallacy may best be answered in the words of Bacon, who remarks that " to say that a blind custom of obedience should be a surer obligation than duty taught and understood, is to affirm that a blind man may tread surer by a guide than a seeing man can by a light. And it is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men gentle, generous, maniable, and pliant to government ; whereas ignorance makes them churlish, thwart and mutinous ; and the evidence of time doth clear this assertion, considering that the most bar- barous, rude, and unlearned times have been most subject to tumults, seditions, and changes." The frequency of the delusion combated by Bacon is due to the fact that educa- tion affords the means by which discontent is clearly ex- pressed in words, and conveys the knowledge of every riot and insurrection rapidly all over the globe. Owing to the energy of the newspaper p)'ess and the large number of those who can now read newspapers, persons not endowed with reflection think that tliere are far more riots and rebellions than there used to be. But a short comparison of the destruction of life and property in late riots and rebellions and in tliose of an earlier uneducated age would soon dissipate that idea, and would also make clear that destructive riots and foolish rebellions have been chiefly made by the uneducated masses. Ignorance has led to many hopeless uprisings prompted often not by wrong but by ignorant fanaticism. In English history the Gordon riots and the Rebecca riots are good illustrations of this. India has lately given a conspicuous instance on a small scale of the same fact in the rebellion of a few hundred fanatics at Broach, who thought that they could overthrow the British Government, and be- lieved their leader's promise, that his prayer would render the bullets of the sepoys as hai-mless as peas. Such up- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 17 ' risings prompted by ignorance lead to much misery by destruction of life and property, and usually do no- thing to help the great struggle against unjust oppression. The utilitarian will also with especial zeal support the cause of female education. For now, as in the past, deficiency of education is one of the chief means by which woman is kept in a more or less subservient position throughout the world. Everything that tends to inequality is prejudicial to happiness, because the inferior feels more pain at his inferiority than the pleasure afforded to the superior by his sense of superiority. Also power over inferiors is bad for the moral condition, and therefore, as we shall see later, for the happiness of both inferiors and superiors. This is peculiarly manifest in the effect that is produced on women and men by the inequality of law and custom in the various countries of the world and especially in the East. The greater this inequality is, the more tyrannical man becomes, and the more servile or cunning woman becomes. The history of civilisation has on the whole displayed a tendency to- wards improvement in the condition of woman. But this tendency to progress has not been without exception. Women were more free and more nearly in a position of equality to men in pre-historic Greece than in the more civilised times of Pericles and Demos- thenes, and are less free in Modern India than in the state of society depicted in the old Indian Epics Ma- hometanism, even when in other respects it has been a civilising influence, has alwaj's lowered the status of women by polygamy and seclusion. But generally speaking, the position of women has advanced with the progress of centuries. In the United States, the most modern of the powers of the world, woman has most nearly secured her complete emancipation, and for strik- ing instances of her subjection we must look for the most part to ancient times, and barbarous or half-civilised communities. B 1 8 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. We read in tbe pages of Abbe Raynal that savage mothers on the banks of the Orinoco justified female in- fanticide on the ground of the overwhelming wretched- ness of female life. One of them reproached with this crime by a Jesuit father replied, " Represent to thyself, Father, the troubles that are reserved for an Indian woman among these Indians. They accompany us into the fields with their bow and arrows ; while we go there laden wdth an infant whom we carry in a basket, and another who hangs at our breast. They go to kill birds or to catch fish, while we are employed in digging the ground, and, after having gone through all the labours of the culture, are obliged also to bear those of the harvest. They return in tlie evening without any burthen, and we bring them roots for their food, and maize for their drink. As soon as they come home, they go and amuse themselves with their friends ; while we are fetching wood and water to prepare for their supper. When they have eaten, they fall asleep ; and we pass almost the whole night in grinding the maize and in pre- paring the chica for them. And what reward have we for these labours ? They drink : and when they are in- toxicated, they drag us hy tbe hair, and trample us under foot It is a melancholy circumstance for a poor Indian woman to serve her husband as a slave in the fields, oppressed with fatigue and at home deprived of tranquillity, but it is a dreadful thing when twenty years . are elapsed, to see him take another woman, whose judgment is not formed. He attaches himself to her. She beats our children ; she commands us, and treats us as her servants ; and, if the least murmur escape us, a stick raised Oh ! Father, how is it possible that we should bear this condition ? What can an Indian woman do better than to prevent her child from living in a state of slavery worse than death ? " This gives a sad but true picture of the way in which women are usually treated in the lowest stage of civilisation, when the rights TSE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 19 of the sexes are settled entirely by brute force. Not much better seems to have been the position of women in ancient Greece and in modern and ancient oriental states ; for freedom from hard work in the fields is dearly pur- chased by richer women in the East at the expense of the loss of their freedom of motion in the open air. In many other respects in the East, law and custom make unjust dis- tinctions between men and women. In India a man may take a second wife if his first wife dies or even if she is childless. But as a rule a woman is never allowed to take a second husband, even if her first died when she was a mere child. On the contrary, it was considered proper for a virtuous widow to burn herself with her husband's corpse, and if she failed to do so became de- graded for life. Since suttee has been declared illej^al by the British Government, it is now rarely practised, but the indignities to which widows are subjected by custom still remain and make many women regret that the la^\' compels them to survive their husbands. Among some of the tribes that inhabit Madagascar, women are treated with the same kind of injustice that thej^ too often suffer in India. The Mahafali, we read, con- sider the woman as an inferior being, bound to perform all her duties towards man, but enjoying no rights. The wife is not allowed to eat with her husband, and, when she dies, her corpse is not carried to the sacred ground reserved for him. Among the Sihanaka, widows are treated with savage brutality. " Upon the death of any man of position or wealth," we read in Sibree's Madagas- car, "on the day of the funeral the wife is placed in the house, dressed in all her best clothes, and covered with her silver ornaments, of which the Sihanaka wear a considerable quantity. There she remains until the rest of the family return home from the tomb. But as soon as they enter the house, they begin to revile her with most abusive language, telling her that it is her fault that her vintana or fate has been stronger than that of 20 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. her husband. Tliey then strip her of her clothes, tear- ing off with violence the ornaments from her ears and neck, and arms ; they give her a coarse cloth, a spoon with a broken handle, and a dish with the foot broken off with which to eat ; her hair is dishevelled, and she is covered up with a coarse mat, and under that she re- mains all day long, and can only leave it at night ; and she may not speak to any one who goes into the house. She is not allowed to wash her face or hands, but only the tips of her fingers. She endures all this sometimes for a year, or, at least, for eight months." For all the oppression and degradation of women in the East, and the inequality of their privileges as compared with men in the West, the remedy is to be found in the improve- ment of the quantity and quality of female education, which will not only emancipate them from their position of inferiority, but also fit them for the higher and more independent position they may expect to have in the more perfect civilisation of the future. The same good result is promoted, though in a less degree, by general progress in education. The more educated a nation becomes, the less men are inclined to tyrannise over women by means of their superioritj' in physical strength, and the greater is the tendency to dis- tribute honour and privileges according to mental excel- lence. In general ability woman is inferior to man, as was admitted by the staunchest upholder of women's rights in ancient times. " Can you mention," asks Socrates in the fifth book of the Republic, " any pursuit of man, in which the male sex has not all these qualities (natural gifts) in a far higher degree than the female ? Need I waste time in speaking of the art of weaving and the management of pancakes and preserves, in which womankind does really appear to be great, and in which for her to be beaten is the most absurd of all things ? " To which Glaucon replies : " You are quite riglit in maintaining the general inferiority of the female sex ; at THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 21 the same time many women are in many things superior to many men, though, speaking generally, what you say is true." The cleverest woman is inferior to the cleverest man, and the average woman is inferior to the average man. But this inferiority has been as a rule grossly ex- aggerated, and, being partially due to neglect or mis- direction of female education in the past, will be much diminished when women are as well taught as men. At any rate it is plain that woman is less inferior to man in mental than in bodily power, and, as the general progress of education causes increased importance and honour to be attached to mental excellence, it is sure to do much to improve the position of women, and so, by removing or diminishing inequality, will promote general happiness. CHAPTER III. We must now turn to the consideration of the more material effects of knowledge. It has been said with truth, that knowledge is power, and the power that knowledge has put into the hands of man has al- tered the face of the earth, and in a wonderful way- changed the conditions of existence for the human race. That this mighty change has been immensely pro- ductive of happiness seems to be very generally accepted. The opinions of those who believe this ai-e eloquently and confidently expressed by Macaulay in his eulogium of the Baconian philosophy. The follower of Bacon being asked what his philosophy has effected for mankind is made to say, " It has lengthened life ; it has mitigated pain ; it has ex- tinguished diseases ; it has increased the fertility of the soil ; it has given new securities to the mai'iner ; it has furnished new arms to the warrior ; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers ; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth ; it has lighted up the night with the splendour of the day ; it has extended the range of the human vision ; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles ; it has accelerated motion ; it has annihilated distance ; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all despatch of business ; it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 23 run ten knots an hour against the wmd. These are but a part of its fruits and of its first fruits." This is all very true. The philosophy of invention has produced wonderful results. But what is the good of it all, if it does not add to the sum of human happi- ness ? If it is said that it brings man nearer to perfection thus to conquer nature, we are inclined to reply that Zoroaster upon Ushidarema or Buddha pondering u.nder the sacred fig tree over the mystery of life, was perhaps a grander being than the most skilful engine-driver who ever controlled the speed of the Flying Scotchman. But here we have been tempted for a moment to diverge from the line of our enquiry. What we have proposed to ourselves is a consideration of the possibility of increasing, not excellence, but happiness. Only if excellence or approach to perfection makes the pos- sessor or other men happier, does it come within the scope of our enquiry ? Now it seems that excellence can only promote the happiness of the excellent 01 perfect person by satisfying pride or by removing the restless craving for greater excellence. The satisfaction of pride based on greater power over nature than is enjoyed by one's fellowmen, may perhaps increase the happiness of individuals, but we have seen that it can scarcely increase the happiness of the race, as this feeling of superiority was enjoyed by as large a fraction of mankind when the greatest products of inventive skill were wooden ploughs, flint heads, and bows and arrows, as in the present century of Eiffel Towers, Suez Canals, Cunard steamers, and phonographs. Nor can the age or the individuals who produce such works of power as we now see around us enjoy in any peculiar degree the satisfaction of victory over nature. The feeling of conquest was no doubt enjoyed with the same zest by the first constructor of a roofed hut, as by M. Eiffel when his iron tower reached its destined height. For the joy lies in the progress achieved. The first hut was 24 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. surely as great an advance on the primeval cave, as the Eiifel Tower is an improvement on the towers of Notre Dame. Looked upon in comparison with the powers of nature, all human mechanical effort is alike insignificant and imperfect. We can divert them a little, and so make the outer skin of an atom in the universe a little different from what it would otherwise have been. But even in this limited sphere the power of man, even in the nineteenth century, is extremely limited, as is shown whenever earthquakes or inundations of tempests exert their destructive powers. And it is painfully evident that if some erratic heavenly body should come into collision with us and drive us into the sun, our poor little earth, bedizened with all the architectural, mechanical, and sartorial glories of the nineteenth centviry, would be reduced in a moment to a mass of hot matter in- distinguishable from what the same world would have become, had it met with the same catastrophe before primeval man had emerged from his cave dwellings and clothed himself in the skins of slain animals. But it will be answered that, though man is still infinitely removed from complete conquest of nature, all partial advances in this direction give him more satis- faction to his desires, more comfort, and therefore more happiness. This is in the main how Macaulay thought that the Baconian philosophy increased the happiness of the world. He and all who think with him, that is, he and the majority of practical men, suppose that mechani- cal inventions have done much in the past to increase happiness, and that the best way to get the same result in the future is to go on making such inventions. In Bacon's time the three inventions that most impressed his imagination and that of his contemporaries were gunpowder, printing, and the mariner's compass. These three inventions have probably had a greater effect in modifying the conditions of human existence than the steam engine or the electric telegraph or any subsequent THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 25 invention. Let us then follow Bacon in taking them as typical examples of great inventions and considering how far they promote happiness. Although something might be said for the felicific effects of gunpowder, and although Macaulay seems to count the new arms furnished to the warrior among the excellent gifts with which the Baconian philosophy has endowed mankind, it is hardly neces- sary seriously to discuss the claims of this inven- tion to honour, from a hedonistic point of view. Gun- poM'der is used most extensively on the battle-field, and does not appear on the whole to have mitigated the horrors of war. If those horrors have been mitigated, the change has been due rather to moral improvement than to change in the weapons of destruction. A gun- shot wound may possibly be less painful to the sense and less horrible to the imagination than a sword cut, spear thrust, or an arrow fixed in the flesh, but surely the sight of fellow soldiers mangled out of all resemb- lance to humanity by artillery and the fear of suffering the same in one's own body is worse than the ordinary incidents of ancient smokeless battlefields. So far as gunpowder is used for peaceful purposes in blasting, it can be considered together with the many other devices for increasing the productive power of human labour, of which devices the most indisputable effect is, as will presently be seen, increase in the population of the world. This increase of population is also one of the principal effects of the discovery of previously unknown parts of the world due to the invention of the mariner's compass. The other principal effect of ocean travelling is increase in knowledge, which, as we have seen, does not clearly promote happiness. Therefore in considering the mari- ner's compass we have chiefly to estimate the effect of increase of population on the world's happiness. There is no doubt that the mariner's compass has done much to increase the number of human beings. Had the 26 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. compass not been invented, America would never have been discovered and peopled by civilised European im- migrants, or would have been discovered later. The continent of America before its discovery can scarcely have contained twenty millions of inhabitants. As a consequence of its discovery, it has now a population of 90,000,000, which may be expected in the course of time to expand to 500,000,000. This is truly a wonderful eflect to have been pro- duced by the discovery of the magnetic needle. But does such an increase of population add to the sum of human happiness ? In this case we have no reason to believe that the increase of population has diminished the happiness of the average man. The European settlers in America are, for anything one can see to the contrary, as happy or not more miserable than the aboriginal inhabitants whom they have displaced or re- duced in numbers, until they have become a small minority in the population of the continent of which they were formerly the undisputed possessors. Now, if the average man before the increase of population due to the dis- covery of America, enjoyed 10 degrees of happiness, and the world then contained 800,000,000 inhabitants, the aggregate happiness enjoyed was 8,000,000,000 degrees. If the discovery of America adds 500,000,000 to the population of the human race without altering the average happiness, it then adds 5,000,000,000 degrees of happiness to the aggregate happiness of the human race. But how, if the average happiness of man be more pro- perly represented by a negative quantity ? The philoso- phical world is pretty equally divided betw^een optimists and pessimists. Those who hold the latter view should, if consistent utilitarians, offer determined opposition to any discovery tending to add to the number of miserable beings in the world. As for practical persons not ad- dicted to deliberate reflection on the evils and joys of life, they generally waver in the balance between THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 27 optimism and pessimism. Yet every utilitarian, nay, every one who thinlcs that happiness is among things desirable for their own sake, ought to make up his mind on this question, as its decision gives a most im- portant motive for the determination of conduct. If the unknown inventor of the mariner's compass was a pessi- mistic utilitarian, and foresaw that his invention would add millions to the population of the world, he was bound as a rational being to keep his discovery to himself. The same remarks apply to the invention of all other instruments which increase the world's population either by making the soil more productive, or by improving the means of communication between different parts of the world, so that each country produces what it can pro- duce most easily, and gives its surplus to foreign nations in exchange, for what they can produce most easily. For this increase of population is, after all, the principal result of steam-ploughs, steam-ships, steam-locomotives, and all the vaunted triumphs of steam. The population of England at the beginning of this century, was in round numbers 8,500,000, and in the fifty years be- tween 1800 and 1850, rose to 16,000,000. This wonder- ful increase may almost entirely be attributed to the immense increase in productive power given to human labour by the use of steam-power ; for a large number of modern inventions having the same effect were prompted by desire to utilise to the full the power of steam, and, therefore, may be regarded as themselves the offspring of steam-power. When England by the use of steam and of ever-improving engines for the utilisation of steam-power became able to produce more corn and coal, to produce and manufacture more iron, and to manufac- ture more cotton, and when improved communication by sea and land enabled her to get from every country in the world good prices for her immense surplus pro- duction, her sons and daughters found themselves in a position to support a family at an earlier age than their j8 the promotion OF HAPPINESS. ancestors. The offspring of these earlier marriages, m spite of their numbers, were no more likely than the more limited offspring produced by earlier generations in less productive ages to die of starvation or insufficient nourishment in infancy, and when they grew up, found the means of subsistence still growing, owing to still further improvements in machinery. So they married young like their parents, and bi-ought into the world healthy children, the usual proportion of which were able to survive. It must not, however, be assumed that the increasing population found the struggle for existence any less severe than their ancestors. It seems unfortunately to be the truth that in England and most other countries the population is always much more than is warranted by the productive powers of land and labour. Whether those productive powers be great or small, increasing or stationary, large fractions of every people seem to be condemned to suffer the miseries of starvation. Of course, if the rich were to abstain from their consump- tion of expensive luxuries, there would be enough for all for a time. But even this remedy would be only temporary, and would, in a generation, be extinguished by increase of population. As this forbearance on the part of the rich is practically out of the question, in estimating whether the population exceeds the productive powers or not we must assume that a large amount of production will be wasted on expensive luxury. How far the population is excessive in each nation depends not on the amount of production but on the relation be- tween the production not wasted in luxury and the existing population, which is determined by the national character and the standard of comfort in the mind of the average man. A people living in a poor barren country may enjoy a high average of comfort, and have a small percentage of pauperism, if they are prudent enough not to marry until they have the means of supporting a THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 29 family. No particular age can be fixed upon as the proper age for marriage from an economical point of view. In a country of rapidly-increasing wealth it may be prudent for a people to marry at an age which in other countries would mean starvation. If inventions merely increased productive power, they would neces- sarily increase comfort and diminish starvation. But unfortunately the effect of invention does not stop short at increase of production. Directly by inventive discovery an increase of wealth takes place, the national soul seems to cry out, " Let us increase and multiply." Thus it is that the saying of Christ, that the poor we will always have, has been confirmed by unvarying experience up to the present day as a political, economical generaliz- ation without exception. Yet, but for the facts of past history, it might seem not impossible that poverty might have been extermi- nated by increase of productive power. If since the year 1800 the population of England had remained stationary at 8,500,000, or, if some great plague or war were suddenly to reduce the population of the country to that limit, then we should have now the same number of men as then lived in England, but by modern mechanical science they would be able to extract far more wealth out of land and sea than the men of 1800. Thus the average of wealth would be so much higher that there would be abundance for everybody, and star- vation and even poverty would be unknown through the length and breadth of the land. But no preacher of prudence arose with sufficient foresight and power of eloquence to persuade the nation to seize the golden opportunity presented them and better their average position. So they did not realise the fact that progress in inventive mechanical skill will never banish want and famine, unless it be accompanied by increased pru- dence and a higher standard of comfort. Whether with these accompaniments it might increase the general 30 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. happiness we shall have afterwards to consider. So far as the history of the past has gone, it does not appear that any mechanical invention has permanently increased general happiness by rendering the struggle for exist- ence less severe. Temporary good effects in_ that direction such inventions may have had. If rotation of crops is suddenly introduced into an agricultural country where this system was previously unknown, the in- creased production will precede for a shorter or longer time the rise of population. However quickly men and women begin to marry on the strength of the increased wealth in the country, it will be some time before enough new mouths appear to swallow up the increase. During this short interval life will be easier, and there will be less of the pains of starvation and poverty. Thus, according to Mr. Leone Levi's calculations, in the actively inventive period between 1857 and 1884, the average money wages of working men in the United Kingdom rose about 42 per cent. During the interval the pur- chasing power of money was, at any rate, not dimin- ished. If rent, meat, butter and cheese are dearer, tea, sugar, rice, and bread are cheaper ; so that the average working man would appear to be really better off now than he was thirty years ago. It is clear that, if these calculations are correct, the rapid increase of population has of late years not quite kept pace with the more rapid increase of production. Let it not be supposed that this is - a contradictory instance to the principles of Malthus. The improvement is evidently due partly to the relief 'from the pressure of population afforded by emigration, and still more to increased prudence among the working classes which is evidenced by the later average of the age of marriage. Men and women have been gradually learning the advisability of postponing marriage until they have saved something on which to support a family, and no-w in England and Wales bachelors marry at the com- paratively late mean age of 26-2 and spinsters at 24-6 years. THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 31 This change is probably clue to the influence of education, which may also affect population by making men and women think of the future, and also in another way, if, as seems to be the case, intellectual development is pre- judicial to reproductive power. But all this temporary im- provement of the condition of the ■working classes is not very much to boast of. After all we have not yet arrived at a condition of universal material well- being, and, in spite of all the mechanical inventions that have been made in the nineteenth century, English labourers are probably not as well off as they were at a far earlier stage of produc- tive progress when England could only support about 5,000,000 inhabitants. In the days of Henry VIII., as we read in Fronde's history, the artizan was l^etter off than the agricultural labourer, and the agricultural labourer received, " steadily and regularly if well con- ducted, an equivalent of something near to twenty shillings a week, the wages at present paid in English colonies,'' and had in addition land in connexion with his house and generally the right to gather fuel from a neighbouring common and use it as pasture for his live stock. Each agricultural labourer now earns in wages, in spite of all the improvements in agricultural machi- nery, from ten to eighteen shillings a week, and is gener- ally out of work for part of the year. We must next consider the third of Bacon's three favourite types of prolific invention, the art of printing. Any claims that it may have to the pronaotion of happi- ness by spreading knowledge we have already considered implicitly in considering whether knowledge of itself adds to happiness. So far as the art of printing has by com- municating fi'om one country to another the discoveries of the nations which stand intellectually in the forefront of the world, it is only one of the many means towards the increase of population, and is to be accepted or rejected according as we are optimists or pessimists. But it has had other effects, which require separate con- 32 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. sideration. Literature has been immensely extended by tlie art of printing, and the reading of literary works is a direct source of pleasure. A literary man of ordinary means in the present day has, owing to the invention of printing, far more books on his shelves than were possessed by Solomon, Socrates, or King Alfred. He can buy Shakespeare for sixpence, the whole Bible for a shilling, and without much heavier outlay can provide himself with the masterpieces of foreign literature. What an immense addition it would seem to be to the happiness of the world that even the poorer classes have abundant opportunities of spending their hours of leisure in read- ing Scott, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Milton ! Surely all this is clear gain. The sum of the happiness enjoyed in the reading of good books is very large, is not gained at the expense of others, and is not necessarily preceded by the pains of desire or followed by the pains of satiety. But unfortunately it is not only good books that are printed. The art of printing, besides cheapening classical works, causes the dissemination of a vast amount of worthless and pernicious productions, which are read more greedily than the works of great and good men. The reading of sensational and fleshly novels wastes valuable time, exhausts the brain, and poisons the souls of countless readers. The very multitude of books and newspapers produced yearly owing to the perfection of the art of printing militates against happiness. The natural result of the multitude of printed matter put be- fore the public is that reading is rapid and superficial. Many men, who would derive much more happiness from a careful study of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton, fritter away their wits in the consumption of innumer- able novels, magazines and newspapers, and derive there- from no solid satisfaction and no real addition to their happiness. It may be answered that the very fact that such things are preferred to better literature shows that THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 33 they afford more pleasure. But this is not the case. The fact that most chiklreu would prefer to live upon sweetmeats rather than beef, mutton, or bread does not prove that they would be happier if they could carry out their wishes. Men with regard to literature are like children. They sacrifice as a rule the possibility of more permanent enjoyment to the pleasure of the moment, and the vast amount of bad literature that is printed enables them to do so more easily. Under the circumstances, as an extensive exer- cise of censorship of the press would be incompatible with modern ideas of liberty, it is no wonder that many sigh for the old times before the invention of printing, when children, instead of possessing beautifully printed picture books with Weather ly's verse and Kate Greena- way's illustrations, used to hearken at their nurse's knee to old national ballads about Wallace wight, doughty Douglas, and fieiy Percy, and when their parents by a kindly necessity were forced to read over and over again, if they happened to have acquired the power of reading, only such works as had been deemed worthy of being- copied by the slow px'ocess of writing. If it be replied that in those old times of which we are thinking, owing to the want of printing, very few found it worth their while to learn to read, so that the pleasures of reading were unknown to the majority of the people, we may well doubt in reply whether the power of reading adds to the happiness of the average man. In fact it may fairly be said that the average man reads too much for his health and therefore for his happiness. Many a man who has to earn subsistence for his family by sedentary work indoors, spends his few hours of leisure over a fire with a newspaper or magazine in his hands, when he might be restoring his health by walking, rifle-shooting, rowing or cricket. One class, however, may be acknowledged to derive on the whole much advantage to their happiness from reading. It 34 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. consists of those whose work in life is muscular work in the open air, and who therefore may without injury to themselves seek their relaxation indoors. The soldier and the agricultural labourer must find the power of reading a real direct source of pleasure, and it need not indirectly hurt their happiness hy undermining their health. But against the happiness that the power of reading confers on the soldier and the sailor, and_ those who from M^eakness of body or peculiar mental disposi- tion are unable to enjoy out-door pleasure, must be weighed the ill effects of excessive study on a large frac- tion of each of those nations whom the art of printing has rendered learned. How many Germans, Frenchmen and Englishmen have had their health and happiness utterly ruined by poring over printed books. In England the baneful effects of over-study sometimes become percept- ible before the child has left the nursery. Competitive examinations for scholarships are held by our chief public schools for very young boys at the age when they come up for their entrance examination. This practice entails hard cramming of promising boys even in pre- paratory schools. Every public school in its anxiety to get the first pick of the boys prepared at preparatory schools naturally makes the scholarship age lower and lower, and thus there is a tendency for the competition and cramming to commence fi-om an earlier and yet earlier age. This system of over-study continues in the case of boys likely to win scholarships or pass hard examinations through the years of growth, when a boy ought to be laying up stores of physical strength ; and at an earlier or later stage many break down with ruined health and exhausted spirits, miserable beings to whom life in the future can afford little joy. Having thus seen that the happiness due to the in- vention of printing is so inextricably combined with a large amount of misery due to the same cause, that it is impossible to see clearly whether tJie happiness or the THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 35 pain predominates, we may now proceed to consider the material comforts conferred upon the world by inventive activity. Certainly they have greatly increased in num- ber, especially during the last hundi'ed years, but that this increase has really added to the happiness of the world is by no means equally certain. The modern has such a much greater abundance of these comforts than the ancient that on a superficial view he would seem to be necessarily far happier. How many luxuries and conveniences are enjoyed by the London clerk that were denied to Alcibiades, and Crassus, and Thomas Beckett. Let us verify this by accompanying a London clerk through an ordinary day of his life. He comes down to his breakfast-room, the floor of which is spread with a Kidderminster carpet, while the state apartments of Thomas Beckett were strewn with clean hay or straw in winter and green boughs and rushes in summer. A tire of coal, first used in England in 1280, is burning in a well-made fireplace, and the smoke is conducted out by a chimney, whereas in the early middle ages it would have burnt in a hole in the middle of the room with an opening in the centre of the roof to emit such part of the smoke as might choose to go straight upward. And then what a comfortable, nay, comparatively speaking, luxurious breakfast does he sit down to ! He puts a lump or two of sugar, first introduced into Europe by the Venetians and Genoese in the fourteenth and fif- teenth century, or perhaps, if sugar does not agree with his health, he puts a tabloid of the recently-discovered substance called saccharine into a cup of snow-white porcelain such as was first imported into Europe from China and Japan in 1518, and first manufactui'ed in England at Chelsea in 1702. He then helps himself to tea, which was in this country in the days of Pepys ^ a novelty and an expensive luxury, or cocoa which was 1 "I sent for a cup of tea (a Chinese drink), of which I had never drank before." " Pepys' Diary," Sept. 25th, 1661. 36 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. b first brouglit from Mexico in the beginning of the six- teenth century. Beside his plate, which is also of porce- lain, is that convenient instrument a fork, which was introduced into England from Italy in the reign of James I. If not solid silver, it has been overlaid with silver through the agency of electricity. His breakfast dish may be home-made bacon or perhaps salmon that has come all the way from Labrador, or 'meat flavoured with Indian curry powder. But it woiild be tedious to follow him in the omnibus or underground railway to his desk and back again to his dinner at night. Let us rather content ourselves with enumerating a few of the modern appliances by which the coui'se of his life is made smooth and pleasant. Among them will be baro- meters, thermometers, gas, clocks, watches, steel pens, artificial ice, coffee, potatoes, tobacco, pianos, photo- graphs, postage stamps, post-cards, money orders, banks, pins, needles, bicycles, tricycles, argand lamps, lightning conductors, matches, umbrellas. All these and much else resulting from modern discoveries, the civilised man of the middle-class now enjoys, and, if he were deprived of them and compelled to live with no other comforts but those enjoyed by Alcibiades, Crassus, and Thomas Beckett, he would bemoan himself with much the same feelings as Ovid experienced when he was banished from Imperial Rome to barbarous Tomi. Yet it does not follow that he is any happier than the average member of the middle class was in past centuries. All these wonderful inventions, which would sound like fairy tales rather than sober truth to ancient Greek, or early Englishmen, are to the man of the nineteenth cen- tury matters of course. We know well enough that we do not enjoy our breakfasts of viands collected from the four corners of the earth a bit more than Queen Eliza- beth, who had to prepare herself for the labours of the day with a solid foundation of English beef, Eno-lish ale, and English bread. When a shower of rain falls, it is a THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. ^:,7 great comfort to have an umbrella to keep the drops off our face and the upper parts of our body ; but the con- stant use of umbrellas has made us so effeminately sensi- tive to wet that with our umbrellas up we suffer more from the rain that wets our trousers than our ancestors did when a shower of rain fell all over their hats, face, and clothes, or, to go further back, than our still more distant ancestors suffered when the rain fell on the painted skin of their unclothed bodies. It is very con- venient for the Englishman in India to be able to apprise his friends in England by telegram that he is at the point of death, but, if the telegraph had never been in- vented, he would never have dreamt of the possibility of so doing and would not have felt any pain at having to keep his friends waiting three weeks longer for the news. It is considered a great blessing by the travelling Eng- lishman that he is able to get to and from India in journeys of less than three weeks ; but, if loco- motives and steamships had never been invented, instead of spending the winter in India he would have con- tentedly and with equal satisfaction to himself have gone to winter in the south of France, the south of Devon- shire, or have stopped at home. Our desires are, un- fortunately, quite able to keep pace with the means of satisfying them ; so that now, while our grandparents managed to get quite well through life with little or no change of air and scene, we think, and are supported in the idea by our medical advisers, that we must for the benefit of our health occasionally take rushes to Switzer- land, Italy, Australia, America or more remote quarters of the world ; and, if we have not the money to pay the expense, we remain at home, while our friends are wan- dering abroad, and, owing to our forced inaction, feel much the same feelings as an active dog must feel in his chain. The merchant of to-day, if he cannot get a train to carry him at the rate of forty miles an hour to his family at- the sea side, suffers as much annoyance as the 38 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. traveller in coaching days felt when his coach did not go at whatever happened to be in his day the average rate of mail coaches. The pleasure derived from such sources depends entirely on custom and comparison. The most ingeniously devised contrivance, if possessed by every- 1iody, gives no more pleasure to the possessor than air or water, although, as is also the case with air and water, the deprivation of them may cause great pain. If dia- monds were as common as daisies, the possession of a diamond would afford no more pleasure than the posses- sion of a daisy. At least this is surely the case with all the complicated machinery of modern luxury. Whether the same can be said of medical contrivances for curing disease and alleviating pain must be considered in the following chapter. In considering the effects of mechanical inventions some thinkers are inclined so far to depart from the opinion of the majority as to condemn them as entirely destructive of happiness. The most eloquent exponent of this view is Mr. Ruskin.^ I have myself heard him at those charming breakfast parties in his Oxford rooms, at which he gathered round his table his fellow labourers at the Hinksey Road, anticipate half in jest, half iti earnest, the day when his disciples would pull down the railway embankments which he thinks so ugly and convert them into strawberry beds. All through his works we find continual complaints of the ugliness of the factories and railway stations and other results of modern mechanical inventions, and regret for the old times when men walked on their feet and rode horses instead of driving steam engines or being shut up in railway carriages. There is no reason why a utilitarian should not adopt this view. It is possible for the philosophical utilitarian to be utterly opposed to what are popularly but wrongly called utilitarian ideas. The true utilitarian may reason- ably prefer parks and picture galleries to factories and 1 See especially Fors Clavigera, Letter XLIV, THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 39 railway stations, and may without inconsistency oppose the tendency of modern invention which is driving the human race to earn their living as the workers of com- plicated iron machines instead of leading the open-air life of their ancestors. Only he must clearly convince himself that the change is diminishing the average happi- ness. At first sight one is inclined to think that it is having this effect. Modem invention, especially the in- vention of steam power, condemns ever-increasing num- bers of the human race to work in the grimy darkuess of mines or amid the clanging machinery of a great factory. They live in crowded towns, the ground of which is black with coal dust, while the heaven is obscured by smoke. How easy to contrast this with the open-air life of the agriculturist or the hunter among all the beauties of nature. But after all it is doubtful whether the agricultural life is any happier than that lived by factory hands. The ideas of the agricultural life formed by literary men are rather those of casual observers than of the workers themselves. The cultured man wearied with hard work in great cities enjoys a ramble through the country or a little gardening amongst the flowers of his pleasure grounds, but he should not therefore suppose that the same feelings are felt by the ditcher working all the long day in a marshy meadow with the mud rising almost to his knees. O fortimati nimiuin sua si bona norint Agricolcel But they do not know their own blessings, and therefore they are not too happy. They are not mentally capable as a rule of enjoying all the pleasures that the literary man who envies their lot derives from the scenery of forest, hill, and valley. They prefer life in the slums of a great city to rural Arcadias, and their preference should not be disregarded as the ignorant opinion of men who do not know what is good for them. Unless we have reason to the contrary, we may suppose that men know themselves best what makes for their own 40 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. happiness. Therefore the fact that so many agricultur- ists leave their country life to work in city factories, and that so few care to return to their rural life must be given due weight. Also it must be admitted that minds of a healthy temperament may derive pleasure and eleva- tion of mind even from the associations of a life among machinery. The poet of American democracy can in- clude among his joys of life the driving of a locomotive; " the engineer's joys ! to go with a locomotive ! to hear the hiss of steam, the merry shriek, the steam whistle, the laughing locomotive ! to push with resistless way and speed off in the distance," and even the miner's joys " to work in mines, or forging iron, foundry casting, the foundry itself, the rude high roof, the ample and shadowed space, the furnace, the hot liquid pour'd out and running." On the other hand, the reverse of the Utopian pictures of agricultural life usually given in literature may be seen in such works as A Village Tragedy and The History of an African Farm. Such considerations must prevent us from feeling confi- dent that an agricultural labourer's life is less miserable than that of a factory hand. On the other hand, we can scarcely think it more miserable. For it is impossible to read the accounts given of the life of the very poor in great cities, and to see their pale, haggard faces in the streets, and yet suppose that the average happiness has been really increased by the crowding into great manufactur- ing cities that has resulted from the development of mechanical art. We should rather leave the question open, and, not knowing whether man is happier or unhappier labouring in a factory than he would be labouring in the field, act as if the invention of steam power had neither improved nor diminished the average happiness of the labourer's life. CHAPTER IV. In discussing the felicific effects of the discoveries of medical science we may begin by assmning tliat good health is a source of happiness, and bad health of un- happiness. The assumption will hardly be disputed. A healthy man is pi^o tcmto happier than an unhealthy one, a healthy nation than an unhealthy nation, a healthy generation than an unhealthj? generation. This leads us to the consideration of a large number of inven- tions intended to benefit health, and of a body of profes- sional men who always consider themselves, and are generally considered by others to be in a peculiar way the promoters of the happiness of the human race. It must be admitted not only that health promotes happi- ness, but also that medical men often by their prescrip- tions free us from pain and restore us to health. He would be a rash man who in the present day would dispute the fact that quinine exerts a beneficial tendency against fever, that vaccination often saves the person vaccinated from small-pox, and that chloroform adminis- tered during surgical operations saves the patient from intense pain. This being granted, it would seem to follow that doctors in the exercise of their profession, by discovering and administering cures, increase the happiness and diminish the misery of the human race. But the argument is at any rate to a great extent fallacious. Medical science can improve the health of the individual ; but it does not necessarily follow that it can improve the health of the race. This can be most clearly seen by the consideration of the effects of the 42 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. progress made in midwifery. Why is it that savage women are without assistance delivered as easily or more easily than civilised women with all the appliances of medical science ? The reason is that the savage women being the descendants of many generations of mothers, all of whom have been able to bear children without assistance from art, have inherited that capa- bility. Savage women, who do not happen to be able to do so, die oS and leave no descendants. In civilised countries, on the contrary, women who would without medical help have no children are enabled to do so, and their children are likely to resemble their mothers when their time comes to be mothers. Yet there is no doubt this branch of the medical art benefits the individual. It saves many an individual mother from broken health and early death, even though it may do so at the expense of the general happiness. Or perhaps we should rather say "without promoting the general happiness." For it is very possible that the civilised woman with medical help manages to get through her troubles with about as little suffering as the savage mother. The fact that medical science may benefit the indivi- dual and yet not benefit the race may be proved by many instances of nations and tribes that have flourished in health and strength with no help from medicine or in spite of the popularity of cures that must have harmed the individual. The Tuaric, an African tribe, is an instance of this, stretching from ancient times to the present day. Herodotus (IV. 187) says that the healthiest men he knew were the Libyans, and that their secret of health was the burning of the veins of their forehead. According to Rawlinson the Tuaric have the best claim to be regarded as the direct descendants of the Libyans of Herodotus. Certainly they exhibit the same power of flourishing in spite of perverse ideas of the conditions of good health, and they have the same fondness for cautery as a cure. Captain Lyon, who THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 43 visited them in the beginning of the century, found that they burnt with a hot iron those afflicted with liver complaint, enlargement of spleen, asthma, consumption, rupture and stricture. Blind men had their temples burned, and pieces of onion placed between their eyes. This people had the most decided aversion to washing. " God," they said, " never intended that man should injure his health, if he could avoid it ; water having been given to man to drink and cook with, it does not agree with the skin of a Tuaric who always falls sick after much washing." Yet, in spite of this and in spite of the fact that they lived in a temperature that rose to lo3 degrees, Captain Lyon described them as being " the finest race of men he ever saw, tall, straight, and handsome." The same conclusion, that medical skill helps the in- dividual without helping the race, may be arrived at by a comparison between modern and ancient times. There is no doubt, that modern medical skill often lengthens the life of a sick man, and enables him to live to old age, when, without the doctor's aid or with only such aid as he could have got in ancient times or in the middle ages, he would have died in youth or early manhood. Yet there is every reason to believe that the average of human life is no higher now than it was in the days of ancient Greece and Rome and in the middle ages. Unfortunately, it is only possible to get very fragmentary statistics of the duration of life in ancient times. But it is better meth- odically to use such fragmentary statistics, than for any one to quote carefully selected instances of longevity or early death to support the view he himself wishes to up- hold. It might be interesting and amusing, to consider whether Masinissa at the age of 88 charging at the head of his cavalry, was a more remarkable instance of long- evity than the grandfather of the present German Em- peror, or whether Sophocles in his old age outdid the poetical work of the old age of Tennyson and Browning, or whether any ancient orator could rival the feats per- 44 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. formed by Mr. Gladstone in the eighth decade of his life. But such bandying of individual instances would be futile as a means of arriving at a probable concliisioa We are much more likely to effect our object, if we use a fair number of instances collected by some one else who was not thinking of the question of longevity, and see what conclusions they point to. Such an opportunity is afforded us by the editor of " Everybody's Pocket Cyclo- ; pasdia," who brings together the names of one hundred and nine eminent men of ancient and modern times, and incidentally mentions the dates of their birth and death. We may accept as correct the dates there given, and remove out of consideration nine famous men whose ages are either not given in the list, viz., Homer, Moses, Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha, and Pythagoras, or given conjecturally, viz., St. Paul, Hippocrates and Galen. Thus we have left one hundred eminent men, who may be divided into three classes, the first class con- taining twenty-two men who lived before the Christian era ; the second class, fifty-two men born in the Christian era before the commencement of the eighteenth century ; while the third class will consist of twenty-six persons born after the commencement of the eighteenth century. These examples, though necessarily limited in number, are in quality about as good as we could possibly have, as they consist of eminent men, and eminent men usually have the best available medical advice. So that statistics of eminent men are much better for the purpose of throwing light on the efficacy of. medical science than statistics of ordinary men. The names of the jDersons in the three classes with their ages, will be found to be as follows ; — First Class.— Pindar, 79 ; JEsohylus, 69 ; Sophocles, 90 ; Euri- pides, V4 ; Aristophanes, 64 ; Menander, 51 ; Lucretius, 40 ; Virgil, 51 ; Phidias, 59 : Praxiteles, 70 ; Socrates, 70 ; Plato, 81 Aristotle, 62 ; Herodotus, 78 ; Thucydides, 69 : Demosthenes, 63 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 45 Oicero, 63 ; Archimedes, 75 ; Pericles, 70 ; Alextiuder, 33 ; Hanni- bal, 64 ; Csesar, 56. Second Class. — Dante, 60 ; Rabelais, 70 ; Cervantes, 69 ; Shake- speare, 52 ; Milton, 66 ; Moliere, 51 : Leonardo da Vinci, 67 ; Michael Angelo, 89 ; Raphael, 37 ; Correggio, 60 ; Titian, 96 .; Rubens, 63 ; Rembrandt, 62 ; Bach, 65 ; Handel, 74 ; Mahomet, 62 ; St. Augustine, 76 ; St. Bernard, 62 ; St. Francis of .4ssisi, 44 ; Erasmus, 70 ; Luther, 63 ; Calvin, 55 ; Loyola, 65 : Bossuet, 87 ; St. Thomas Aquinas, 47 ; Bacon, 65 ; Descartes, 54 ; Spinoza, 45 ; Locke, 72 ; Leibnitz, 70 ; Berkeley, 68 ; Tacitus, 63 ; Plutarch, 70 ; Montaigne, 59 ; Montesquieu, 66 ; Voltaire, 84 ; Copernicus, 70 ; Kepler, 59 ; Galileo, 78 ; Harvey, 79 ; Newton, 85 ; Charlemagne 72 ; Alfred the Great, 52 : William the Conqueror, 60 ; Charles V., 58 ; William the Silent, 51 ; Richelieu, 57 ; Cromwell, 59 ; Peter the Great, 53 ; Guttenberg, 68 ; Columbus, 70 ; Palissy, 80. Third Class.— Goethe, 83 ; Scott, 61 ; Mozart, 35 ; Beethoven, 58 ; J. Wesley, 88 ; Hume, 65 ; Kant, 80 ; Diderot, 71 ; Lessing, 52 ; Gibbon, 57 ; Linnseus, 71 : Lavoisier, 51 ; Bichat, 31 ; Cuvier, 63 ; Frederick, 74 ; Washington, 67 ; Jefferson, 83 ; Nelson, 47 ; Napoleon, 52 ; Wellington, 83 ; Franklin, 84 ; Montgolfier, 70 ; Howard, 64 ; Arkwright, 60 ; J. Watt, 83 ; Stephenson, 67. Omitted from the lists owing to uncertainty of age at death. — Homer, Moses, Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha, St. Paul, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Galen. Anj'one who works out the sum will fiad that the average age of the first class is CSJrr, of the second class, 64||, and of the third class 65i§. These statistics show no clear evidence of prolongation of the average of life hav- ing been secured by the great advance made in medical science during the last two centuries. Of the lives mentioned in the list, but not included in the statistics above, Moses, as we read in the Bible, " was one hundred and twenty years old when he died," and we are given the following additional information interesting from a medical point of view that " his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated." Hippocrates is credited in the list with a hundred and three years of life, but the editor has put a note of interrogation after the dates, so that it seems safer to leave him out of consideration. Gould Hippocrates and Moses, or Hippocrates alone have been 4.6 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. added to the first class of lives, the lives before the Christian era would have attained a decidedly higher average than either of the two subsequent periods. Galen's years are given as seventy in the cyclopsedia, the dates being followed by a note of interrogation as in the case of Hippocrates. His inclusion in the second class would raise the average of the second class to over 66, while the insertion of St. Paul, who, according to the dates given in the list, lived either 62 or 65 years, would slightly reduce it. Let us now take another comparison. We must still confine ourselves to eminent men as the ancient world gives us no statistics of the longevity of ox'dinary men. Statesmen will not give us a fair comparison, as those who engaged in politics in ancient days had their lives so very often shortened by constant wars, executions or political assassination. Literary men will, however, afiord a fair basis of compaiison, and let us this time confine ourselves to them only, taking care not to choose our instances. In the account given in the Encyclopssdia Britannica of Greek Literature down to its decadence, if we take the names of all the Greek poets and prose writers mentioned therein and look them out in Smith's bio- graphical dictionary, we find a conjectural or uncon- jectural statement given of the age of twenty-eight of them. They will be found to be Solon, 80 ; Xenophanes over 90 ; Bimonides of Ceos, 89 ; Anacreon, 85 ; Stesi- chorus, 80 ; Pindar, 80 ; .^schylus, 69 ; Sophocles, 90 ; Euripides, 75 ; Cratinus, 97 ; Eupolis, 35 ; Aristophanes, 64 ; Herodotus, 77 at least ; Anaximander, 64 ; Hel- lanicus, 85 ; Thucydides, 70 at most ; Antiphon, 69 ; Xenophon, over 90 ; Gorgias, 105 or 109 ; Andocides, at least 74; Lysias, 80; Isocrates, 98; Demosthenes, 63; iEschines, 75 ; Lycurgus, about 73 ; Plato, 82 ; Aristotle, 63 ; Theophrastus, 85 or 107. For the purposes of our calculation we may ascribe to (iorgias and Theophrastus THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 47 the ages of 107 and 9G, the means between the two extremes given in the dictionary. The average age will then be found to be considerably over 78, and this wonder- fully high average would not be diminished by excluding the ages given conjecturally, as among the conjectural ages is the age of Eupolis given at 35. Let us compare with this the literary men who happen to be mentioned in the last period of English Literature sketched in the same Encyclopedia, taking their ages from Vincent's " Dictionary of Biography," published in 1878. They are Wordsworth, 80; Coleridge, 62; Southey, 69 ; Scott, 61 ; Burke, 68 ; Shelley, 30 ; Byron, 33 ; Mary Godwin, 38; Senior, 74; Horner, 39; Romilly, 61; Ricardo, 51 ; Mill, 67 ; M'Culloch, 75 ; Lancaster, 63 ; Ball, 80 ; Harriet Martineau, 74 ; Elliott, 68 ; Moore, 73. The average age of these nineteen persons is between 61 and 62. If it be objected that of these Shelley was drowned and Eomilly committed suicide, we need only glance our eyes over the ancient list to find that it includes two suicides, Isocrates and Demosthenes, and Antiphon who was put to death. If it be objected that the English list only reaches down to 1832, since when medical science has made brilliant and rapid progress, I reply that medical science has surely made immense strides between the days of Aristotle and the beginning of the present century, and that the comparison indicates clearly enough the in- efficacy of that progress to increase average longevity. It is possible that the extraordinarily rapid advance of medical science since the beginning of this century may have temporarily increased longevity, but, for the reasons given below, this improvement can hardly be permanent. ^nd even the death rate of eminent men during the last few years cannot rival that of the great Greek poets, historians, and oratoi'S. To support this, let us examine the obituary list given in Whitaker's Almanack for 1890. 48 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. It gives the ages at death of 238 eminent men who died in 1888-1889, and the average will be found to be a little under 70, a wonderfully high average, but far below the average taken from the literary men of ancient Greece. Thus, on the whole, it is clear that eminent men en- joyed about as long lives in ancient as in modern times, and it is natural, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to infer that the generalisation may be ex- tended to the lives of ordinary men, that is, of the whole human race. The men of the ancient world and of the middle ages lived just as long as we do in the nineteenth century, and, if they lived as long, it is natural to suppose that they enjoyed just as good health. So that medical science seems to have done nothing to im- prove the health or lengthen the life of the human race as a whole. Had it done so, it would have promoted happiness. For health promotes happiness, and short lives and frequent deaths involve much painful mourning among bereft relations and friends. If it be asked how medical science can improve the health of the individual without improving the health of the race, the answer is not far to seek. In fact the explanation has been given above in considering the obstetric branch of medical science. We have only to apply more generally the explanation there given. A hint towards the solution may be found in the Republic of Plato, who praises Asclepius because " bodies, which disease had penetrated through and through, he would not have attempted to cure by gradual process of evacuation and infusion ; he did not want to lengthen out useless lives, or that weak fathers should beget weaker sons ; if a man was not able to live in the ordinary way he had no business to cure him, for he would have done no good either to the man himself or to the state." Medical science, if its operation could be strictly limited according to the lines laid down by Plato, would increase the average health and happiness. There THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 49 are cases in which a sick man after his cure is likely to enjoy more than the average health. If an exceptionally healthy man is saved from dying of cholera, he may be as healthy after his cure as he was before he was ill, and the saving of such a life is a gain to the average health and happiness. In other cases a man who is below the average health may, by medical skill, be improved in health so much as to enjoy more than the average health. It is not, however, to be expected that either by legal enactment or public opinion doctors will ever be com- pelled to confine their ministrations to those whom they have a fair chance of raising above the average health. But until such restrictions are laid upon doctors, medical science cannot be admitted to be a constant element in the diminution of the sum of human pain. Medical science, as long as it cures without discrimination all who can pay their doctor's bills or get attendance for nothing, does good to the general health by giving good health to the moderately health}^ but it cancels its good work by enabling those, who would otherwise die, to live on in bad health, and in some cases produce offspring inheriting their weakness and transmitting it to a third generation. And it must be remembered that the mere prevention of the death of individuals, unless it leads to a rise in the average health and leng-th of life, is a doubtful benefit to the general happiness. Every life saved by a doctor may be expected to diminish the sum of misery by saving his relations and friends from the grief of bereavement. But on the other hand, as there is only a limited amount of subsistence in the earth at a given time, every death leaves more to be divided among those who do not die. And the saving of lives makes the struggle for existence harder than it would otherwise be. The death of the bread- winner of a family leaves his wife and children destitute, but may enable some other father of a family who suc- ceeds to his vacant post to support his family, which would otherwise have suffered from want. On these D 50 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. grounds the mere saving of life, unless it improves the average health and length of life, is a doubtful benefit to the world, and every doctor should realise the fact that, by enabling a dying man to live, he probably somewhere in the world causes a living man to die, and so benefits the payer of his fee at the expense of some unknown person. Let him therefore abstain from supposing him- self a benefactor of the human race on the score of all such triumphs of his art. The medical man who in the exercise of his profession saves lives, by so doing some- times increases and sometimes decreases the general happi- ness. He generally increases it when the person saved lives on in more than average health, and generally decreases it when the person saved is so weakened by the disease of which he is cured that his health is below the average. But some will oppose this reasoning and these statistics by other statistics which seem to point in the opposite direction, and to show that the saving of lives by modern medical science is proved by the increased length of life to have improved the average health. It is popularly believed that the death I'ate in the nine- teenth centuiy is far lower than it ever was befox'e, and this l)elief is supported by appeals to statistics. We read in " Chambers' Information for the People," that " in England during the period 1690-1820 the ratio of deatlis to the population fell no less than two fifths." This state- ment so confidently put forward cannot rest on any sure foundation. Mr. N. A. Humphreys, in the " Statistical Journal " for June, 1883, remarks that "It is scarcely necessary to say that very little is known of the variations in the annual death-rate in England prior to the establish- ment of civil registration in 1837. The Eegistrar-General's mortality statistics embrace the forty -five years, 1838-1882, and constitute the only trustworthy basis for calculations as to the duration of life in England." The conclusion arrived at in " Chambers' Information for the People " must depend partly on London Bills of Mortality, and THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 5 1 partly on the experience of insurance companies, etc. The evidence of the former source of information cannot be applied without danger to the whole of England. It is quite possible that sanitary improvements might tempor- arily improve the death-rate of great cities without afiecting the rural districts. In fact, this is a difference that we should naturally expect even without the guid- ance of statistics. In the country there is less room for sanitary improvement. The death-rate in great cities may partly be attributed to rural immigrants unaccus- tomed to the sanitary or unsanitary conditions of life in great cities. This part of the city death-rate will be lessened by sanitary improvement, and at the same time the old civic population, as their families have been long settled in the city, the sanitary condition of which has been improved, being descended from ancestors well weeded by much more trying sanitary circumstances, will die less plentifully until their average power of resisting disease has been weakened by the less stringent natural selection due to improved sanitation. These considerations show that the health of great cities may improve without a corresponding improvement in the country generally. And this conclusion is verified by the returns of the Registrar- General for the current decade, which are as follows :— 1531-1SS6. 1887. 1888. Urban Districts, Rural Districts, 20 3 17-S ]9-7 17-2 18-4 16-7 These figures show that tlie Ijite improvement in health has been about twice as great in cities as in the country. Further, owing to the practice of selection, the experi- ence of insurance companies is not by any means to be relied upon. The advance of medical science enables the medical advisers of companies more unerringly every year to reject bad lives. It is probable that when insur- ance companies were first started they rejected fewer lives, 52 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. and it is certain that the conditions of longevity being then less known the rejections were made with less skill. So that the improvement in assured lives cannot be ex- pected to be true of the whole population. Neverthe- less, although the consultation of mortality tables and of the records of insurance companies has undoubtedly given an exaggerated view of tlie improvement in health before 1838, there is still room to believe that there was a very distinct progress made in this respect between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. But is this progress, if it may safely without reliable statistics be assumed to have taken place, due to sanit- ation and medical science or to some more potent cause ? In the middle of the seventeenth century the English nation began to drink spirits on a large scale, and so in- troduced into their midst a terrible engine of destruction. From 1691 to 1708 the annual consumption of home made spirits on which duty was paid rose from 539,868 to 1,155,063 gallons, and in 17.no it had reached 6,440,454 gallons. The sudden introduction of this deadly plague must have made the death-rate abnormally high at the end of the seventeenth century, and the rapidly increasing popularity of the poison until 1735, the year of the gin bill, must have kept it high. But as time went on, like all other plagues it began to work its own cure. Most of the Englishmen living in the beginning of the nineteenth century were descendants of two or three generations who had managed to drink spirits and live and have children. Though they still went on drinking about as much spirits as their ancestors, the process of natural selection that had been goincr on before they were born enabled them to bear it better. Thus, at the beginning of this century, England was only struggl- ing back by the action of natural selection to the normal death-rate which had lieen temporarily suspended by the drinking of spirits. No one pretends 'that the death-rate rt THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 53 is absolutely fixed. What appears to be the truth is that it swings back and forward on either side of the mean death-rate witli the oscillatory movement of a pendulum. Having been violently disturbed by the introduction of the practice of drinking spirits in the end of the seventeenth century, it began to approach the mean again in the begin- ning of the nineteentJi, and remained there for some time. Mr. Humphreys points out in the article already quoted that, " although the death-rate varied from year to year, it may be said to have remained practically stationary during the thirty years 1838-70." Since then there has however been a marked improvement. The mean death-rate for England from 1871 to 1880 was 21'5, and from 1881-1888 it was 19'2, the best two years recorded being ISS for 1887 and 17-8 for 1888. This improvement may be attributed to sanitary improve- ments, especially to the improved sanitation in great cities in which the decrease of the death-i-ate has been most conspicuous, but, unless the improvement in sanita- tion goes on for ever at the same rate as in this decade, the death-rate is likely first to cease to improve and then to move in a retrograde direction, as the average human being becomes weakened by those who are from a health point of view unfit being helped to survive. But sanitation cannot be expected to go on improving for ever. Immediately it ceases to improve, the death-rate will tend to rise. For if the sanitarj^ condition in Eng- land, after improving steadily year by year up to the year x, after that year ceases to improve, and is the same in the year x -I- 1 as it was in the year x, a larger proportion may expect to die in the latter than in the former year, because those living in the former year will have been better weeded by themselves and their an- cestors having lived in years all of which bad been in- ferior from a sanitary point of view, while those living in the latter year will have missed, at least for the im- mediately preceding year, the advantage of a more 54 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. stringent natural selection than they will be exposed to in the year x + 1. There is, however, a particular class of medical dis- coveries to which the above disparaging reasoning does not apply, because their chief claim to value is not so much that they promote the health of individuals and prolong their lives, though they may effect this also, but that they directly diminish or annihilate pain. Anaes- thetics thus stand on quite a different footing from merely curative drugs, and require separate consideration to see whether they promote general happiness. When a man suffering from great pain escapes that pain by taking chloroform, the diminution of his misery is not gained at the expense of any other being. Nor is there any reason why the anresthetic which drives away pain in his case should in other cases be productive of pain. So far as anaesthetics are instrumental in the prolonging of in- dividual lives and restoring health to individuals, they are no more productive of happiness than any other remedies, but in so far as they simply banish pain they are a clear addition to the happiness of the human race. Thus the inventors of anaesthetics may be regarded as men who have increased the happiness of the human race, unless the anaesthetic produces after effects of a more painful character than the pain escaped. All that can be said on the other side is that some people by the excessive use of anaesthetics ruin their health and shorten their lives. This is as true, though in a less degree, of anaesthetics, as it is of alcohol. Yet, if it has been proved satisfactorily that vaccination, quinine and all the other cures and preventives of disease that have ever been invented have had no appreciable effect in improving the health of the human race, it follows that the use of drugs productive of disease, however ruinous to the individual, cannot per- manently decrease the general health and happiness. Although, like alcohol, at their first introduction they may increase the death-rate, as time goes on, and those THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 55 who have not strength of mind to avoid them, or are not healthy enough to use them with impunity, die out by the process of natural selection, these drugs will not affect the death-rate any more than the excessive cold of Norway, or the excessive heat of Central Africa. So that the direct good effect of anfesthetics in preventing pain, does not seem really to be counterbalanced by any general permanent bad effects on the health and happiness of the human race. The consideration of anaesthetics naturally suggests the advisability of euthanasia as a means for the increase of happiness. The term euthanasia has been used in two senses, in both of which it deserves to have its felicific effects estimated. Bacon in the " Advancement of Learn- ing " recommends euthanasia, and means by the word the diminution or extinction of the pains of dying. " I esteem it,'' he writes, " the ofBce of a physician not only to restore health, but to mitigate pain and dolors, and not only when such mitigation may conduce to recovery, but when it may serve to make a fair and easy passage : for it is no small felicity which Augustus Csesar was wont to wish to himself that same euthanasia, and which was especially noted in the death of Antoninus Pius, whose death was after the fashion and semblance of a kindly and pleasant sleep. So it is written of Epicurus, that, after his disease was judged desperate, he drowned his stomach and senses with a large draught and ingurgitation of wine ; whereupon the epigram was made : — Hino Stygias ebrius hausit aquas : he was not sober enough to taste any bitterness of the Stygian water. But the physicians contrariwise, do make a kimi of scruple and religion to stay with the patient after the disease is deplored ; whereas, in my judgment, they ought both to inquire the skill, and to give the attendances for the facilitating and assuag- .56 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. ing of the pains and agonies of death." _ Certainly euthanasia in this sense is in every way desirable from a utilitarian point of view. So far as the members of the medical faculty have by anajsthetics or other means succeeded in diminishing the pains of death, they have made a clear addition to the happiness of the human race. It is only when the extinction of pain enables those who would otherwise have died to live on in bad health that its f elicific effects become doubtful. But some have gone farther than Bacon and recom- mended under the name of euthanasia not merely diminution of the pains of death but painless extinction of life in the case of painful and incurable disease. They have ventured to argue that, when a man is so overcome by the pains of an incurable disease that his life is a source of continual pain to himself and others, it would be better for happiness that he should be painlessly put out of misery. No doubt it would be better for the individual sufferer, and, if he could be painlessly killed by other than human agency, his gain would diminish the happiness of no one else, and would therefore be an addition to the happiness of the world. But it is a very different matter to recommend that such a person should be killed painlessly by his doctor after consultation with his nearest relatives. While there is life there is hope. How often have doctors given up as incurable the case of a patient who has nevertheless eventually recovered ! Much would be added to the misery of the sick if they were continually in fear of having their dear lives taken away without their consent. But worst of all would be the mutual suspicion engendered by such a course between the nearest relations, and between the patient and his physicians and nurses. Such evils would certainly not be less than the bodily pain from which the individual sufferer would be saved by accelerating the hour of his death. CHAPTER V. Having found that medical science by interfering with the natural struggle for existence, and enabling those to live and have children, who would without its assistance have died childless at an early age, counteracts the good it would otherwise, by giving good health to those who were slightly unhealthy, have done to the race, we naturally proceed to consider the opposite extreme, which will be found in infanticide and other customs by which man has deliberately set about the task of assist- ing nature in weeding out the weaker, unhealthier specimens of the human type. Would it promote the happiness of the world to simply add to the number of destructive agencies in the world, say by abolishing vaccination in order to allow small- pox to rage uncontrolled, or by promoting famine, or by advocating that men should exj)0se themselves more to damp and cold by forswearing houses and clothes ? In answer to this question, a distinction must be made between two classes of diseases. Some permanently weaken even those who recover from them. Therefore, the utilitarian would immediately dismiss the idea of promoting those diseases, as they would obviously not only kill the weak, but also weaken the strong. But there may be, and are certain diseases which kill the weak, and leave no effects of an evil character upon those who are strong enough to recover from them. Thus, while recovery from a sore throat leaves behind it increased liability to the same attack, which liability may doubtless be transmitted to descendants, quite the 58 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. opposite is the case with sniall-pox and some other dis- eases. Small-pox, as a rule, when it fails to kill, leaves no evil effects behind. The person who has recovered is no weaker, and is indeed fortified against small-pox in the future, and probably transmits a tendency to similar immunity. In this way the prevalence of small-pox in one generation increases the health of the next generation, which will be composed of a large number of children of parents either not liable to small-pox, or strong enough to recover from it. From these considera- tions, it would appear that small-pox may be good for the health of the next generation. But as this ad- vantage is gained at the expense of a large amount of disease and death in the present generation, the advantage of the future is obtained at the expense of the present, and not improbably the plus and minus quantities would be found just about to cancel each other. Is there then no means by which this advantage to future generations may be secured without the present generation suffering from disease, and without the mourn- ing occasioned by grief for the untimely death of human beings in the hearts of the bereaved ? Several peoples have tried to improve their condition by weeding out their weaker members, but none of them have quite succeeded in effecting this in accordance with utilitarian principles. The remedy has generally been found to be as bad as, if not worse than, the evils intended to be cured. The most common form which the effort has taken is infanticide, which was commonly practised by the ancient Greeks, and, until quite recently, by the natives of India. This method of eliminating the weak is in three ways preferable to the elimination by means of disease. Infanticide is more thorough. It kills out- right all those who are condemned, whereas many dis- eases inflicting pains equal to those of death, instead of killing leave the victim alive, but weak, to suffer the THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 59 pains of ill-health for many years. Secondly, infanticide does not inflict so much pain as disease, inasmuch as infants can be quickly killed without suffering much bodily pain, and are entirely free from the mental pains of anticipated death. Thirdly, infanticide makes a better selection than disease. Though disease more often attacks and kills the weak than the strong, there are many cases in which strong men and women are carried off by disease when the weak escape. Such ex- ceptions may also have happened in the case of infanti- cide, but much more rarelj^ Occasionally an unhealthy- looking infant may grow up into a healthy man, and a healthy infant may become an unhealthy man. But such unexpected developments certainly happen in a much smaller proportion of cases than the exceptions to the rule that disease attacks and kills the weaker and spares the stronger. But these three advantages, though they must make infanticide really improve the health of the people among whom it is practised, are counterbalanced by the one great disadvantage that it is carried out by human agency and by the will of the parents of the child. The diminution of happiness due to the violation of the saeredness of human life, and to the dissolution of the ties of parental affection must be at least as great as the increase of happiness due to the improvement of the average health really secured by infanticide. Among the Spartans an attempt was made to sujiplement infanticide. New- born infants were bathed in wine, which was supposed to strengthen the strong and kill the weak. Although no one will now believe that a wine bath could have been so doubly efficacious, the plan is interesting as an attempt to secure an ideally perfect elimination of weaker individuals. Other peoples are said to have practised the opposite of infanticide and to have killed their old men and women. Thus, according to Strabo, the Derbices killed 6o THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. and ate all who passed the age of seventy, and the Caspians killed but did not eat those who had passed the same age. No doubt seuicide, like infanticide, was due to rough utili- tarian calculations such as could be made by barbarian in- tellects. It was argued that, food being scarce, it was better for the tribe to get rid of their older members, who could not do much work. It was doubtless also a point in favour of the practice that old men were really incapable of enj oying life like young men. Therefore it was deemed expedient to despatch them, and the Derbices went to a farther length in brutal utilitarianism by making the dead bodies of the old men add to their stock of food. Similar to senieide was the custom followed by the Massagetee (Herodotus i. 216) and the Indian Padseans of killing those who were ill. Of the Padaeans we read in Herodotus that "If one of their number be ill, man or woman, they take the sick person, and if he be a man the men of his acquaintance proceed to put him to death, because they say his flesh would be spoilt for them if he pined and wasted away with sickness. The man protests he is not ill in the least ; but his friends will not accept his denial — in spite of all he can say they kill him and feast themselves on his body. So also if a woman be sick the women who are her friends take her and do with her exactly the same as the men." (Raw- linsou's Herodotus iii. 99.) The humorous account of Herodotus illustrates how naturally, when once the sacredness of human life is forgotten, interested motives lead to killing beyond the bounds originally laid do'mi. At first we may suppose that only those incurably ill were killed, but unscrupulous persons in time of want would stretch the regulation in a way which they thought would conduce to the general good, by killing those afflicted even with slight indisposition. A society among whom such regulations existed would at least have the advantage of escaping from the annoyance caused to his friends and relations by a hypochondriac's THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. affectation of illness, which is so often an excuse for idleness and ill temper. No Padasan would renture to impose upon the sympathies of his friends hy playing the part of a onalade imaginwire. Sometimes in the struggle for existence, whole peoples are eliminated by pestilence or by war, and give place to other peoples. The most conspicuous instance of this is the disappearance or decrease of the natives of Australia and America on the advent of European settlers who have destroyed the natives as much by introducing fire water and new diseases as by war. The effect upon happiness of such a substitution of stronger in the place of weaker races has already been partly discussed in considering the effects of the invention of the mariner's compass. For this invention led to the discovery of America, and one principal effect of that discovery has been the disap- pearance of the aboriginal Indians before the face of white immigrants, men of a superior race. The displace- ment of the Indians in America, however, had one peculiar feature in the immense increase of population which does not always accompany the extermination or diminution of weaker by stronger races. When, as in North America and Australia, the stronger conquering race is agricultural and manufacturing, while the inferior con- quered race is, for the most part, composed of hunters, great increase of population is the natural result of the conquest. But this need not always be the case. The populations of Peru and Mexico may have been as great before the Spanish conquest as at the present date. So that, in some cases, even those who have made up their minds on the question in dispute between optimists and pessimists are not thereby enabled to settle whether general happi- ness is affected favourably or unfavourably by war be- tween nation and nation, between race and race. Indeed, it cannot be satisfactorily determined whether war does or does not, on the whole, increase the population of the world. On the one hand, the conquering nation is probably superior 62 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. in knowledge and thereby enabled to get more production out of the earth than the conquered. On the other hand, the conquering nation is not unlikely to have a higher btandard of comfort which will prevent the population from increasing in proportion to its increasing means of subsistence. Also the prevalence of war, by withdrawing a large proportion of the population from productive work, tends to diminish population, and the insecurity due to the fear of war together with the actual destruc- tion of life and property in war has the same effect. We must therefore, in many cases, treat the question as if the result of war would not affect the amount of population, and ask simply whether the average member of a conquering race is likely to be happier than ohe average member of the conquered race. Let us consider concrete instances. Were the Jews happier than the Canaanites ? the Persians than the Assyrians ? the Greeks and Macedonians than the Persians ? the Romans than the Greeks and Carthaginians ? the Saracens than the Christians of the Eastern Empire ? the Saxons than the Britons ? the Normans than the Saxons ? or, looking at the recent colonization of once savage countries by Anglo-Saxon and other settlers, we may ask whether .they are happier than the savages whom they displace. In the case of the last instance we can most easily observe for ourselves, if we care to travel, the two sides of the comparison, and without travelling we can refer to the abundant testimony of many modern travellers. Yet room remains for much difference of opinion. " What a vast mass of cannibalism," remarks Sir James Mackintosh, " was the whole population of Brazil ! To have replaced it by the most corrupt Europeans was one of the greatest benefits to the world." But Sir James Mackintosh had never visited savages at home. Mr. Hume Nisbet, who in New Guinea made tlie acquaintance of some of the most savage inhabi- tants of the world, formed a different opinion. "On THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 63 the whole," he writes in his Land of the Hibiscus Blossom, " I think we civilised savages murdei* as much and as atrociously as the so-called savages do in dark lands, even though we may not eat our victims ; and, aside from this evil, I fancy that they are happier in their simplicity than we are with our vaunted civilisation. . . . Looking on the savages of New Guinea from a material standpoint, I think that they are much more com- fortable as they now are than are our English poor — indeed, than many of our English middle classes — who are fighting so madly for an existence, while they, the natives, bask away luxuriously on tlieir coral-fringed and sunny sands." It is difficult to be confident in an opinion opposed to that of many travellers who have passed a good part of their life among savages. But as other travellers hold the other opinion which is more agreeable to our feelings as civilised men, one is inclined, though not without doubt, to believe that civilised men are happier than savages. Perhaps we may also venture to regard it as probable that, as a rule, conquering nations are happier than the conquered were before the conquest, and that, therefore, the world is happier now thaia it would have been if wars had not raged in the past. Should the utilitarian then form societies for the encouragement of war ? He cannot reasonably do so, unless he has reason to suppose that the increase of happiness due to the imposition of a more orderly or otherwise happier life on the conquered, or to the substi- tution of stronger in the place of weaker nations, out- balances the accumulation of evils included in the horrors of war. But this conviction is scarcely possible to anyone who reads reflectively the accounts of campaigns given by historians, and more especially by war correspondents who have seen the dying and the dead lying before their eyes on the bare ground, and the wretched inhabitants of the theatre of war driven destitute out of their burning houses. But even if the utilitarian were con- 64 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. vinced that war does on the whole more good than harm, he would still shrirdc from encouraging it, and rather exert himself to diminish its frequency. For war, if a good at all, is one of that class of good things which are only good in moderation. An individual's health may be improved by a daily walk of five miles, but a daily walk of tbirty miles would lead not to increased health, but to ill health. In like manner, though a limited amount of war might con- ceivably be beneficial, a larger amount of war than there has hitherto lieen in the world would almost certainly be very destructive of happiness. Therefore the utilitarian, although of course he may approve of particular wars waged against tyranny, will never approve of war for its own sake, that is, for its general consequences only. Even if he thinks that the general consequences of war may be good and more than out- balance the pain it causes, he will not promote war in the abstract, but rather discourage it, knowing tliat up to the present time the angry passions of individuals and nations have provided more than the amount of war required gradually to eliminate inferior races, and remembering that the useful struggle for existence may be as efiectually carried on by industrial competition and other methods less painful than war. Much more will he do his best to extinguish war if he thinks, as most iitilitarians probably do think, that war in any form or amount is such a painful remedy, that it can never, except in exceptional circumstances, be productive of more happiness than misery. There- fore it will be the duty of utilitarians carefully to consider by what means war may be totally extin- guished or rendered less common. The introduction of arbitration has perhaps done something to diminish the frequency of M^ar, and the utilitarian should encourage the more fxtensive employ- ment of this method of settling disputes. At the sam ; THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 65 time there is a clanger which interferes with the paci- ficatory effect of all such milder substitutes for war, as long as the possibility of war remains. When war is the only means of settling national dilierence.s, nations are very careful of pressing such differences to extremity, knowing that the result may be war. But, when there is a chance of arbitration settling differences, nations may be inclined to enter into national disputes with as light a heart, as that with which some indivi- duals enter into litigation, and yet after all eventually such angry passions may be roused that arbitration will be found impossible, and the contending parties may have to resort to war after all. However in spite of this danger arbitration may be readily supported by the utilitarian as on the whole furthering the cause of peace. Another fact, that has diminished the amount of fight- ing in the world, is the tendency that has manifested itself since the beginning of history towards the division of the human race into larger and larger political aggregates. In ancient Greece, divided as it was into small states, war was terribly frequent. For each small state was surrounded by other small states, with whom it had every now and then to engage in war. Nor did these frequent small wars prevent wars on a large scale. For besides the very petty wars of one Greek state against another, there were wars like the Peloponnesian war of one confederacy of small states against another confederacy, and also national wars against Persians, Macedonians, Carthaginians, and Romans. If war were the best process of natural selection, the Greeks ought to have gone on rapidly from strength to strength, but history shows that they I'apidly deteriorated in the midst of continual warfare, and probably, it may be added, because of their continual warfare. If England, France, Germany, and the other countries of Europe, were split up into small states like ancient Greece, war would be incessantly going on in modern Europe also. 66 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. But oven as things are, in spite of arbitration and the large nations into which the world is now divided, the utilitarian will think there is too much of war, and will consider whether there are not any other means by which its comparative freqiiency may be diminished. One very practicable scheme for effecting this object has either been entirely overlooked or not sufficiently re- cognised. It is suggested by the existence of the British volunteer force. Si vis pacem para helium is an old adage, and the most efficient peace-making way of pre- paring for war is that adopted by the British volunteers and others who strictly follow the motto, " defence not defiance." Owing to the existence of her volunteer force enlisted for the defence of her native soil in case of invasion and not for service abroad, Britain is much stronger for defensive than for offensive war. For offensive warfare, we have only our small standing army with its small reserve, while, if England were invaded, there are more than half a million of men in arms to drive out the invader. From this state of affairs, Eng- land naturally abstains from attempting to pursue an aggressive policy except sometimes in colonial wars against savage peoples, and on the other hand even the strongest foreign power is not much tempted to attack England and land an army on her coasts. The chief defect in the English volunteer force is that it is not quite large enough at present to make successful invasion impossible. If it could be increased to about one million of men, England could laugh to scorn the idea of invasion. There is no reason why this increase should not be made. Military training would, in the case of the large number of Englishmen engaged in sedentary em- ployments, be a distinct gain. It would promote their health and happiness, and convenient times for drill and parade could be chosen, which would not interfere with peaceful avocations any more than other kinds of healthy bodily exercise. Therefore, every English utili- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 67 tarian should do his best to increase the power of the volunteer force by joining it himself and inducing others to do so, and every utilitarian throughout the world should exert himself in favour of the formation of a volunteer force on the same principle in his own nation. If large enough defensive armies cannot be obtained by voluntary enlistment, let us have conscription for purely defensive purposes. When all the great powers of Europe have each one million of men enlisted for de- fence against invasion, and never required under any circumstances to cross the borders, a great step will have been taken to establish universal peace. For what nation would venture rashly to attack another nation with the knowledge that one million of its best soldiers could not join in the invasion, and that the invading army would be opposed by an overwhelming superiority of defensive force ? There is another kind of struggle for existence carried on between people and people on a vast scale not by war but by industrial competition, the effect of which might be very prejudicial to happiness. This has been recog- nised hy some nations who have, by calling in the aid of laws, tried to defend themselves against the evil effects of being worsted in such a struggle. The laws on this subject have not indeed been prompted by purely utili- tarian considerations. When tlie United States or our Australian colonies pass laws to keep out Chinese cheap labour from their territories, they are actuated by the consideration of their own happiness alone, to which they would, if necessary, sacrifice any amount of Chinese happiness. Yet such legislation might perhaps be justi- fied by pure utilitarian considerations. There is a real danger of the Chinese overrunning the world and every- where underselling all industrial competitors by the smallness of the wages on which they can keep them- selves in life and health. What would be the result upon general happiness if all over the world cheap yellow 68 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. labour were to take the place of our white labourers in the held and in the workshop ? The immediate result would undoubtedly be much misery among the displaced white workmen, who would suffer terribly from starva- tion and almost more from their indignation at being driven out of existence by an inferior race of men. This indignation would express itself in continual riots that would inflict pain upon white assailants and still more on the weaker yellow men. Nor would the latter feel in their triumph happiness equivalent in amount to a tithe of the misery suffered by the starving and indig- nant white men. Thus the immediate results would be an immense amount of unmitigated misery. Nor does it appear that there would be any ultimate good results to compensate fo]- all this woe. Would the happiness of the . world be found to have been permanently increased, when the heartburnings of the displaced white worker had been mitigated by custom or diminished in aggregate amount by the dying out of the majority of the white population ? There is rather reason to anticipate the contrary. In the moral elements of happiness, which will probably be found to be more important than any other, the Chinese seem to be decidedly inferior to Americans, Englishmen, and continental Europeans. Perhaps, however, this opinion may be a wrong opinion naainly due to experience of the inferior and less respect- able Chinamen who emigrate to America. Those who, like the author of TJi^e Middle Kingdom, have lived long in China have much to say in favour of the Chinese at home. At any rate, we have no reason to suppose that the Chinese are on the average happier than ourselves. Thus the world would not be rendered permanently happier if this very painful change, that we are consider- ing, were effected, and, of course, on utilitarian grounds a change painful in itself and not leading to any distinct gain must be condemned. Therefore, utilitarian states- men are justified in supporting laws for the exclusion of THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 6g Chinamen from territory now occupied by white men; and utilitarian Chinamen should, if they recognise the moral inferiority and consequent lesser, or not greater, hap- piness of their countrymen, be conservative on t^uestions of emigration. At present old laws absolutely forbid emigration, and in consequence no women, and only such disreputable members of the community as can do with- out female society and have no respect for their own law and religion, emigrate. In the same way the natives of India have a religious horror of crossing the sea, by crossing which they incur guilt only to be atoned by severe penance. But, perhaps, the change so much to be dreaded may be brought about without a native of India or China leav- ing his native land. Facility of communication is bringing the remotest corners of the earth into keen industrial competition with each other. Already this competition is beginning to tell with terrible effect on European agriculturalists. Com raised by the labour of natives of India working for wages of 2d. or 3d. per day comes in large quantities into European markets, and can be sold at a price which even now renders it almost impossible for employers of agricultural labour in England and France to make any profit out of their lands. It is true that the English and French labourer does far moie work in a day than an In- dian can do. But the value of his work is not nearly so much more than an Indian's Avork as his wages are than an Indian's wages. So that the Indian's labour is really far cheaper than the European's. In such a state of affairs, which improved communication is likely to intensify, we seem to be drifting towards a time when it will only be possible profitably to gi'ow corn in England and France on exceptionally fertile soil, and the English agricultural labourer will have to leave the plough and convert himself into a factory hand, unless he can consent to work 70 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. for an oriental labourer's pittance and subsist on vege- tarian diet, forswearing his beef and beer. But even by becoming a factory workman he will scarcely permanently avoid the competition of cheap oriental labour. For in the East there are to be found coal and iron and other mateiials of manufacturing industry as well as fertile soil. At present Asiatics are not far enough advanced in knowledge to compete on a lai-ge scale with European manufacturing indus- try. But this ignorance will not last for ever Already among the 260 millions of India technical education is advancing and energetic preparations are being made for its further extension. Already in Bombay cotton factories are increasing year by year, and in the course of time the whole of India will follow tlie lead of her western sea-port. In China the Chinese are determined to teach themselves or be taught how to manufacture cannon and ironclads for their own use. Mr. James in his travels through Manchuria saw a Chinese arsenal in which Chinese workmen without European supervision could manufacture the most improved instruments of destruction for themselves. The progressive party in China will probably before long introduce an extended system of technical education into their country also. Thus in the future Chinese and Indian workmen working for wretched wages will com- pete with Manchester and Glasgow on more than equal •terms. The result of this will be just the same as if Chinese and Indian immigrants settled in the West, and undersold American and European labourers. But it cannot be well stopped by any restrictive legislation as oriental immigration has been checked. In the face of this competition it is likely that the western labourer will have to lower his standard of comfort, and work for far lower wages than he claims at present: or else the labouring population in the west must be reduced in numbers to about a fourth of its present dimensions. In THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 71 either case the world is threatened with diminution o£ happiness. The gradual starving out of existence of say one half of the labouring population of Europe, namely, of all the labouring population whose raison d'etre is that Asia needs manufactured articles and cannot make them for herself, would be the result of Asiatics all over Asia obtaining mastery of all kinds of technical arts ; and this starvation, though gradual, would, in the aggregate, cause about as much misery as all the famines that have been chronicled in the world's history. Perhaps less misery would be caused by the gradual lowering of the standard of comfort that would accompany the diminu- tion of European wages down to the oriental average, especially as there would be simultaneously a gradual rise of oriental wages towards the European standard. For the new rate of wages would be somewhere between tlie present European and the present oriental rate. Thus the millions of Asiatics would derive from a gradual change of this kind increase of happiness, though not as much as the increase of misery on the other side of the world. But even if this, apparently the less painful, alternative be chosen, there will be much misery. Our vast labouring population will not learn to tolerate life in cold climates on vegetarian diet without much pain, and large fractions will die until only those are left who are able to adapt themselves to such very different circumstances. Whether the utilitarian can devise any means by which this change can be averted, or any - reasoning by which it can be shown not to be productive " of increase of misery, remains to be seen, but it is a question of such difficulty that it can hardly receive even a probable solution without more data of experience bearing upon the subject, than we at present possess, CHAPTER VI. " All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." This old proverb expresses the belief that amusement is one of the most essential elements of happiness. If this is so, among the best practical utilitarians would seem to be those who do their utmost to spread a taste for the best games all over the world — Englishmen who teach Indians to play cricket, and Maoris to play football, Americans who introduce into the mother country their fascinating game of base-ball, rural rectors who en- courage their parishioners to play cricket on the village green, and all who by precept or example induce their fellow men and fellow women to take any kind of healthy exercise in the open air. The effect upon happiness of such sports is both direct and indirect, direct inasmuch as those engaged in games enjoy them- selves while playing, indirect because they lay up for themselves stores of health which may be a permanent source of happiness. There is a Spanish proverb to the effect that the days spent in hunting do not count in one's life. It means that, if a man is forty-two years old, and has spent two years in hunting, he is to all intents and purposes only forty years old, the invigor- ating effects of the exercise being supposed to exactly counteract the weakening effect of time. The words of this proverb may be extended so as to apply not merely to hunting but to all outdoor sports. The case of hunting is distingiiished from other means THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 73 of healthy exercise by the fact that the lower animals are forced to take part in it. Therefore the utilitarian in considering the effects of hunting upon happiness must include in his calculation the eiiect produced upon the hunted as well as that produced upon the hunter. Is the happiness of the lower animals injuriously affected by hunting? There is no reason to think that it is. Animals must die, and the quick violent death usually inflicted by the hunter and his hounds is less painful than the slow death by starvation or cold that the animal if unhunted would have to undergo, and not more painful than death inflicted by birds and beasts of prey. All that can be said in this connection against hunting is that animals wounded by rifle or arrow more often escape to die a lingering death than those wounded by animals of prey ; but this may be balanced by the fact that the bullet and the arrow often kill instantaneously animals that might otherwise die a longer and more painful death by hunger. It may be urged by some against hunting that an animal's life must be considered as a whole, that hunting shortens the life of many, and that, the longer their lives are, the more likely it is that the joys of life will compensate for the eventual pain of dying. This is probably true, as animals, at any rate wild animals, seem to derive more pleasure than pain from life. But on the other hand it must be remembered that hunting usually kills gi-own-up animals whose joy in life may be supposed to be on the wane, and leaves room for the growing up of numerous new-born animals who would otherwise be crowded out of existence for want of food. For there is no doubt that every year far more animals come into the world than the supply of food can support. Great numbers of these must die of starvation before enjoying the joys of exuberant young life. Every grown-up animal that is shot leaves room for the growth of a younger and therefore presumably happier being. Thus on the whole there is no reason to think 74 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. that the happiness of lower animals is at all diminished by hunting. This being so, it only remains to consider the effect of hunting on the happiness of human beings. At an early stage in the history of society hunting was pursued as a means of existence and not as a source of pleasure. The hunter had therefore to hunt not merely when he ex- pected pleasui-e from his hunting, but at times when, if he had by him enough to eat, he would infinitely prefer bodily ease in his hut or cave. The life of a professional hunter does not seem to be in any way happier than that of a shepherd or an agricultural labourer. Nor is it more unhappj^. All that we can say about the hunting stage of society is that it is incompatible with the earth being thickly peopled, so that the utilitarian pessimist has every reason to sigh for the return of the hunting stage of society. In connection with happiness we have rather to consider hunting as an occasional interlude than as the permanent occupation of a man's life. Of the intense pleasure derived from hunting both litera- ture and the experience of life give abundant evidence. Again and again has the desire of this pleasure proved triumphant over the fear of death in tiger-shooting, fox- hunting, bear-hunting, and elephant-hunting. It drives rich men, who might take their ease in richly-furnished houses, surrounded by all the comforts supplied by wealth, to toil up the snowy mountains of the Himalayas and struggle through the hot, marshy, pestilential jungles of India, Africa, and South America. The enthusiastic love of hunting, though perhaps it reaches its highest pitch in the modern Briton, is certainly as old as civilis- ation and perhaps a good deal older. It has been felt by nations most widely different from each other in character. The sculptured walls of Nineveh and Babylon show the delight taken by Assyrian kings in hunting the lion, and from the dawn of civilisation in Homeric Greece to the present day a large portion of the literature of TSE promotion of happiness.' 75 the world has been devoted to celebrating the joys of the chase. Even the tyranny of feudal game laws, that ordered the common man who killed a boar or a deer to have his eyes torn out, and reduced great tracts of good land to desolation that thej' might be the hunting- ground of kings, helps to show the immense popularity of hunting. But this popularity seems at last to be somewhat on the wane. Evolutionists tell us that the love of hunting- is the survival of a taste that descended through many generations of our ancestors, who, without intense con- centration of energy on the task of killing animals, could hardly have survived. But the traces left on our minds by many generations of hunting ancestors must now be growing less distinct, as most of those now living are the descendants for several generations back of men who have never been engaged in hunting. As this process of obliteration continues, fewer and fewer men will be left so constituted in mind as to be able to take great delight in the chase. There is also another influence working in the same direction. Human sympathy for the lower animals is decidedly on the increase. The society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, though it does not particularly direct its energy against hunting, does indirectly discountenance any such amusement by never allowing us to forget that the lower animals feel pain, which is therefore not to be wantonly inflicted. In old times the hunter as a rule did not trouble his head about the feelings of the hunted animal any more than about the grass bruised under his horse's foot. Now-a-days this unconcern is by no means so easy. The hunter of to-day must often ask himself whether he is justified in promoting his own health at the expense of so much pain to animals, many of whom are weak and harmless. When this troublesome question has again and again been forced upon his mind by reading, by the teaching j6 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. of the society for the prevention of cruelty, or by the suggestion of some tender-hearted wife or sister, he is not unlikely to resolve with Wordsworth, Never to blend his pleasure or his pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. Some hunters who do not go so far as to make this resolve, cannot entirely quench the questionings of their heart, and, though they perhaps go on amusing them- selves at the expense of animal pain, do so with occasional feelings of remorse which must seriously detract from the total of their pleasures. Even Scott, devoted sportsman as he was, sometimes asked himself how it came to be that The failing wing, the blood-shot eye The sportsman marks with apathy, and the reflection must surely have marred his pleasure in the chase. Tlius Lady Florence Dixie, after shooting one of the golden deer of the Cordilleras, was so troubled in mind that she wrote, " If regret could atone for that death of which I unfortunately was the cause, then it has long ago been forgiven ; for, for many a day I was haunted by a sad remorse for the loss of that innocent and trusting life." A similar struggle of contending feelings in the hunter's breast is indicated by an incident related by J. Thomson in his account of his journey through Masai Land. "I shot," he says, " a hartebeest for the pot, and was made to regret my deed of blood on seeing the infinitely piti- ful manner in which its mate hung about, divided between terror of the destroyer and wistful tenderness and anxiety for its struggling and bleeding companion. Bounding away a few steps, it would turn again to face the hunter with its great beautiful eyes, or to cast per- plexed glances at the dying hartebeest, wondering, THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 77 doubtless, what horrid fate had fallen upon it. I could easily have shot the poor creature, but I felt too conscience-stricken to do the deed of blood, and I let it alone." Such instances show that universal indulgence in hunting cannot be advocated as productive of happiness in spite of its general good effects upon health. For the happiness due to improved health may be cancelled by the pains of an uneasy conscience. Should the utilitarian even encourage in this amusement those who, from bluntness of feeling or want of reflection, are able to derive unalloyed enjoyment from the chase ? Even this is doubtful. Many will be of opinion that it is essential in the interests of happiness that universal sympathy with all living- beings should be aimed at, and that the promotion of this universal sympathy is of far more importance to happiness than the coarse pleasure that unretlective persons derive from pursuing and killing animals, and from the more refined pleasures that attend the chase. Such persons should be taught sympathy, by being continually reminded that the lower animals feel pain or pleasure just as we do, though probably to a less intense degree. It may, however, be urged in favour of hunting, that after all, as pointed out above, hunting- does not diminish animal happiness, and that, therefore, a reasonable person who clearly recognises this tiutli may go on hunting without feeling that he is gaining ])leasure at the expense of animal pain. Perhaps a perfectly logical being might do so, but as men are constituted with their emotions continually usurping a position in the realm of reason, it seems impossible for men to inflict death and cruel wounds on sentient beings without doing violence to their sympathetic feelings. Thus the settlement of this question must be deferred until the effects upon happiness of extended sympathy have to be considered. In the meantime we 78 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. must consider those many other out-door amusements which, like hunting and shooting, are often very enjoyable in themselves and promote the health of their votaries, but do not inflict pain on animals. The chief of such amusements are cricket, football, lawn-tennis, racquets, fives, riding, swimming, base- ball, skating, bicycling, tricycling. In this great variety we find out-door active amuse- ments to suit every purse, and almost every taste. Even the poorest man, if he lives in the country, can generally find some beautiful river or seashore open to him as a bathing place, and, at the worst, he can always walk, enjoying the companionship of some dear friend, or silently admiring the beauties of the country, or in great cities the wonder- ful works of man. Walking only requires a little extra expense in soleing and heeling boots, and some other out- door amusements, such as skating and football, are almost equally inexpensive. There can be no doubt that on the whole they immensely improve the health of those who are addicted to them. Occasionally a man may be maimed for life by an accident in the cricket field or at football. A few Oxford or Cambridge oars may overstrain them- selves by violent exercise in the boat race, or the severe preliminary training they have to undergo. But the number of such casualties is immensely exaggerated by the publicity given to them in the press. When reck- less assertions about the evil effects of rowing upon row- ing men were being made in the papers, Dr. J. E. Morgan, who had a truly Baconian distrust of affirmative instances, took the trouble to look up the life-history of those who had rowed in the world-famous University boat-race. The result of his enquiries was the discovery that their average of life and health was decidedly better than that of ordinary men. If the pain caused by accidents in active out-door amusements were compared with the in- crease of happiness they confer on the thousands who do not happen to meet with any accident, they would be THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 79 found to be as nothing in the balance. The contrary opinion could never have been held, but for the tendency to see clearly pain that is concentrated in a few indi- viduals, and to ignore the mass of happiness far greater in the aggregate that is scattered over a large multitude though not conspicuously evident in any of the indi- vidual members of the multitude. When the impercep- tible growth of thousands of trunks, myiiads of branches, and millions of twigs, is taken into consideration, we re- cognise that the amount of timber in a forest has in- creased in the course of a year, though a few branches, or even whole trees, may have been blown down by the wind. In the same way we should recognise that the thousands of men and women who pursue enjoyment in active open-air games have vastly increased their happi- ness, even though a small minority may have hurt them- selves by unfortunate accidents, or imprudent excess in their out-door activity. But those who add to their health and happiness by energetically engaging in out-door recreation are only a fraction, and perhaps a small fraction of the whole world. We must now consider whether it necessarily follows that the general happiness has been advanced because the happiness of this fraction has been advanced. We have seen reason to believe that though medical science improves the health and happiness of individuals, it does not generally improve the health and happiness of the whole race. Can the same disparagement be justly applied to the source of happiness that we are now con- sidering ? Or is there any essential difference between out-door exercise and medical curative drugs, operations, diet, &c., on account of which we can say that, while the latter benefit individuals without benefiting the human race, the former benefits the race as much as the indivi- dual ? There does seem to be such a difference. It con- sists in the fact that out-door athletic games are eagerly engaged in by the healthy and avoided by the delicate. 8o THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. while medical drugs, diet, and surgical operations are more usually prescribed for and used by the delicate than by the healthy. We saw that the chief evil of medical science from the point of view of general happiness was that it enabled human beings who would otherwise have died childless to survive and transmit their delicacy to their descendants. This bad effect does not arise from out-door exercise at any rate in its more violent forms. A moderate walk of two or three miles a day may bene- fit the individual delicate man as much as or more than carefully regulated diet or well-chosen drugs. But if the very delicate man attempts football, hunting, Alpine climbing, or big game shooting, it is likely very much to diminish the few years he would otherwise live, and is more likely to reduce the moderately delicate man to the level of the very delicate than to raise the very delicate man to the level of the moderately delicate. Thus these violent delights tend to strengthen the strong, while they debilitate the weak and di'ive them rapidly out of existence. Out-door amusements have also another advantage over medical appliances, parti- cularly over medical drugs. . Surgical operations are painful, and most medical drugs ai-e nauseous. But out-door exercise is not only productive of health, but also delightful in itself. Thus it is doubly conducive to pleasure, and those who exert themselves successfully in establishing football clubs, Alpine clubs, ci'icket, and rowing clubs, and by other means promote a taste for the more violent athletic out-door amusements, do really substantially promote the utilitarian end. Another class of amusements deserves careful con- sideration on the part of the utilitarian, namely, those kinds of recreation which -are not accompanied by active bodily exertion. The chief pleasures of this kind are those afforded by the fine arts, especially painting, sculpture, and music. Looked at from a utilitarian point of view, they differ from the pleasures of active THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 8i bodily exei'cise in two respects. They do not tend to kill off the weak, and they have little effect, as com- pared with out-door sports, in strengthening the strong. They can be enjoyed as much by the delicate as by the healthy, and improve the health of the delicate. The first diflPerence tends to make the kind of pleasures we are now considering less productive of the general happiness than the pleasures of active bodily exei'cise. Nevertheless, while it is clear that they do not do nearly so much to improve the health of the strong, it would be a mistake to suppose that they do nothing. Whatever relieves the mind of the worker from the burden of earning money, or the vacant idler from the monotony of a purposeless existence, promotes cheer- fulness and thereby promotes health. But still the active out-door sports have the advantage, as they not only promote cheerfulness, but also improve the health in a far more effectual way by bracing the muscles and keeping us in the open air. For one class, however, the pleasures of the fine arts are preferable as a means of relaxation. It is possible even for a healthy man to have too much hard work in the open air. The agricultural labourer, the post- man, the railway porter, the groom and others, who are fortunate enough to earn their livelihood by open air work, cannot be expected to devote much of their leisure time to football, or cricket. Their muscles and lungs being sufficiently provided for by their working life, they should be taught to turn to the fine arts for recreation. To supply their needs, the utilitarian should provide museums, picture galleries, concert rooms, zoological and botanical gardens, and they should be open on Sundays and week-day evenings, in order that they may be used not merely by those keeping holyday, but also by busy men in their short intervals of leisure. In the country sufficient beauty is provided for the eye hj nature. But in the man-made town too often F 82 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. the beauty of nature has disappeared without any architectural beauty being brought in to compensate for the loss. In great cities the utilitarian has plenty of good work to do. Parks have to be made and defended against the attacks of so-called utilitarians, who would like to see them covered over with houses and factories. It is one of the evils of private property that too much beautiful scenery is kept for the enjoy- ment of the few and denied to the manj'. Many rich men entirely refuse the public access to their grounds. " Why should not these great Sirs Give up their parks some dozen times a year To let the people breathe 1 " If utilitarians have extensive grounds near a great city, they should throw them open to the public, or, at least, if they are not extensive enough to become promenades, allow the weary walker along the dusty roads to refresh his eyes by looking into them through railings. At present in the suburbs of great towns it is too often the practice to protect gardens and pleasure grounds against intrusive eyes by high walls or hideous barriers of tarred or un- tarred planks. This abominable selfishness compels the unfortunate citizen to walk miles out into the countr3', before he can see anything pleasanter to look on than the dusty or muddy road, and should surely be strongly condemned by public opinion. Material should also be provided for the ear by the utilitarian. Concerts can be organised at low rates, and public rooms may be presented with pianos or harmoniums. Much good work in this direction has been done by the Gordon League, " a body of benevolent individuals who shortly after General Gordon's death formed themselves into a THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 83 league, to carry on under the auspices of his great name the work of mercy in which he delighted." Besides attending to the material wants of the poor by forming coal funds and clothing funds, they provide excellent gratuitous concerts at their head quarters in the Portman Rooms. " Every Sunday evening," we read in a daily paper, " at half past eight o'clock when the churches are closed, the doors of the Portman Rooms are thrown open to working men and women for a social gathering. There is no Sabbath glumness at these meetings, the League recognising that no hard-and-fast line should be drawn between sacred things and those which are called secular, but that everything good and pure is consecrated by use for worthy ends. Hence the Sunday evening meetings happily associate the religion of Christianity with that of common life. Members of the League sing appropriate songs to their congregation, or play instrumental solos, or give recitations inciting to high and noble deeds, or read the Bible, and lead the psalm or hymn. In this manner the poor are attracted within the influence of much that makes for their peace. As a rule about 1,000 people attend each Sunday evening, most of them being precisely those on whose behalf the Gordon net is spread. Last evening the seats in the spacious hall were well filled by a most orderly and attentive crowd, whose behaviour, we are bound to say, might advantageously be taken as a model by not a few calling themselves their betters. The eflbrts honestly made to please them were keenly ap- preciated and loudly applauded." Similar attempts are made in the same spirit in different parts of the country to provide instrumental and vocal music for the poor. They are valuable not merely for the immediate pleasure they confer on the 84 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. audiences, and as counter attractions rivalling the less innocent pleasures of the public hou^e or gambling den, but also as establishing kindliness between rich and poor, and softening the asperity of the envy with which the latter often regard the former. Also at such meetings a taste for niusic may be acquired which may be cultivated in many an otherwise dull home as a perennial source of innocent pleasure. There is, however, a drawback in all attempts to provide the poor with entertainments of a charitable character. This cannot be better expressed than in the words of Mr. G. R. Sims, a writer who has done much to reveal the misery of the London poor, and interpret their feelings. " The well-meaning efforts," he tells us, " of the societies which have endeavoured to attract the poor to liear countesses fiddle and baronets sing comic songs in temperance halls, have not been crowned Mdth anything like success, for the simple reason that there is an air of charity and goody goody about the scheme, which the poor always regard with suspicion. They want their amusement as a right, not as a favour, and they decline to be patronized." This objection, fortunately, does not apply to another species of musical entertainment within the reach of everybody. It is probable that the poor derive the greatest amount of pleasure, thiough the ear, from a humble and much-despised source, namely, from the ubiquitous organ-grinder, who spreads all over London familiarity with tunes new and old. Many an air is thus picked up by errand boys and workmen on their way to their work, and they solace their hours of labour by humming and whist- ling snatches of song, which, but for the street-organ, they would never have known. Let us then un- grudgingly pay our pennies to encourage those THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 85 ■wandering minstrels by whose instrumentality the airs, which sung by Patti or Albani delight the rich man in his opera-box, give even more delight to the poor street arab. Music, even good music, seems to give pleasure without any previous training. It is different with some of the other fine arts. Sculpture, for instance, may almost be regarded as an acquired taste. The average British workman does not derive very much pleasure from the sculptures of the British Museum, and even the more educated crowds, who visit the Koyal Academy, do not much frequent the sculpture gallery. In the case of sculpture, and to a less extent in the case of painting, it is necessary to cultivate taste among the masses, and this is not easily done. Some effect is undoubtedly produced by simply placing paintings and sculptures before their eyes, but this needs to be supplemented by a certain amount of instruction in art. No doubt Ruskin's Modern Painters has taught many to appreciate art who would otherwise have remained artistically blind. Such literary works then promote the happiness of the world, if the fine arts themselves promote happiness. But before we arrive at an ultimate conclusion on the latter question we have to give full weight to the effect of the cultivation of the fine arts on the popu- lation of the world. The workers who produce beauti- ful objects for the gratification of the senses, in so far as they merely produce beauty, are unproductive consumers, and, therefore, their presence in the world diminishes the population of the world. If all painters, musicians, sculptors, engravers, poets, manufacturers of ribbons and ornamental cloth, jewellers, makers of fine porcelain, carvers in wood and ivory, and others who produce beautiful objects or beautify useful objects, and in addition all those who manufacture 86 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. instruments or obtain materials for beautiful work- manship as the makers of musical instruments, of painters' colours, of sculptors', engravers', wood-carvers', and jewellers' tools, and elephant hunters, and miners in ruby and diamond mines, were all Eo turn their energies to reclaiming waste land or any other dis- tinctly productive work, the world would be able to support a far larger population than it does now. This being the case, pessimist utilitarians should strive hard to promote the fine arts, as the pursuit of them diminishes the number of miserable beings in the world and at the same time makes the average man less miserable. Optimist utilitarians cannot so easily decide the question. They must allow that the fine arts diminish the number of happy beings in the world, but must go on to consider whether the increase in average happiness does or does not more than compensate for that loss. Thus, if without the fine arts the population of the world would be 1,500,000,000 and the average happiness 100°, and with the fine arts the average happiness is 105° and the population is 1,400,000,000, he would prefer that the fine arts should be entirely stamped out, as with the fine arts the aggregate happiness would be only 147,000,000,000°, while without it the sum would be 150,000,000,000°. The utilitarian who leans neither to pessimism nor optimism would prefer to promote the fine arts, because not having made up his mind whether the average man is happy or miserable, he is indifierent whether the number of human beings is greater or smaller, and is bound to favour whatever promotes the average happiness. CHAPTER VII. In considering the eifect of law and custom upon happiness, we have to consider first whether good laws and good constitutions increase the happiness of the world. Have such lawgivers as Lycurgus, Solon, Justinian, and the authors of the code Napoleon or legislative bodies like the English House of Commons had great opportunities of increasing happiness and how far have they used those opportunities well ? If a good code of laws increases the happiness of particular nations, it may be assumed to increase the happiness of the world. For, if happiness is by means of good laws secured for one nation, there is no reason to believe that the gain is secured at the expense of any other nation. Although in the assignment of punishment some suppose that just retribution is a paramount consideration, the promotion of happiness is generally regarded as the great end of the art of jurisprudence : so that jurisprudence may almost be regarded as a branch of utilitarian ethics. This being the case, it is not surprising to find eminent lawyers like Bentham and Austin among the staunchest upholders of utilitarian morality, for, when they pass from jurisprudence to morality, they only change from a more limited to a more general survey of the means of promoting happiness. Although it is generally recog- nised that the goodness of laws and constitutions is rektive, that what suits one nation may be unsuitable to another, there is little or no doubt in the opinion of the world that national happiness may be promoted by 88 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. good laws and constitutions. Plato is so convinced of the fact that he makes it the foundation on which to build his proof of the happiness of the good man. One of the premises of his reasoning in the main argument of the Republic is that the most perfectly constituted state is sure to be more productive of happiness than a worse constituted state. Others, however, are of the opinion of Pope's couplet : — For forms of government let fools contest, Whate'er is best administered is best. To exhaustively consider this question would be to write a book on jurisprudence. It is, however, possible to come to a conclusion on the subject by a shorter I'oute. That legal and constitutional reform does bene- ficially affect happiness will be seen clearly enough. Even if a nation may be happy in spite of bad laws and a bad constitution, it would surely be still happier with good laws and a good constitution. Pope's antithetical couplet may be easily shown not to prove his point, even if we admit the statement made in the second line. Granting that the government that is best administered is best, it is surely plain that some forms of government are more likely to be well administered than others. This truth was recognised by Solon when he defended himself against a critic by observing that his laws were Dot ideally the best, but only the best that he thought he could get the Athenians to obey. One or two con- spicuous instances in history are enough to make it clear to any unprejudiced mind that legislative changes may much promote the happiness of a people, especially perhaps repeals of bad laws or changes in the consti- tution of courts of justice. He would be a bold man who would deny that the Great Charter, the Habeas Corpus Act, and the repeal of laws opposed to the principle of religious toleration have done much for the happiness of England. Like good effects were produced THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 89 by the laws of Solon in Greece, and in Rome by the laws which amicably settled the bitter contentions between the Patricians and Plebeians. The discussion of the effect that can be produced on happiness by particular political measures has to a large extent been anticipated in the previous pages. The laws may establish national schools, national colleges, and national museums, where' the poor can be educated gratis. This will undoubtedly increase knowledge, and, if increase of knowledge implies increase of happiness, happiness will be increased by such laws, or would be but for one difference between spread of knowledge by private effort and by legal enactment. Laws establish- ing a cheap gratuitous system of public education are in accordance with the socialistic or semisocialistic principle that the rich should be taxed for the benefit of the poor. Whether the carrying out of this principle is productive of happiness or not, is a question on which much difference of opinion prevails. Possessors of wealth will generally urge that the taxation of the rich for the poor discourages accumulation of capital, diminishes the wage fund, increases want, and diminishes industry and happi- ness. The poor, and the friends of the poor on the other hand, only recognise the fact that gratuitous education satisfies the yearnings of many who would otherwise 'grow up ignorant, and, owing to their ignor- ance, be liable to be ground down by poverty. Similar arguments are brought forward on either side in dis- cussing the imposition of a graduated income-tax and laws limiting the freedom of bequests or heavily taxing large legacies, the socialistic tendency of which is more clearly discernible. Laws of this character un- doubtedly discourage the accumulation of capital, or drive it to other countries where such laws are not made. With the latter result, though it may be de- plorable from a patriotic point of view, the utilitarian has nothing to do, unless he has good reason to believe 90 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. that it is better for the liappiness of the world that capital should be accumulated in his own rather than in some foreign country. Of course, he must not make up his mind upon this point without carefully purging his intellect from patriotic bias. If he comes to the un- patriotic conclusion that capital promotes happiness more in other countries than his own, he will, of course, be inclined to support any laws that drive capital into foreign countries. As to the diminution or less increase of capital brought about by such laws in the country in which they are passed, there can be little doubt that it is a fact. An ordinary mortal will be less inclined to save than to spend, if the more he saves the greater is the proportion of his property that he will be forced to pay to government in the form of taxes, and if he is much limited in exercising what he is inclined to regard as the sacred right of doing what he likes with his own. In the case of free education, the diminution of capital due to discouragement of saving, may be compensated for, or more than compensated for, by the increased productiveness secured by the spread of education among the masses. Knowledge being power, increased educa- tion enables man to get more out of nature. Also, education not only produces good sense that will lead to greater thrift, but also, as we have seen, diminishes the number of wasteful riots and rebellions. These consider- ations render it probable, that, after all, although free education means that the rich must educate not only his own children, but also tliose of the poor, and so dis- courages saving, it may nevertheless, on the whole, produce increase of capital. But is the accumulation of capital productive of happiness ? Political economy will not allow us now to believe with Dr. Johnson that the extravagant waste of the rich is a benefit to the poor. We all know now, that the miser who saves and invests his money provides more wages for poor labourers than the extravagant spend- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 91 thrift. So, if accumulation of capital is a f^ood thing for happiness, laws of a socialistic tendency should be avoided, and we should lather, if strict justice is an unattainable ideal, have income taxes graduated so as to tax the poor more than the rich. But, although it is clear that the accumulation of capital increases population, it is not clear that such accumulation promotes happiness. We are at this point brought back to the old question between optimists and pessimists. Pessimists should regard the increase of population, the increase of miserable beings in the world, as an evil almost sure to result eventually from accum- ulation of capita], although recognising that it may effect a temporary good by increasing the amount of subsistence, temporary because the population is likely to increase in a very sliort time till it reaches the greater number that the increased subsistence allows to live. They will also be inclined to think that the numerous masses suffer a great deal of pain from a warranted or unwarranted sense of injustice at seeing the peculiar advantages enjoyed exclusively by the few rich, and that this pain of the many is far greater in the aggregate than the pain from a sense of in- justice that would be suffered by the much smaller number of rich at seeing themselves the objects of special legislation, and being compelled to pay out of their property a larger fraction as taxes than the poor are required to pay. Owing to these considera- tions the pessimist utilitarian ought to be in favour of socialistic legislation. The optimist, on the con- trary, seeing that socialism, by depriving those who are industrious and inclined to save of their reward, would decrease the population of the world, ought to be strongly opposed to socialism. At any rate, we may rest assured that the optimist has stronger reasons to oppose socialism than can be brought forward by the pessimist. 92 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. The same may be said with even greater confi- dence in the case of free trade. The corn-laws were repealed in 1846. From 1855 to 1885 the popu- lation of the United Kingdom rose from 27,800,000 to 36,300,000. There is no doubt that free trade largely contributed to this great increase of population, and that, if it were more generally adopted, the world would produce more, and so be able to support a still larger population. Political economists show quite clearly that, when trade is free, each country works at the production of whatever it can best produce, while protection is a waste of labour, as it makes a nation produce what might be best produced by some other nation. Free trade may diminish the happiness of the nation that adopts it, if that nation's circumstances cause some very unplea- sant industry to be the work which it can most pro- ductively engage in. Thus some, who, like Ruskin, think, and are perhaps right in thinking, that agricultural life is happier than labour in factories, may suppose that England loses happiness by free trade, as thereby a very large proportion of her children are condemned to work in mines and ironworks. If this is the case, England's loss is some other nation's gain, for England's devotion to mining and manufactures enables some other nation to addict itself more to agriculture, and thus the happiness of the world is not affected. So that if free trade affect to any great extent the happi- ness of the world, it does so by increasing the world's inhabitants, and so adding to the aggregate happiness, if the average man is happy, or to the aggregate misery, if the average man is unhappy. Another way in which free trade may perhaps affect happiness, though only in a slight degree, is by pro- ducing monotony of occupation in particular regions. The more the principle of free trade is followed, the more the world will be mapped out into corn-producing THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 93 regions, mining regions, regions in which iron is manufactured, and so on. Certainly such monotony of occupation is unpleasant in itself, and must also produce narrow-mindedness, and cramp the human intellect, and may so diminish happiness ; if it can be proved that happiness is at all in proportion to know- ledge. But this is rather a minor consideration. A seemingly more serious way in which free trade, by tending to limit particular areas of the world to particular industries, may be prejudicial to happiness is that it may intensify the horrors of war. A country dependent on foreign countries for many of the neces- saries of life may suffer terrible privation when debarred by an enemy from external commerce. Of this danger the United Kingdom is a conspicuous example, since owing to free trade we import yearly 146,000,000 bushels of wheat and only produce about half that amount. The corn produced in England annually is not nearly enough to feed the teeming population. It follows from this state of affairs that, if Britain should ever be blockaded by a superior naval enemy, the sufferings of the population from starvation would be terrible. The same is true in a less degree of many other countries partially dependent on foreign supplies. Thus free trade tends to intensify the horrors of war. But perhaps this is after all not an evil. The more horrible war is, the more nations will keep the peace, and the more quickly wars will be finished. So that free trade while intensifying the horrors of war would seem to tend to make wars less frequent and of less duration. As this effect and that of the cramping of ideas have no very great influence on happiness, the consideration of free trade for the most part drives us back to the old open question between optim- ism and pessimism. For the same reason that should make optimists discourage and pessimists encourao-e socialistic reforms, optimists should ap- 94 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. prove and pessimists disapprove of such a power- ful means of increasing population as free trade is. Limitation by law of the amount of labour stands on much the same footing as protection, inasmuch as by limiting production it tends to keep down the population of the world. It is looked upon by many friends of the poor as a panacea for the woes of the working classes. They suppose that it will improve the lot of the labourer, firstly, by lightening the burden of men's work, by protecting women against unsuitable work, and by saving young children from having to work at other than their school tasks, and secondly by diminishing production and so enabling labour to be more profitable and to secure higher prices. These were the objects aimed at by the Swiss Government when they invited the European Governments to meet at Berne in September, 1889, to consider the labour question. Their programme included, first, prohibition of Sunday labour ; secondly, fixation of a minimum age for the admission of children to factories ; thirdly, fixation of a maximum for the daily labour of young workmen ; fourthly, prohibition of the employment of women and young workmen in such industries as are specially injurious to health ; fifthly, limitation of night labour for women and young workmen ; and sixthly, stipulations for the execution of the Convention to be eventually concluded. Usually such schemes include a definite proposal to limit the hours of work to eight hours daily. All the proposals tend to have, and are intended to have the same result, namely, lessening of the burden of daily work and diminution of production. The following considerations will make it clear that the increase of wages hoped for from the diminution of production is a vain hope, and that such proposals, if approved of at all, must be so solely THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 95 because they lighten the over heavj' average burden of labour. The only way in which diminution of production could increase the profits of labour is, if it were confined to some single industiy productive of a necessary of life for which no substitute could be found, and if production in that industry were limited all over the world. For instance, if coal- miners all over the world agree to work only si.x; hours a day in order to limit production of coal, the price of coal would lise perhaps so high that the miners would get as high wages for six hours' work as they now get for a full day's work. But even under such improbable circumstances, these high wages, which, after all, would not be high absolutely, but only in comparison with the amount of woik done, could not long be maintained. Even if the high price of coal did not fall before increased pro- duction of petroleum and other substitutes, labourers would desert other industries and crowd into coal- mining in order to get good wages for short hours of work, and this competition would infallibly bring- down the wages of coal mining, until the miners were paid very much less for their six hours than they used to be paid for their full day's work. Thus even under the most favourable conditions the policy of limited production would, far from better- ing the condition of the working classes, lead to their getting a smaller amount of wages daily. It may be urged on the contrary that trades unions can sometimes prevent the competition of outside labourers, and that thus the coal miners might, in the case we are considering, receive for their half day's work almost as much as the wages before given for a full day's work. This is true, but does not affect the question from a general point of view. The gain of the coal miners in this case would be at the expense of all other wage earners, who in the matter 96 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. of the purchase of coal would have the value of their wages diminished by the success of the coal miners. So far we have been considering limitation of hours of work and consequently of production all over the world in one particular industry. If the limitation were confined to one country, the labourers would, unless their industry were fostered at the expense of other wage earners by heavy protective duties, entirely fail of their objects, and be thrown out of employment. For capital would be transferred to other countries where such limitations did not prevail. If the coal miners in England banded together to work only six hours a day to limit the output of coal, capital now engaged in English coal-mining would immediately be transferred to German and other coal mines where it would be employed more profitably, unless the English coal miners were willing to receive half wages for their half day's work, a contingency so utterly opposed to the purpose aimed at by the limitation of production that it need not be considered. The same result would happen if the limitation of production Avere extended to all the industries of one country, say England. In that case there would be an immense transfer of capital out of England into other countries, whose wage fund would be increased at the expense of England, so that the average wages of the world would not be increased and the general happiness would receive no benefit. England in this case would suffer severely for want of capital, unless the labourers consented to receive small pay, as the Hindus do, in proportion to the small production of each man's short daily labour. The cogency of these considerations is recognized even by some of the most thorough-going friends of the working man, as by Mr. Bradlaugh, who desires wages to be as high, and days of labour as short as is THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 97 compatible with profitable industry, but objects to legislative action establishing a universal eight hours' day of work, on the grounds that if " eight hours' labour be translated to mean, that no works of any description are to be conducted for more than eight hours in each twenty-four hours, the giving legal effect to a prohibition of this kind would be certainly ruinous to many of the largest industries in this country," and that, "to prevent men in all kinds of labour from working more than eight hours out of twenty-four may, and in some cases would, involve a serious reduction of tlie wages liitherto received." On account of the necessity of such results, schemes for the diminution of production by lessening the hours of labour of the men and the amount of work done by women and children, are by some of their advo- cates intended to extend to the whole world. Such a universal extension of the limitation of labour in the present state of the world is chimerical. There would be little hope of arriving at an international agreement to include China, Japan, India, the Republics of South America and the whole world. But, even if it could be arranged, no benefit would accrue to the labouring classes, at least, not the anticipated benefit of hiffher wa^es. If such a world-embracinfj scheme were realized, the diminished supply would not be enough for the demand, and, therefore, it is supposed that the labours of production would be better re- warded. But those who argue thus, forget that pro- ducers are also consumers, and that the possibility of making large profits owing to the scarcity of their production would be defeated by the corresponding scarcity of what they themselves require, tools for their work, and food and clothing, and other neces- saries and luxuries. Under these circumstances, even if the labourer got larger money wages, he would be G 98 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. able to buy so much less for the same amount of money that he would not be benefited. From a consideration of this fact, Jevons goes to the very opposite extreme, and asserts that " a real increase of wages to the people at large, is to be obtained only bj' making things cheaply," that is, by increasing the produce of labour. But this seems to ignore the fact that cheapness of products leads to increase of popu- lation, which increase tends to lower wages by in- creasing the supply of labourers. The fact seems to be that neither diminution of production nor increase of production can clearly be shown to improve wages permanently. On the whole perhaps it would be better to increase than to diminish production, as diminution of production would cause a temporary diminution of happiness until the population of the world adjusted itself to the diminished production, and this adjustment would not be effected without much misery and starvation. When the new state of affairs that would be introduced by universal diminution of production is established, we shall only have, instead of a larger population receiving larger jiay for more work, a smaller population receiving a smaller amount of pay for less work. So the advantage to happiness of lighter work would be cancelled by the disadvantage of insuffi- cient food. Thus the optimist utilitarian at any rate should not advocate limitation of labour. Perhaps the pessi- mist might be moved to do so on account of the diminution of the world's population, making allow- ance, however, for temporary misery caused by the adjustment of the population to the limited pro- duction. The majority of the world wlio are neither optimists nor pessimists should join with the optimist in maintaining the status quo. The foregoing remarks mainly apply to the diminu- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 99 tion of the daily labour of men. They also applj'-, but in a less degree, to limitation of the labour of women and children, as that limitation also diminishes production. At any rate, more is produced when not only men but also women work. The case of young children is different. If they work in factories, they cannot be properly educated, and their intelligence suffers, and want of intelligence diminishes production. But whether production is limited or not by regula- tion of the labour of women and children, the utilitarian should give such regulation his support. The sacrifice of happiness involved in mothers engag- ing in hard work, and leaving their infants to be fed on artificial food, and their homes to take care of themselves, and in depriving childhood of the pleasant alternation of school and play is very great, far greater than the misery suffered by over - worked men ; and, after all, the labours of women and children do not to any appreciable extent lighten the labours of husband and father. Of course, a man and a woman can earn more than a man can by himself, and even young children may add a pittance to the family income. This knowledge makes the poor labourer accept lower wages or marry earlier, as he hopes that his wife will add to his earning, and that, if he has any children, they will at a very early age contribute to their own support. But such early mar- riages prevent the labours of women and children from raising the standard of comfort among labourers, who, if they have to depend on their own exertions, and therefore marry later, are as well ofi' as if they married early in the hope of being partly supported by their wives and children. Early marriage, rendered possible by wife and children being allowed to over- task themselves in physical labour, does not seem to be desirable. Under such circumstances, domestic happiness must be extinguished in the necessity of loo THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS heavy labour laid upon weak and strong alike. Therefore, no utilitarian is likely to blame the factory laws of England, which, for the most part leaving grown-up men to themselves, protect women and children against excessive work, and do not allow very young children to work at all. Such legisla- tion might profitably be carried to further extremes, if the nations adopting it could be protected by some such international agreement as that proposed by Switzerland against the danger of being undersold by other nations who do not put the same restrictions upon labour. But though limitation of production would not really better the condition of the working classes even if it gave the labourer higher money wages, is it not possible by any means to increase the real reward as opposed to the pecuniary wages of the working man? Co-operation, trades unions, and strikes are the usual means employed for the attainment of this object. Now there is no doubt that determined strikes have often produced increase in wages, and so bettered the condition of the workmen. On the other hand it is equally certain that many strikes, especially unsuccessful strikes, have dissipated the savings of poor workers and so reduced them to poverty. Tliese two good and bad effects may be regarded from a working man's point of view as about balancing each other. But what from the same point of view should incline the balance in favour of strikes is the good effected by the fear of strikes. It is this that prevents the capitalist em- ployer all over Europe from venturing to pay very low wages to his workmen when he is himself making very high profits, in case he should there- by be involved in a ruinous contest with them. This fear will not, however, make him pay such high wages as would deprive him of the average rate ot profit on capital, and, if the men insist upon an exces- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. loi sively high rate of wages, he will withdraw his capital from the business, unless he can get higher prices out of the consumer. It is hardly likely that he will be able to sell as much goods at the higher as at the lower price, so he will produce fewer goods, and employ a less amount of labour, and transfer much of his capital to other industries in England or to foreign countries, where the rate of wages allows larger pro- fits. In many cases capitalists would take away their whole capital from the business they had, before the strike, been employing it in. If this determination to get higher wages than will, without increasing the price of the goods sold, allow the ordinary rate of profit, should extend over the whole of England, much capital would be transferred to foreign countries, where labour could be obtained for lower wages. Thus capital would only be employed in England in industries in which higher prices could be got from the consumer. English work would be hopelessly undersold in foreign markets, and to a large extent in home markets also, unless importation of foreign goods were prevented by high protective duties. Thus the state of affairs would be that there would be in England a few labourers enjoying high wages, and an immense number of unemployed, who would perish of destitution until the population should be reduced to the small number that could get employ- ment under the new state of affairs. Whether the eventual condition of the labouringTpopulation would be worse or better than it is now, would be hard to determine ; but it is certain that the reduction in their numbers could notj be efiected without much misery. The only way in which sti'ikes could secure higher wages, than without alteration of prices would allow the average rate of profits, is by a harmonious determin- ation all over the world among the working classes I02 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. to demand higher wages. In this case capitalists, liaving no foreign country with lower wages to transfer their capital to, might consent to take less profit. If all European labourers could come to some such agree- ment, how could the same sentiment of resistance to the claims of capital be instilled into the Chinese and Hindoo labourer ? Would they not be likely rather to jump at the increased employment in agricultural and manufacturing industries opened up to them by the obstinacy of their European rivals ? If, how- ever, in the future, by improved communication, the working classes all over the world can combine for concerted action, they may win for themselves at the expense of the capitalist's profits much higher wages than they now have. Let us consider then whether such a result would promote the sum of human happiness. The question may to a certain extent be answered by appeals to experience. Wages are very high in America and Australia, very low in India. Is the average happiness of mankind much greater in America and Australia than it is in India ? The question would be hard to answer. The diflPerence between the climate, religion, and political position of India and of those two countries is so great that, if any difference in happiness could be traced, it would be rash to attribute it to difference in the rate of wages. It would be more to the purpose to compare the happiness of England and the United States, because, although there is less difference between the average wages of England and the United States than between the average wages of India and the United States, England and the United States very closely resemble each other in climate, religion, govern- ment and other conditions, on which happiness mainly depends. On the whole, life would appear to be happier or less miserable in North America than it is THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 103 in England. At least this is the conclusion indicated by the comparative estimates of travellers and by the doubtful evidence of suicide. From the suicide statistics collected by Morselli it appears that suicide is about twice as common in England as in the United States. This superiority in happiness of Americans over Englishmen may most naturally be ascrib- ed to the higher wages obtained by the working classes. Yet it has sometimes been maintained on various plausible grounds that high wages do not promote happiness. It is often said, for instance, that, when labouring men get a spell of high wages, they squander it recklessly on champagne and other ridiculous ex- travagances. But such lamentable waste is rather the result of the unusualness of high wages than of high wages in themselves. If workmen were more used to high wages, they would look upon them as ordinary income to be spent on useful things, rather than as a temporary windfall to be quickly squandered. Even if these occasional outbursts of extravagance are not exaggerated by critics devoid of sympathy with the working-classes and inclined to concentrate attention exclusively on their failings, they are not quite so painful in their effects as the ruinous extrava- gance committed by so many ill-paid labourers, who now spend the most of their pittance on gin, when they themselves and their wives and children are starving for want of bread. Others, who cannot be accused of want of sympathy with the working-classes, are disposed to depreciate the good effect of such material advantages as high wages. Mr. Booth, in his valuable work on " East London," says that " An analysis of the elements of happiness would hardly be in place here, but it may be remarked that neither poverty nor wealth have much part in it. The main conditions of human happiness I believe to be work and affection, and he who works for those he loves I04 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. fulfils these conditions most easily." But the men whose work earns for those they love the barest possible subsistence, and who are threatened with starvation or the work-house at the least reverse, and who have little prospect of laying by anything for their old age, are surely under such circum- stances only rendered more miserable or less happy by having loved ones dependent on their labours. No doubt, even in such circumstances, custom, the great equaliser of the happiness and misery of men, can alleviate their sufferings, but this alleviation cannot amount to extinction of pain, especially when they compare their lot with those who seem to do no work, or far less work, and yet have no fear for the future. But do not those earning a miserable pittance derive satisfaction from comparing their lot with the still more miserable condition of the unemployed ? No. For the misery of the unemployed is the very pros- pect that enhances their misery, as the least mis- fortune is liable to hurl them into the same abyss, while they have very little hope of rising to a higher stratum of society by any stroke of good fortune. Some one may object that in considering the effect of high wages on general happiness we must consider how it affects, not merely the working-classes, but also the capitalists, wliose incomes are diminished, for, . if wages are increased, a smaller share will probably be left as the reward of capital. We must, of course, as far as we can, consider the happiness of all con- cerned, remembering, however, that the working- classes _ form the majority of the population and capitalists only a small fraction. The general result of high wages would seem to be, in spite of the im- mense fortunes of American millionaires, an approach to equality of wealth. This would promote happiness, for, while it would make happier the lower classes THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 105 raised to moderate competence from the starvation limit, it would less affect the richer classes, since they would merely have to diminish the amount of their luxuries, and custom would easily reconcile them to the change, particularly when they saw their friends and associ- ates and all belonging to their class forced to make the same curtailment of their superfluous expenditure. Further, if there were perfect equality of wealth, the world would be spared from the pain of being poorer than others and from the happiness of being richer than others. As men are more inclined to compare themselves with those more fortunate than with those more miserable than themselves, inequality produces more pain than pleasure from comparison. Therefore a condition of equality is productive of happiness, and high wages as tending to such equality should be promoted by the efforts of every utilitarian. Is it then possible to increase by human effort the reward of labour, and if so by what means ? We have seen that trades unionism and strikes do something in this direction, as they prevent capitalists from ven- turing to give labourers very low wages when profits are very high. But more than this is wanted. The labourer wishes to secure for himself a larger fraction of the profits of production than he now gets. This could only be effected by strikes, if they were extended by a universal agreement of workincf men over the whole earth. Such an exten- sive agreement being impossible as far as we can see, some other means must be sought, and we naturally turn to the advocates of the nationaliza- tion of land, who are confident that they have in their scheme the true remedy for the poverty of the labouring world. They propose that the state should either buy, or confiscate all land, or impose upon rents such a high tax as would amount to practical confiscation. It is hard to see how the io6 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. position of affairs would be materially altered by the state buying the land from the present holders. The income of the state would, of course, be im- mensely increased by the rental of all the land, but there could be no diminution of taxation, as interest, about equal to the rent collected, would have to be paid on the money borrowed by the state to compensate the landowners. The proposal to con- fiscate landed property would, if carried out, have much more far-reaching results. Mr. Henry George, because direct confiscation would largely increase the duties of government and would be a needless shock to present habits of thought, would prefer to do the confiscation indirectly by taxing the rent of land so heavily that the landlords would only have left them a small percentage to reward them for the trouble of collecting rents, if they chose to retain their property on such terms. This measure would, he thinks, eradicate the curse of poverty from modern civilisation, by enabling all labourers to earn abundant wages free of all diminution by taxation and would give government an overflowing revenue, which would increase year by year, as the material progress due to the new state of things increased the rent of land. " This revenue arising from the common property could be applied to the common benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. AVe might not establish public tables — they would be unnecessary ; but we could establish public baths, museums, libraries, gardens, lecture rooms, music and dancing halls, theatres, universities, technical schools, shooting galleries, play-grounds, gymnasiums, &c. Heat, light and motive power as well as water might be conducted through our streets at public expense ; our roads be lined with fruit trees ; dis- coverers and inventors rewarded, scientific inves- tigations supported ; and in a thousand ways the THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 107 public revenues made to foster efforts for the public benefit." Such are the results promised from either the confiscation of all landed property by the state, or the substitution of one tax on rents for all the complicated systems of many taxes now in existence. The most important blessing promised in all this picture of the world's happiness in Mr. George's millennium is the increase of the labourers' wages. If this could really be secured to the extent he imagines, if, by enriching the community at the expense of the landlords, every labouring man could be assured of abundant wages, the utilitarian would be bound to support the scheme. For, in comparison with the banishment of extreme poverty and starvation from the world, the pain suffered by landlords deprived of their superfluous wealth would weigh lightly in the balance. Nor would the sufferings of landlords be as great as might at fir.st sight be supposed. It is only proposed to confiscate land and the rent of land, not improvements added to the land in the sha])e of buildings. Thus a large part of the wealth of land owners would be untouched, and, as most of them are wealthy men, they could afford the loss of the mere rent of their land without being reduced to absolute poverty, unless their properties were heavily mortgaged. The capital left in their hands would be increased in value, being, like labour, entirely free from taxation, and the increase to the value of their capital would partially compensate them for the loss of rent. Peasant proprietors would gain more than they lost in rent, if the change brought them higher wages and more profits from their capital. In particular eases, such as poor widows, who derived a small in- come from land, special provision would, no doubt, be made to prevent them from becoming entirely de- io8 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. stitute. Beside the pain of having their wealth diminished, landowners would also suffer much from a feeling of injustice at the violation of their rights of property. But perhaps their indignation would not be productive of as much pain as is now felt by the vast number of indigent labourers, and still more indigent unemployed who compare their want with the luxury and abundant wealth of rich land- owners, enjoying all the good things of the world without toil. This indignation is heightened by the fact that property in land stands on a different footing from other property, inasmuch as it was originally for the most part obtained by confiscation, and has risen to its present value not by the labours of landowners, but by increase of production due to mechanical inventions and freer trade, and by consequent ino'ease of population which tends to make land scarcer and scarcer, and therefore more and more valuable every year. After a careful survey of all these considerations the utilitarian would probably feel himself bound to support the confiscation of the whole, or the greater part of the land value of the country by the state, if only it could be shown to increase wages to the extent imagined by Mr. George and those who think with him. But here is the question on which all depends. Would the transference to the state of all the wealth now derived from land permanently raise the rate of wages and permanently afford employment for everybody ? There is every reason to believe that, if the state took to itself the whole or nearly the whole of the rent of the country, this one simple and easily collected tax would render all other taxes unnecessary. It would thus free labour and capital from all taxation. The capitalist would not have to pay pai't of his earnings to the state in the form of income tax, and the labourer and THE PkOMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 169 capitalist alike would be able to buy tlie necessaries and luxuries of life, and the machines and tools which are the instruments of production at prices far lower than is now possible. For at present the consumer pays in the price of most of the articles he buj's an indirect tax to the state. Under these circumstances the rewards of production to be divided between the capitalist and the labourer would be much increased, and the labourer would for a time be able to insist on getting his fair share of the increase. If capitalists re- fused to give higher wages, they would be compelled to do so by strikes; and, as they could yield to the strikes in this case without carrying on business unprofitablj^ they would yield. Thus the immediate result of the change would be great gain to labourers and capitalists at the expense of landowners. As most landowners are rich and nearly all labourers are poor, the change would be in the direction of equality which is itself a source of happiness, in addition to the immense diminution of misery in the millions of woiking men who are now underpaid and unemployed, but would then be working for abundant wages. But it is to be feared that the change for the better would only be temporary, like that produced by free trade or im- provement in mechanical invention. A great impetus would be given to production partly by the impoverish- ment of the class which now most abundantly indulges in unproductive consumption. This increase of pro- duction would give the world a larger dividend of all things, especially of food and clothing and other necessaries of life, from which poor and rich, and especially the poor, would receive a greater share. But this happy state of affaiis could not continue long. The population would soon rise in proportion to" the increased supply of the means of subsistence, and then the competition of labourers would recom- mence as keenly as ever, and force down wages to their I lo THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. present average rate. To secure a temporary rise of wages, it would not appear to be justifiable from a utilitarian point of view to make such an immense interference with property, as the confiscation of all property in land or the one heavy tax on rents proposed by Mr. George would be. But it is clear that the benefit could only be temporary, unless the population doctrine of Malthus is false. This is clearly seen by Mr. George, who therefore devotes a large amount of space to the refutation of Malthus, attempting to show that the increase of population only drives wages down to a starvation point, because landlords are enabled by that increase to absorb more and more of the proceeds of labour in the form of rent. The arguments by which he attempts to prove that " in any given state of civili- sation a greater number of people can collectively be better provided for than a smaller," and that " the new mouths which an increasing population calls into exist- ence require no more food than the old ones, while the hands they bring with them can in the natural order of things produce more," are not strong enough to shake the Malthusian position. Therefore the benefit ofi"ered by his proposed remedy for poverty would only be temporary, and would be too dearly purchased by the disturbance of the security of all property, bitter feelings and civil wai-s, that would be sure to result from the attempt to transfer landed property without compensation from its present owners to the state. Is there then no other remedy for low wages ? One is suggested by what, as we have seen, would happen, if strikes for very high wages were made all over one particular country. In this case, much capital will leave the country, fewer labourers will be employed, and until the population is reduced to the limit suited to the new state of afi'airs, a very painful period of starvation will intervene, but after that painful interval high wages might be main- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 1 1 1 tained. Why not, then, avoid this painful process by inverting the order of cause and effect and begin- ning with reduction of the population ? If the labourers of England, by prudence and late marriages, reduced the number of their offspring by one half, the next generation would secure much higher wages. Of course another condition would be necessary to secure this result. Strict laws would have to be passed to prevent the immigration of foreign labourers. With these two conditions fulfilled, the supply of labom: would be diminished and wages would rise high. The production of the country would be much diminished, as it would only be possible for capitalists to engage profitably in industries for which England has peculiar advantages, for instance, in mines and land of excep- tional productiveness and of peculiarly advantageous situation. The self-denial necessary to bring about the required partial depojiulation of England would involve a certain amount of pain, but much less than the starvation that would result from partial depopula- tion due to a general strike for higher wages. But it is hardly likely that the labouring classes will ever be taught to practise this kind of self-denial to any great extent. To postpone marriage, not for one's own inclination, but because one's early marriage inflicts infinitesimal disadvantage on the next genera- tion of labouring men requires an amount of public spirit that will perhaps never be generally diffused through the world. Yet this is, according to Mill, the only means by which wages can be permanently improved, and the condition of the labourer be substantially ameliorated. There does, however, seem to be another way in which the same object might be effected to a certain extent. Education increases the intelligence of work- ing men. This increased intelligence may be expected to better their position in more ways than one. In 112 tbe promotion of happiness. the first place, it will teach them prudence in marriage, and so prevent them from increasing their number too rapidly, whenever a new invention in- creases the productive powers of the countiy. The ad- vantage thus obtained, as it operates by limiting the supply of labourers, is only a means to the remedy the efficacy of which is admitted by Mill. Education, however, seems to work favourably in other ways. It is likely to increase the rapidity of productive in- vention, and so enable labourers to get larger wages without being forced to reduce their numbers. The increased intelligence produced by education will also teach them how to join their savings together as capital, and so be at once capitalists and labourers to the great advantage of tlieir incomes. It will also enable them more clearly to estimate probabilities and to adjust their expenditure to their income. Indeed, the mere knowledge of arithmetic ought to be of great service to the working classes by helping them to determine when a strike is likely to be successful and when it would be suicidal folly. The settlement of this question is mostly a question of figures deter- mining whether capitalists are or are not securing too high profits. In smaller matters too, the knowledge of figTires will be of great use. It will enable the woj'king man to settle better the many questions of domestic life, as to the advisability of marriage, change of place, or change of employment. In all these ways education will tend to give the labouring man a larger income, and will also teach him how to use that lai'ger income to the best advantage. It is generally assumed in newspapers and in the speeches of politicians that heavy taxation is an evil, and that the diminution of taxation is productive of happi- ness. The argument on which this conclusion is based is, that diminution of taxation increases the national wealth, and that each individual of the nation is likely to THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 113 be benefited by that increase. Sometimes, however, dim- inution of taxation, instead of increasing national wealth, may actually diminish it. If the diminution of taxation diminishes a nation's army, navy, or police, below the quantity necessary for the security of life and property, the individual is likely to suffer, on the average, more from war and robbery, than he gained by relief from taxation. Diminution of taxation with such results would be advocated by no one but robbers or national enemies, and may, therefore, be left out of consideration. Those who desire diminution of taxation do so on the supposition that it may be secured by skilful economy, without impairing the efficiency of the defensive forces, or dangerously curtailing any other expenditure produc- tive of national prosperity. This has, of course, often been done in the past. It has often happened, especially when taxes have been farmed out, that far more has been taken out of the taxpayer than finds its way to the na- tional exchequer. Sometimes this is due to peculation on the part of the tax collector!?, sometimes to the nature of the tax which cannot be levied without an excessive number of salaried collectors. In other cases, the waste comes later, and consists of extravagant expenditure of the proceeds of taxation. For instance, it is contended, rightly or wrongly, by Lord Randolph Churchill, and others, that the United Kingdom might have an equally or more efficient army at a less cost. Under such cir- cumstances, the burden of taxation may be reduced with- out injury to the national wealth, or even, in many cases, with such a great addition to it as was effected by the re- peal of the Corn Laws. Conversely heavy taxation may,and generally does, seriously diminish a nation's wealth. The partial depopulation of the once populous regions now included in the Turkish empire is no doubt, in a great measure, due to heavy taxation, and shows how injuri- ously heavy taxation may affect national wealth. But, if all taxes in the Turkish empire were remitted for ever, H 114 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. the result would only be a temporary increase of happi- ness, owing to a temporary lightening of the struggle for existence. Very soon the population would rise in pro- portion to the remission of taxation, until the average income of the people became about what it was before. Owing to this increase of population which may generally be expected to follow increase of national wealth, light- ening of taxation need not be expected to make the aver- age man permanently wealthier, or less poor, than he was before. When the reform of taxation leads to in- creased wealth, and thereby to increased population, it does so by increasing production, much in the same way as improvement in machinery does, and has the same effect, or want of effect, upon the general happiness, as material progress. In another way, howevei-, reform in taxation may promote happiness. Some taxes tempt men to im- moral conduct. As the assessment of the income tax to a large extent depends upon a man's own state- ment of his income, it I'e wards falsehood and dis- honesty and punishes conscientiousness. In like manner heavy duties on imported goods encourage the kind of dishonesty call.d smuggling, which often leads to murder and other crimes. Even moderate duties tempt men, otherwise honourable, to condescend to all kinds of evasion, and to tell lies, in order to bring foreign goods in without paying the tax imposed by law. Unscrupulous men, to effect their object, try to bribe custom-house officials, who are often not firm enough to resist the temptation, and betiay their trust to the ruin of their moral character. The farm- ing out of taxes eniiches generally the most unscrup- ulous speculators. Wherever, as in the above instances, taxation tempts men to commit vicious actions, its reform is desiiable in the interests of happiness, as im- moral conduct is in a higli degiee destructive of happiness. Unjust taxes, as also all unjust laws, are very pre- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS 115 judicial to happiness. But what taxes or laws are unjust ? If, adopting what may perhaps he called the natural utilitarian modification of the meaning of justice, we call all laws unjust which distribute privileges and burdens in a way productive of misery, then it is a verbal proposition to say that unjust laws produce misery, and it would be enough merely to determine which laws are just and which are unjust. Without attempt- ing to settle exhaustively this question, so as to deter- mine difficult questions about the justice or injustice of particular taxes, for and against which much may be said, let us consider certain old taxes admitted to be unjust on all sides except by those who were bene- fited by their imposition, and see whether they did much to diminish happiness. In Mahometan countries the levying of double taxes on Christians could not appear just to any except some Mahometans whose discrimination between right and wrong was blinded by fanaticism and the wish to have the burden of taxation thrust upon other shoulders. The injustice of this arrangement of taxation consisted in its im- posing unequal burdens on men of equal wealth. Equally unjust in another way was the poll-tax of one shilling on every person above the age of sixteen imposed in England in the reign of Richard II. This law exacted as much from the y)oor as the rich, and its natural consequence was the rebellion of Wat Tyler, at the end of which, after the destruction of much private property, fifteen hundred persons were executed on the gibbet. Such unjust taxes as those just mentioned must be very injurious to happiness, from the bitter indignation excited in the minds of the sufferers and the division of the peo]de into fav- oured and oppressed, who, instead of sympathising with each other, are animated by envy or proud contempt, according as they belong to the former or latter class. When the oppressed are carried away by their spirit ii6 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. of indignation, they break out in insurrection, wliich, whether successful or unsuceiessful, is sure to be pro- ductive of much misery. In Europe, since the French Revolution, such modes of taxation as were flagrantly unjust have been for the most part swept away, to the great advantage of the general happiness. But if these unjust laws had never been imposed, or could liave been abolished without insurrection and blood- shed, the improved state of affairs, which the leaders o£ the French Revolution were mainly instrumental in producing, might have been secured without the suffer- ings that necessarily accompany a violent uprising. The abuses of taxation are not now in modern Europe as they were before that cataclysm. Such taxes as are now vehemently condemned as unjust by socialists would in the past have almost entirely escaped criticism, or even been lauded as patterns of justice. The effect upon happiness of reform of taxation in a socialistic direction has been discussed above. Before concluding this short survey of taxation from a utilitarian point of view, there is one prin- ciple which must never be forgotten. It is that almost all change of taxation has a tendency to diminish happiness. An old established, heavy tax presses less heavily both upon sellers and buyers than a light one newly imposed. In spite of the heavy taxes levied upon imported wine and spirits, wine merchants and hotel-keepers are as able to support themselves and their families as other tradesmen who deal in articles less heavily taxed. This is because they fix the price of wine and spirits at such a high price as reimburses them for the heavy taxes they pay, and the number of those who engage iu these trades is so limited by calculations of prud- ence on the part of those choosing their calling in life that no more persons enter them tlnn can expect a THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 117 fair profit out of the comparatively limited amount of wine and spirits likely to be purchased at the high prices necessitated by the heavy tax. On the other hand buyers are so accustomed to the idea of paying high prices for wine and spirits that they look upon it as a matter of course and forbear to be indignant. Suppose now that in England the heavy tax on beer and spirits were taken off and its place were partially supplied by a large inert ass of the duty on tea. In this case the tea drinkers would be annoyed at having to pay more for their tea than they used to pay, but owing to the per- verseness of human nature the drinkers of strong drinks would not feel correspondingly thankful for the diminution of the expense of their drink, so that there would be a diminution of happiness equal to the difference between the great pain of discontent felt by the tea drinkers and the slight pleasure of gratifica- tion that the drinkers of alcohol would derive from buying cheaper. Further, owing to the change in the taxation, less tea and more alcoholic drink will be consumed, and, therefore, a certain number of the less prosperous wine merchants and innkeepers will have either to change their trade or be ruined, or, perhaps, do both, for it is often a ruinous measure for a tradesman to give up his old trade and begin life afresh. On these grounds taxation should not be changed except for the sake of such very solid advantage to happiness as may be enough to counterbalance the evil effects due to the mere fact of change. CHAPTER VIII. No doubt a great effect may be produced on happi- ness by alteration of domestic and social customs. Should polygamy be established all over the world, or are there some nations and climes in which poly- gamy and polyandry are preferable ? Is early marriage or late marriage more productive of hap- piness ? Should a man or boy choose his own wife, or a woman or girl her own liusband, or should mar- riages be arranged by the parents of the principals ? Should divorce and re-marriage be sanctioned by society ? Should women be as free as the American girl of the peiiod, or closely confined in the walls of a zenana, as in many parts of India, in Turkey, and in ancient Greece during the historic period ? Ought they to be educated as men are, or difierently, or not at all ? Should men be allowed to choose their own calling, or be forced by a rigid system of caste to adopt that of their father and father's father ? Is it better to dine at nine in the morning, as the ancient Normans did, and take supper at four or five in the afternoon, or to dine in the afternoon as they did in the days of William of Orange and George I., or to follow the fashion of the rich of to-day and dine late at night ? Is it better to enjoy the social cup at meals as in Europe, or between meals as in America, or on no occasion ? Many such social questions present themselves for consideration, the settlement of which must be important for the utilitarian. THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 119 In the case of some of them it is possible to give a decided answer. We may safely assert that among tlie domestic customs most destructive of happiness the oriental custom of secluding women must take almost the foremost place. To abolish it gradually among the millions of people among whom it prevails would un- doubtedly increase the average happiness or diminish the average misery of the world. Tlie influence of the Mahometan religion has done much to intensify this evil. The natives of India trace its introduction into their country to the Mahometan conquest ; at which date they say they began to seclude their women, partly in imitation of their conquerors, and partly in order to defend their wives and daughters from outrage. But the custom existed long before the Mahometan era, and not only in Asia but also in Eastern Europe among the most refined people of the ancient world. In fact it seems to be about as old as civilisation ; but not older-, for the great epics of Greece and India show that in the uncivilised period, when warriors fought habitually with stones and had hardly given up the idea of eating their conquered enemies, women enjoyed plenty of freedom of action. This fact makes the possibility of reform easier, as reform under the circumstances being a reversion to an earlier custom, can be advocated on conservative grounds and can not be regarded as a revolutionary destruction of a practice observed from time immemorial. The infelicific effects of seclusion can hardly be dis- puted, though like all wide-spread customs its evil effects are softened by habituation. Oriental women, owing to the habitual seclusion of themselves and their ancestors through many generations, have come to hug their chains. Like canary birds they would not know how to use their liberty properly, if they were suddenly freed from their restrictions. But this is no reason why the gradual restoration of their freedom, accompanied by I20 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. an improvement in education to fit them for their new- position, should not be a gi-eat benefit not only to the women themselves but also to the society of which they form a part. The clearest evil efi'ect of seclusion is upon health. Human beings cannot expect to be healthy without a fair allowance of exercise and fresh air. But this is what oriental women cannot get, condemned as they are to spend the greater part of their life indoors. A small proportion of them may have access to private gardens and enjoy a certain amount of what is by a misnomer sometimes called carriage exercise. But a promenade in a small high-walled garden or a drive is a poor substitute for riding, or tennis, or walks in the open country. Even when driving they get little fresh air owing to the thick veil with which they are shrouded. And after all, it is only the small minority of the rich that can afford private gardens or carriages. Most of them are shut up in small crowded rooms, from which they seldom or never emerge. Strong vigorous healtli must be all but impossible under such conditions. Then it must be remembered that it is not only the women themselves who suffer from seclusion. Their children succeed to their weakness. When one half of the parents of a race are deprived of the possibility of vigorous health, it is no wonder if each succeeding generation is less healthy than its predecessor. The oriental defence of tlie system we are considering is that it is necessary for the preservation of female chastity. Put into a utilitarian form the argument would be that seclusion secures chastity, and that un- chastity is so productive of misery that it is reasonable to secure chastity at tlie expense of all the unhealthi- ness due to seclusion. Now, in the absence of experi- ence to the contrary, it might have been supposed that seclusion is a safeguard of chastity and that liberty has the opposite effect. But there is an overwhelming THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 121 amount of experience to tlie contrary in the fact that European and even American women are certainly as virtuous as their sisters in the east. There seems no reasonable grounds for doubting this fact. At first sight the large number of divorce cases chronicled in English newspapers would seem to point to an opposite conclusion, as compared with the infrequency of such cases in the history of oriental families. But the reason of this difference is not the superior chastity of women in the east, but the oriental custom of settling such matters by the family or caste without appealing to the law. The aberrations from virtue that in England lead to divorce cases do not as a rule in the east appear in the newspapers in the records of judicial cases, unless they are revenged hj murder, and not always even then, al- though in the newspapers of the east there is no lack of murders actuated by jealousy. As experience shows that women are just as capable of being virtuous in a state of liberty as when subjected to jealous confinement, and that the variety of interests that occupy the mind of a free woman with plenty of liberty of action is a better preservative against error than stone walls and doors, the seclusion of women must, if justified at all, find some other defence. Can it be defended, on Darwinian gTounds, against the charge of being injurious to health ? No doubt, if all over the world owing to some univeisal law of nature the whole of the human race or all the women were compelled to live in houses without ever emerg- ing into the open air, human nature would be able gradually to adapt itself to its environment, and those unable to live and be healthy without fresh air and outdoor exercise, or without their wives and daughters enjoying Iresh air and outdoor exercise, would die out and leave no descendants. Thus there would be left to people the world, only those fitted by hereditary temperament to be healthy and happy 122 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. indoors. But there is no such law of nature, and consequently nations and families who seclude their women are heavily handicapped in the struggle for existence with those who live a life which, in the present condition of things, is healthier. Even in oriental countries like India the poor cannot seclude their wives and daughters, and might be expected, in the long run, to rise successfully against the rich, and by superior bodily health and strength due to a more rational life would overthrow those, who before by their power and wealth were able to follow the pernicious practice of seclusion of women. This was pretty clearly shown by the rise of the poor un- civilised Marathas against their Mahometan rulers. Had it not been for the British conquest, they would doubtless have become the rulers of India, but only for a tiuie, until having adopted from the conquered the practice of seclusion, and being able by their wealth to keep it up, i\\Qj had paved the way for their own physical deterioration. The weakening effects of this practice partly explains also the rapid fall of many oriental empires when attacked hj poor and hardy mountaineers, and especially the deterioration that Mahometan nations seem to suffer from prosperity. The Arabs, and after them the Turks, on first adopting Mahometanism, dis- played an immense amount of energy and valour, but in both cases after a few generations these qualities disappeared or remained only among the poorer classes who had not sufEcient means to seclude their women, It would therefore appear that though, in the long course of ages, portions of the human race, if isolated from the rest of the world, might manage to be healthy although secluding their women, yet this slower process has always been cut short by the more rapid disappearance of in- dividuals, families, and nations following this practice and having to contend in the struggle for existence with ordinary men who are the offspring of mothers whose minds THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 123 and limbs have not been cramped by seclusion. This being the case, one may be tempted to argue in favour of seclusion that it is not likely to damage much the happiness of the human race, as those who follow the practice, tend to die out, and, like suicides, leave few or no descendants. But unfortunately, besides the fact that this dying out involves a large amount of painful ill-health and killing, the practice has such attractions to the oriental mind, that many of those, who take the place of the individuals, families, and communities that have died out owing to seclusion, soon adopt the same bad custom, which they are enabled to do owing to the wealth they have won at the expense of the displaced. So that the custom remains, however much those who practise it suffer in health and lose the happiness that good health confers. And even if seclusion of women were as compatible with health as their liberty, the practice should still be eschewed by utilitarians as directly diminishing the happiness of women. It is only after long confinement that women come to hug their chains and prefer confinement to liberty. Naturally as they grow up they miss the freedom they enjoyed as little girls. Nor are they prepared for seclusion by heredity, for their male parents have been accustomed to liberty, and women derive their mental characteristics as much from their fathers as their mothers. Thus seclusion would seem to diminish happiness both indirectly by militating against health, and also directly. Therefore oriental utilitarians have a great work to do in effecting by precept and example the gradual extinction of this custom. Another oriental custom, that affords scope to utili- tarian effort, is early marriage. This custom is the rule, though not without exceptions, among the two hundred and fifty million inhabitants of India. A large number of those sections of the Indian com- 124 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. munity, which many young, aggravate the evil results of the practice by prohibiting widows from re- marriage, and subjecting them to social tyranny. Indian widows are regarded as degraded beings, who have lost their husbands owing to misdemeanours committed in one of their lives, and their presence is supposed to be ominous of evil. They are com- pelled to shave their hair, forego the use of ornaments, eat the coarsest food, and take the lowest place in the household hierarchy. Owing to early marriage and the prevention of widow re-marriage, there are a disproportionate amount of widows in India. In England, only the death of men produces widows ; in India, nearly every boy that dies leaves a widow behind him, and by the prohibition of re-marriage most of those who are once made widows remain widows for ever. In India, there are out of a population of 254,000,000 more than 23,000,000 widows. India, with ten times the population of England and Wales, has twenty -three times the number of widows. The position of widows is proverbially unhappy all over the world. In Christian countries, their unhappy state is alleviated by the religious sanction supporting with all its power the duty of kindness and justice to women and children bereft of their natural pro- tectors, as among tlje most sacred of moral duties. Hindu religion and custom, on the contrary, as we have seen, goes out of its way to intensify the bitter- ness of tiie widow's lot. Thus in India, widows are not only more numerous, but also more miserable than in ihe rest of the world. Also early marriage helps to make the average state of the widow excep- tionally unhappy. In England, few women become widows until they have passed the prime of youth and the most passionate age of life. In India, a vast majority of widows are young girls, whose passions are too strong to be controlled by reason, THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 125 and, as a natural consequence, they are not unlikely to fall away into vice and misery. It may be answered that in Europe, there are not only widows, but also a large number of women who remain unmarried till their death, while in India almost every woman gets married, and old maids are scarcely ever heard of. In England and Wales in 1881, there were out of a population of 26,000,000, only 1,000,000 widows, but of unmarried women above the age of twenty, there were nearly 2,000,000. This, however, is a very partial answer. The unhappiness of European spinsters should on the average be much leas than that of Indian widows. As marriage in Europe depends mainly on a woman's own free will, almost any woman can marry, if she is very anxious to do so. Consequently, a large proportion of European spinsters are women either totally averse to married life, or who are not very anxious for matrimony, and there- fore have been disinclined to accept such men as have happened to ask for their hands. Thus, there is good reason to believe that English spinsters are less dissatisfied with their state than Indian widows. Further, owing to early marriage, Indian wives and husbands are more likely to be dissatisfied with each other than English wives and husbands. Of course, such generalisations are subject to excep- tions. Many English wives and husbands, after a few years or months of married life, find their tempers incompatible. But such unfortunate too late dis- coveries are less likely to be made in the case of husbands and wives who have chosen each other after arriving at years of discretion, than when a match has been made probably on prudential con- siderations by the parents of bride and bridegroom. Early marriage is also said to be bad from a physiological point of view, as being injurious to the health both of parents and children, on which account 126 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. Plato in his Kepublic does not allow his guardians to marry before the age of twenty-five, and then, only to women of twenty years old and upwards. Thus, on the score of health, and as much happiness as depends upon health, there is the same objection to early marriage as to the seclusion of women. But it is unnecessary to dwell upon the evils of early marriage and enforced widowhood, as they have been detailed so exhaustively in the writings of Mr. Malabari, a Parsee of Bombay, who, in a true utilitarian spirit, has devoted himself heart and soul to their extinction in India. The effect produced by his enthusiasm and literary labours in this field is somewhat marred by the fact that the Hindus rather resent being lectured upon their manners and customs by a Parsee or any other outsider. More result may be expected from the efforts of enlightened members of the Hindu community, if only they do not urge on the wheel of progress so rapidly as to provoke reaction. Festina lente should bo their motto. If all educated Hindus would take up the good cause with the same enthusiasm and self sacrifice as Mr. Malabari, and with such knowledge of the dangers and difficulties in the way of reform as can only be possessed by a Hindu, the happiness of millions would be increased, and, as this increased happiness to India would not be obtained at the expense of any other portion of the human race, general happiness would thereby be promoted. Closely connected with the seclusion of women, early marriage, and the prohibition of widow re-marriage is the question of caste, because it is by the tyranny of, caste rules that these practices are enforced upon the ma- jority of Hindus. Tiierefore, the evil effects of these practices are arguments against caste. But caste is far more wide-reaching in its results, and rules with a rod of iron the lives of men, as well as of women and children. Its great effect is to sub-divide India into small communi- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 127 ties of men who can have no social intercourse with each other. It is therefore condemned by those who have studied the institution, as hostile to the spread of sympathy between man and man. " Caste," says Mr. Sherring, is "a sworn enemy to human happiness. Laws, customs, social compacts, and the sweet acts of self-denial so fre- quently practised between man and man, are intended to promote the welfare of mankind, to increase the sum of human joy, to make homes tranquil, and to strengthen all the ties by which one family is bound to another. Caste was instituted for a different purpose. It seeks to sever natural ties, to alienate friends, to harden the heart, to stifle sympathy, to increase pride and self- esteem, to generate misanthropj^, to repress the kindly affections, and to destroy mutual confidence and trust, without which society is beset with stings, and becomes a stranger to genuine comfort and peace." This may seem an exaggerated indictment to those who have not realised the immense number of castes in India, and the strict social exclusiveness which separates each caste from the rest of the world. In ancient Persia there are said to have been onl}^ four castes, priests, soldiers, husbandmen, and tradesmen. In ancient Egypt there were, according to Herodotus, seven castes, priests, soldiers, cowherds, swineherds, tradesmen, interpreters, and boatmen. But how far these Persian and Egyptian castes were sub-divided, and how strict were the lines of separation, we know very imperfectly, except that it is stated, that in Egypt the swineherd was looked down upon as a degraded being, and was not allosved to enter the temples. It is to India where the caste system is still in full force that one must look for experience of its workino-. It is very commonly supposed, that in India there are only four castes— (1) The Brahmins or priestly caste, (2) The Kshatryas or military caste, (3) The Vaishyas or mercantile caste, (4) The Shudras or servile caste. If there were only these four castes in India, the accusation 128 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. that caste restrains sympathy within narrow limits would have less force, for there is plenty of room for the exer- cise of sympathy for those who can have intimate friendly intercourse with even a fourth part of their fellow-men in a thickly populated country like India. But in truth, this fourfold division is only the original starting-point of the caste system. When the Hindus first divided them- selves into these four castes, the barrier of exclusive- ness does not appear to have been so strict as it has since become, and men and women of different castes married one another. From the offspring of these mixed marriages new castes have arisen, until now the number of castes is astonishingly large. In the census for 1881, over nineteen thousand caste names were given in to the census officers. This shows the immense number of Indian castes, even allowing for the probability that, in many cases, different caste names were given in by dif- ferent individuals of the same caste. So firmly fixed is the caste system in India, that even the native Christians are divided into castes. When such an immense number of divisions supplements the ordinary divisions of society according to place and wealth, the Hindu must often have very few human beings with whom to associate in friendly sympathy. Think of a Hindu in his village or town. Like other men he depends for society upon his near neigh- bours, and especially upon those who are neither much richer, nor much poorer, than himself. But by caste rules he is still further limited in the circle of his possible friendships. He can only familiarly associate with those of his neighbours of about the same fortune as himself, who happen also to belong to the same caste. With those who belong to any one of the thousands of other castes he cannot, as a rule, join in a social meal, or form a marriage connection. Even without such restrictions it is often hard enough for men to find a sufficient number of congenial friends among their neighbours. Just as friendship adds much to human happiness, any institu- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 129 tion which, like caste, limits a man's power oi" selecting congenial friends must be prejudicial to happiness. Even members of the same caste are restricted in their social intercourse. The men take their meals first, and afterwards the women by themselves. Con- versation is forbidden at the time of eating. By the rules which regulate the Namburi Brahmins it is de- creed that the " Brahmani woman is strictly pro- hibited from having access to or seeing any other man besides her lawful husband, and likewise lier own male children are restricted from having access to her after they have attained the age of fourteen years." Thus caste like slavery maj^ bring about a forcible separation between mother and child. We have seen reason to believe that equality is productive of happiness. Caste in one of its principal aspects resembles slavery by being a contravention of the equality of men. An immense number of the re- gulations of caste are intended to make a great gulf of separation between Brahmins and the rest of man- kind. The contempt of white slave-master for black slave, or of Greek for barbarian was much less arrogant than the contempt with which the Brahmin is taught to look down upon the lower castes. " Indian caste,'" says Dr. Wilson, " is the condensation of all the pride, jealousy, and tyranny of an ancient and predominant people dealing with the tribes which they have sub- jected, and over which they have ruled often without the sympathies of a recognised common humanity." As Dr. Wilson was a missionary, his judgment on tlie subject might be naturally suspected, if it were not abundantly supported by extracts from the sacred books of the Hindus. Brahmins and gods are sometimes coupled together in caste regulations. The law books say that in the house of a king, in a cow's fold, and in the presence of a god and Brahmin, and at the time of worship and eating, shoes ought to be pulled I I30 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. off. "The Brahmins are earthly gods, to be adored and honoured with commendations," according to the Kalki Purana. In the Padma Purana it is written that " the Brahmin is the exalted lord of all the castes. To him should gifts be made with faith and reverence. The Brahmin represents all divinities in himself, a visible god on the earth, who saves the giver in the impassable ocean of the world," and again elsewhere in the same book we are told that "Whatever good man bows to a Brahmin, reverencing him as Vishnu, is blessed with long life, with sons, with renown, and with prosperity." In all ways, says Manii, Brahmins are to be worshipped ; they are a supreme Divinity. Men of the servile class were only created for the purpose of serving Brahmins. According to the same lawgiver a Brahmin may without hesitation take the property of a Shudra. The Namburi Brahmins are so proud that they will not allow Shudras to approach within three paces of them, and, if a Pulyar touch them, they must im- mediately bathe and change their Brahminical threads and clothes, and absolve themselves by reading the Vedas before they dare to enter their houses. The lowe)' castes are compelled by the caste regulations to humiliating restrictions in their mode of life. The Chandala and Shoapaka must live outside towns, be denied the use of unbroken vessels, and have as their sole wealth dogs and asses. Their clothes must be those of the dead, tlieir dishes broken pots, their ornaments rusty iion. Other classes must have no intercourse with them. The Brahmins and other castes are by no means to be equal in the sight of the law. If a Vaishya slanders a Brahmin he must be lined one hundred and fifty or two hundred panas; if a Brahmin slanders a Vaishya, he is fined twenty-five, and, if he slanders a Shudra, only twelve panas. A Shudra slandering a Brahmin must suffer corporal punishment. THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 131 Should a Brahmin kill a Shudra, he pays no more penance than if he killed a cat, an ichneumon, a frog, a lizard, an owl, or a crow ; but a person intending to strike a Brahmin with intent to kill remains in hell a hundred years, and, if he actually strikes him, a thousand. Every drop of a Brahmin's blood shed and attracting particles of dust, demands a thousand years' torment for each of these particles. These instances, most of which, with many others to a similar effect, may be found in Dr. Wilson's posthumous work on " Indian Gaste," illustrate the immense arrogance with which the Brahmin is taught by his sacred books to look down on his fellow-men. Nor is this relation of contempt on the one side and degrading inferiority on the other confined to the Brahmins and Shudras. All the castes are arranged in a kind of hierarchy, the higher members of which are taught to despise the lower, and, when they can, inflict upon them marks of inferiority. Thus the Shudras, though so far below the Brahmins, themselves lord it over the castes of inferior dignity. They are divided into many castes, and some of the higher caste Shudras consider them- selves polluted by contact with lower caste Shudras. Below all the Shudras are ranked certain outcast and polluted castes who pay to the Shudras almost as much reverence as the Shudras pay the Brahmins. Such, for instance, are the Pulayars, who form one-twelfth of the whole population of Travancore, and must keep well out of the way of even the Shudras. In Mr. Mateer's account of native life in Travancore we read that " Until lately Pulayars were not allowed even to approach the roads. When they had palm- leaf umbrellas and other small articles to sell, they laid them down near the highway, and, standing at the appointed distance, shouted to their customers . . . Cottayam Pulayars put a few green twigs on the roadside, near where they ai-e working, to warn 132 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. off high castes. Pulayars, walking on the high road, are required to run off into the jungles or fields when high-caste people pass along. Where there is plenty of room, a kind of side-walk is sometimes formed in this way. It is most painful to see a poor and in- offensive woman with a load on her back, or burdened with an infant, scramble up the steep side of the road and retire into the jungle, to allow a high-caste man to pass." In this account it must be remembered that " high caste " includes Shudras as well as Brahmins. It must not be supposed that such intolerable preten- sions to superiority are submitted to without painful feelings of bitter indignation among the oppressed and degraded. Buddhism was a great protest against the tyranny of caste, and very nearly drove Brah- minism out of India. Its success showed the strength of the feeling of indignation among the lower castes, and the temporary nature of its success showed the immense strength of the caste system, which, though for a time overthrown, managed once moie to recover its ascendency so completely, that now Buddhism is practically an extinct faith in India. All the caste regulations given above, which draw degrading distinctions between caste and caste, must be condemned as terribly destructive of humility, sympathy between man and man, compassion for the weak, and, therefore, of happiness. There are also many other regulations in the caste codes which will be condemned equally by the ordinary mora- list and by the utilitarian. Some of the caste regu- lations entail great inconvenience even on the castes in whose favour they are made. " All this super- stitious punctiliousness," remarks Mr. Mateer in his " Native Life in Travancore," " is fraught with great inconvenience to the unenlightened high castes themselves. They are unable to travel by sea unless they could land daily to cook and eat their food, THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 133 that prepared with the water on board ship beinjr ceremonially unclean. When travelling by rail along ■with other classes, they dare not even take a draught of water to refresh themselves ; and often there is great suffering from hunger when habitations belong- ing to their own caste are not at hand. A friend of ours calling a native doctor to the Hills for a serious emergency, the poor man could eat nothing but plantain fruits during the two days he was in patient and kindly attendance." In some exceptional cases the directions given to the castes seem directly opposed to ordinary morality, and, therefore, to happiness. For instance, according to Manu, a Brahmin must live by truth and falsehood rather than by hired service. But, on the whole, the principal objections that the utilitarian will have to the caste system will be on account of the degradation of the lower castes, the seclusion of women, early marriage, en- forced widowhood and unkindness to widows. The culmination of the evils sanctioned by caste is to be found in the practice of suttee. This rite, however, stands on a different footing from the other evils we have been considering, inasmuch as it is recom- mended as a counsel of perfection, not prescribed as necessary. It was, however, supposed to have such peculiar efficacy in securing a husband's salva- tion, that wives of the higher castes abstaining from it were liable to contempt and contumely. There were differences in the arrangements allowable according to tlie caste of the victim. Brahmin women were not allowed to sacrifice themselves except on their husband's dead body. Women of other high castes might and did do so after their husbands had been dead many years, when, perhaps, they found the life of widowhood intolerable. Some of the lowest castes seem to have been denied the honour and privilege of committing suttee in any form. The 134 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. duty of suttee is not prescribed by Manu, but is advocated in the Brahma-purana and may be regarded as the natural result of the severe regulations by which widows are oppressed. It is not unnatural that, to avoid the evils of existence as a widow, a wom.^u should make a virtue of necessity and die on her husband's funeral pyre. Here is a description of a case of suttee described by an eye-witness in a letter to the Bombay Courier of September 10th, 1802, which will illustrate how the ceremony was performed. " About two o'clock the body (of the husband) was brought to the pagoda feet foremost. The wife very richly dressed walked close to the head. At the pagoda some ceremonies were performed by the Brahmins, and the lady threw large quantities of the red powder, which is used at the Hooly, over every person near her, after which she with the corpse went down into the river which was close by, and, after bathing and throwing dust about for a lone time, she followed the corpse to the pile, which was about three feet high. She then took off all her ornaments except her nut and two gold rings and distributed them among her mother and children. She gave a few rings to some other female relations who attended. None of the daughters or mother seemed really affected ; they appeared to weep, but you might see they were inwardly pleased at the honour that would redound to their family from the victim's fortitude. After she had given away all her jewels, the Brahmins gave her sandal-wood dust which she distributed to all near her. She then walked round the pile, the Brahmins salaaming to lier feet as she passed. When she arrived at the feet of the corpse which was the enti'ance (the wood having been piled about two feet at the head and about the height of the body as it lay), Roba (a Brahmin under whom the dead man had served) THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 13S got up and went to her, knelt down and made salaam with his head to her feet, and complimented her on her virtue and fortitude, at which she smiled and seemed highly pleased. She then turned, and having salaamed to her husband's feet she entered the pile, and walking up to the head with a firm step she sat herself down and took the head of the corpse into her lap, where she remained perfectly composed whilst the Brahmin piled up the rest of the wood, putting great quantities of dry cow-dung round her person. The wood was laid in a triangular form, so that the entrance at the foot was never closed, and you saw the woman very plain. After it was finished and closed at the top, it looked like an oven. There were a great many pieces put over where she sat, which by very little exertion from without would have been thrown down upon her and crushed her to death, but there was no occasion for that to be done. A lighted torch was given her by an old Brahmin (who remained at the entrance of the pile) with which she very deliberately set tire to the cow-dung all round her, and sat surrounded by the flame without altering a feature. When the flame appeared at the top, the old Brahmin threw a handful of something full in her face which instantly caused a great blaze, and she was entirely enveloped in it. A band of country music then struck up, the Brahmins began knocking the ujiper jiart of the pile doAvn upon the bodies, and every person present began clapping their hands and hollowing as loud as they could." The most painful feature in this account is the provision made by pieces of wood piled above her to prevent the victim from bursting away from the pile if her courage failed her at the last moment. When this happened, the poor women trying to escape were often crushed by the Brahmins under the wood of the pile, or, if 136 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. they got out of the pile, were cut down with the sword. Such scenes were of frequent occurrence at the commencement of the century, until suttee was placed by law on the same footing as murder by Lord Bentinck, who, in spite of the fact that he stamped out a custom dear to caste prejudicep, is still remembered with affection by the people of India as one of the best ' of English Governor-generals. But much still requires to be done. Suttee being the natural result of the tyranny exercised by caste over the Hindu widow, it may seem from a utilitarian point of view an act of doubtful benevolence to prevent her from escaping her miseries by a voluntary and honoured death. What is required to supplement the abolition of suttee, is some measure for the amelioration of the widow's lot and her freedom from the indignities she is now subjected to on account of her supposed crimes. But this can hardlj^ be effected by law. It may, however, be brought about gradually by the influence of education. This is recognised by one of the noblest champions of woman's rights in India, the Pandita Ramabai, who herself a widow has set about the work of educating widows in India and teaching them to learn to support themselves and be independent. As soon as Indian women have secured the full advant- age of the education offered to the people of India, they will effect a reform of the customs that now press so unfairly on the weaker sex. The utilitarian will prefer to reform the caste system by the gradual influence of education rather than attempt suddenly to subvert it, because the regulations of caste are not by any means all opposed to utili- tarianism. In tlie codes that regulate the castes, there is mixed up with much that the utilitarian will con- demn a large amount of good ordinary morality, the obedience to which must be productive of happiness THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 137 A large number of the regulations are neither for nor against happiness. Such, for instance, is the rule that the stick with which a Brahmin rinses his teeth is to be twelve inches long, that of a Kshatriya is to be eleven, and that of a Shudra nine. But mixed up in strange confusion with such immaterial regulations are precepts in accordance with the ten command- ments. Thus the Brahmin is commanded to abstain from honey, flesh, perfumes, garlands, vegetable juices, women, acidulated substances, the killing of animated beings, unguents for his limbs, black powder for his eyes, wearing sandals, using an umbrella, sensual desires, wrath, covetousness, dancing, singing, dice, detraction, and falsehood. He is warned by Manu against being puffed up by the lofty position given him in the hierarchy of castes, for " by falsehood, sacrifice be- comes vain ; by pride, austerities go for nought ; by the dishonour of priests, life is diminished ; and by the display of charity, its fruit is destroyed." Many of the regulations must have been originally prompted by utilitarian considerations of a sanitary character. Such are the rules for ablutions, for the protection of tanks from pollution, and the penalty imposed upon those who drink water or eat food that has fallen to the ground. Out of the long collections of regulations for the castes on all kinds of subjects in the sacred books a large body of prescriptions productive of happiness might be extracted, and in some cases where the letter of the laws is infelicific it is possible never- theless to see that they have been dictated by a spirit of benevolence. It is likely that, with the progress of knowledge, the felicitic regulations will gradually render obsolete those prejudicial to happiness. At present caste wields the overpowerful sanction of public opinion in support of its rules whether good or bad, and may be regarded as a rigid enforcer of a system of conduct which on the whole is pro- 138 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. ductive of happiness. If caste were suddenly over- thrown, it is not unlikely that an immense number oi: individuals who are now kept in order by the fear of their castes would break out into all kinds of licentiousness. This being the case, the sudden destruction of caste would probably do far more harm than good. Therefore the utilitarian will rather strive to promote the reform of caste from within by education and by giving more and more importance to those parts of the caste regulations, which are in accordance with general happiness, and obedience to which would be Ibund ultimately to be inconsistent with the proud disdain of the higher castes, with the seclu.sion of women, and with the cruel condition of widows. Undoubtedly this internal process of reform has long been going on steadily and silently. The view of caste derived by Sanskrit scholars from the ancient literature of India is a picture of caste in its extreme form, in the form which the most conservative upholders of the system would like to see restored, and is not literally true of modern India. The authority of Manu as a legislator is now practically obsolete, and many of his regulations have become a dead letter-, though their spirit may be followed as far as the changed circumstances due to the lapse of centuries allow. Also the picture given by Mr. Mateer of caste in Travancore must not be sup- posed to be applicable to India generally. In and around Bombay I have never had experience of anything ap- proaching the spirit of contemptuous exclusiveness of which he gives so many striking instances. The world is moving even in the East, and the caste system has not shown itself entirely incapable of that internal reform by which alone old institutions can survive and adapt them- selves to the changing spirit of successive ages. CHAPTER IX. A LARGE number of persons suppose that the happiness of the world would be immensely promoted by the general adoption of vegetarianism, and many of them have devoted much time and trouble to writing books and pamphlets in support of their view. They show clearly that the universal adoption of vegetarianism would enable the earth to support a much larger population. As to this part of their teaching there can be no doubt. If the pasture land now used for the support of sheep and oxen intended for the table were converted into com land, the earth would produce food for a much greater amount of inhabitants than it can now support. It has been calculated that London alone consumes in the year 600,000 oxen, 2,000,000 sheep, 200,000 calves, and 300,000 swine. If the citizens who consume all these animals were converted suddenly to vegetarianism, they could out of the savings due to their conversion feed all the poor of London sumptuously every day. The same conclusion would be true of the whole world, in which at present there is much misery owing to want and starvation. If vegetarianism were adopted all over the world, there would be far more than enough food for the fourteen or fifteen hundred millions who now inhabit it. Upon this indisputable fact the vegetarians by mak- ing a false assumption base a wrong conclusion. They suppose that, when they have shown this, they have proved that vegetarianism would drive want and starva- 140 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. tion out of the world. This conclusion rests on the assumption that the adoption of vegetarianism would not affect the population of the world. But any such assumption is opposed to fact. In India and China and other countries where vegetarianism is the rule there is just as much of the misery of want as in carnivorous countries. This is because population increases in pro- portion to the supply of food, unless the increased supply of food is accompanied by increased prudence. But increased prudence may just as easily come into play without any increase of the food supply. So there is no reason to suppose that vegetarianism, by increasing the food supply, would save the human race from the pains of want. It would add a few additional millions to the population of the world, but increase of popula- tion in itself should not be pi'omoted by any utiU- tarians except those who are confirmed optimists. In fact, if we consider the matter aright, we shall probably come to the contrary conclusion, and see that the practice of eating flesh is really a useful defence against famine by providing nations with a kind of reserve fund in times of great scarcity. In countries like England where much flesh is eaten, the population can in bad years evade famine by abstaining to a certain extent from such costly food as beef and mutton ; but in vegetarian countries this resource is not available, as the population is almost as large as the average pro- duce of the countr}' can possibly support, so that, if the produce falls below the average, it is terribly difficult to find any means of economy by which to avoid starvation. This is the principal reason why India and China suffer so much more from famine than European nations. In these countries the wages of the poorer labourers are about three pence a day, on which they can barely purchase the rice necessary to keep their bodies in working order. When a bad year comes and their vegetable food becomes dearer, THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 141 and their employers themselves suffering from the bad times cut down their miserable wages still further or are unable to pay them, the unfortunate men must die in large numbers. Thus the very fact that animal food is so much dearer than vegetable food is a utili- tarian argument against the universal adoption of vegetarianism. A common argument in favour of vegetarianism is that the eating of animal food necessitates a great deal of cruelty in the shambles and in the chase. We have seen that hunting does not on the whole diminish the liappiness of hunted animals. Nor does it appear that death in the shambles is more painful than the natural death of animals. In fact, even at present, it is less pain- ful, and it might be rendered still more painless by the use of chloroform or electricity. The diminution of pain, how- ever, due to the suddenness of death at the shambles, is about counterbalanced by the pain suffered by the ani- mals when conveyed by train or driven by road to their place of death. Sometimes at the end of their journey their misery is aggravated by a source of pain rare in the case of the lower animals. Sheep, certainly, when they are being driven in to the shambles, often show dis- tinctly by their terror that they have some idea of what is going to happen to them, and anticipate death. On the whole, according to present arrangements, the fact that they are used as food cannot be seen to affect, one way or another, the happiness of the lower animals. There- fore, as far as the happiness of the lower animals alone is concerned, utilitarians should, instead of advocating vegetarianism, rather exert themselves to diminish the pains suffered by animals on their way to the slaughter- house, and to render still less painful their death there, which even under present arrangements is not so cruel as the lingering death they would otherwise have to die. If, then, the eating of animal food is to be condemned by utilitarians on account of cruelty, it must be not on 142 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. account of suffering inflicted on the lower animals, but because it hardens the hearts of the men who eat and the men who kill slieep and oxen, and so diminishes their happiness, and, it may be added also, that of those with whom they come into contact. For men who are cruel to lower animals are likely also to be cruel to their fellow- men. The general belief in the brutalising effect pro- duced on the mind by the butcher's trade is shown by the common though erroneous idea that butchers cannot serve on a jury, and by the frequency with which " butcher " is used as a term of reproach. On the other hand, there are, no doubt, many exceptionis to these general tendencies. There are many butchers who are humane and kindly men, and the excesses committed by the Sepoy mutineers, together with other facts of oriental history, show that vegetarianism and tender regard for animals are no effectual defence against violent outbursts of cruelty against men. On the whole, however, we should be less inclined to expect gentleness and humanity in butchers than in any other trade or profession. Thus the general adoption of vegetarianism would save many thou- sands of men from enteringa trade that is likely to brutalise their minds, and so make them unhappy themselves and the cause of unhappiness to others. This is the most dis- tinct attraction that vegetarianism has to offer to the utilitarian. There is also to be considered the less marked but more extensive bad effect produced on those who eat animal food and see thecarcassesof animals exposed inshop windows. However slightly each individual eater of animal food may impair his humane feeling, the aggregate impairment obtained by multiplying this slight impair- ment by the millions of men who eat flesh must be very great. Therefore the utilitarian ought to do all he can to support the vegetarian movement, if it were not for the fact mentioned above that vegetarian populations are peculiarly exposed to the ravages of famine. These two considerations, that vegetarianism aggravates THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 143 famines, and that eating flesh tends to render less com- passionate men generally, and one class of men in particu- lar, may be supposed to balance each. Therefore the utilitarian will neither advocate nor oppose vegetarianism, but do his best to defend both vegetarians and flesh eaters against the sources of pains to which they are peculiarly exposed. The great famines, to which vegetarian nations are peculiarly exposed, are principally due to great variations in the rain supply. A very barren countrjr with little variation in the produce year by year is much less liable to famine than a rich country that suffers once in ten years from droughts or destructive floods, because in the former case the population is not likely to be much too large for the yearly produce of the country, while in the latter case the number of the population is determined by the large amount of the produce during average good years, so that it is far too great for the produce during the exceptional year of drought. Hence, the best preventive of famines is regularity in a country's annual production of wealth. In agricultural countries, and all countries to a large extent agricultural, this object is best secured by exten- sive irrigation, by which, when rains are deficient, the deficiency is supplied by more extensive use of the great rivers and lakes of a country'. Much can be done by the storage of water in tanks and other large reservoirs, such as dammed-up rivers, in which a large supply of the abun- dant rainfall of good years may be kept for use in years of drought. Another defence against extreme scarcity of food in bad years is provided by facility of communication between different parts of the world, so that the bad effects of a deficient harvest in England may be alleviated by abundant harvests in Russia, India, or America, and vice versa. For it can hardly happen that drought can prevail in the same year over all the countries of the world. Facility of communication, it should be observed, has a double operation in preventing 144 THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. variation in the supply and cost of food from year to year, that is, in preventing the principal cause of famine. It tends to increase the price of corn in good years, and to diminish the price in bad years. In years of abundance a country in communication with the rest of the world can find a market for its superabundant produce in other countries where the harvest is less abundant. Thus, the farmers have not to sell their corn at such a low price as they would have been compelled to take, had they been confined to the market provided by their own country. Also, prices being only moderately low, and a large amount of the produce going to other countries, there is not such a stimulus given to increase of population in the country with the good harvest, and the labouring classes are not so likely on the strength of the exceptionally good harvest to exceed the number that an average year can support. In bad years, on the other hand, corn will be imported from the countries that have had a good harvest, and so the rise of prices that would otherwise have taken place will be diminished. Consequently, in two ways, the difference between the price of food in good and bad years will be lessened, though it can never, of course, be reduced to zero. Thus,in agricultural countries, the utilitarian should labour to improve facility of communication and irrigation. In manufacturing countries he should, if he can find the means of doing so, aim for the same reason at diminishing the difference between years of abun- dant trade and years of depression. Much, perhaps, can be done in promoting this object by government, and little by private individuals. Government has every year a large amount of money to expend on ships and weapons, and public works, so that it can do much to encourage industry in bad years by large orders, and can discourage excessive production in good years, by refraining from giving custom to private firms. In this way government would, besides get- THE PROMOTION OF HAPPINESS. 145 ting its work clone clieaply, defend the nation against the pernicious efi'ect of violent oscillations between periods of excessive prosperity and years of great depression. So far, we have been considering the means of protection against famine and scarcity, to which vegetarian nations are especially exposed, but which also afflict, in a less degree, nations that indulge in a mixed diet. Let us now consider whether there are any means of alleviating the bad effects that the killing of animals must have upon butchers, and that the eating of animal food must have upon the butcher's customers by more or less diminishing their natural sympathy with pain and suffering. One obvious way to the attainment of tliis object is to introduce a more pain- less way of killing animals, than that at present practised. The killing of animals by the butcher is probably less painful than the natural death by disease that they would otherwise die. But, though such cruel practices as that called in French salgner en blano are rare in England, death in the shambles is still much more painful to the animals killed, and much more honifying to the tiro ia the art of butchery, than it need be. Animals are too often kept for a long time hud