III COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT

We have been out to Orange County to spend a week-end with the Peytons. They are about our age, but differ from us in condition in that they have adequate means of support. Archie Peyton got them by inheritance, and they are very ample and enable Archie and Eleanor to have all the desirable things and do everything they want to. They try conscientiously to live up to their opportunities, making pretty hard work of it, but that’s natural, for it is hard work. They went abroad in the summer, and now they are providing country lodging and food and sport for their available friends. This sport is golf and tennis and road exercises, relieved by dabs of riding after hounds, for the Orange County Hunt meets out in their country. Eleanor says it’s nice, except that they have to invite too many people who have had too much to eat and are trying to get thin, whereas it would be more satisfactory to be inviting people who have had too little to eat and were trying to get fat.

That’s not why they asked us, for we had been living on our parents all summer and were quite plump. They have got motor-cars, horses, butlers, valets, chrysanthemums, greenhouses, and all the apparatus of pride. For us on sixty dollars a week it is rather expensive even to nibble at it. We can’t do it often, but we saved money living on our parents, and the fall is a grand season, and to fill one’s lungs with the air of it and one’s vision with autumn colors is worth some fiscal strain, and it always does me good, too, spiritually even more than physically, to get over a little easy country on a horse. Besides, Archie is my client, and that’s important. I have discovered that one of the great secrets of prosperity and advancement in this world, especially in the profession that I affect, is to have one’s coevals grow up and prosper and have business, especially law business, that somebody must be paid to do. When people have these opportunities of lawful gain to bestow they seem to like to bestow them on habitual friends, provided that they have any and can persuade themselves that they are competent. A great deal of opportunity goes by association—is bound to.

To be honest, I did not make all these discoveries solely on my own hook. Though they are simple enough. Major Brace expounded some of them to me after dinner. He gave me great encouragement in the effort to exist. Promotion, he said, cometh neither from the East nor the West, but from the cemetery, so it was almost sure to come to any one that could hold out; and in the long run a man who was sober, competent and diligent, and intelligent about his associations couldn’t very well miss it. There were so many advantageous jobs to distribute and each generation had them in turn, as the world and what is in it came to be its property. Moreover, as things go now and with us, each generation has a lot more things and opportunities and good employments than the generation that preceded it, not only absolutely, but per capita, because the increase of wealth and business is outrunning the increase of population. It wasn’t a scramble, the Major insisted, for a share in a limited quantity of goods, but for an unlimited quantity, and the harder the scramble the more there was to distribute.

All that came out of a discussion whether we should restrict our wants or try to satisfy them. Try to satisfy them, the Major said. Effort in that direction enriches and develops civilization. It tends to increase the supply of commodities. It is not the satisfied people, nor the people who are content to go without, that make civilization go forward, but the unsatisfied ones, who want a lot of things they have not got, and get out and go after them and build railroads and factories and improve agriculture and invent machinery and multiply automobiles and take an interest in aeroplanes and try to accumulate money and keep it employed.

“Are you doing all those things, Major?” said I.

“Me? Oh no! I belong to the police. My job is to help to keep order and protect property. I never had one of the large-sized appetites for commodities—just food, clothes, shelter, money in the bank, and something to give away, and protection against rainy days, and enough to keep my wife and children off the Charity Organization when I get run over by a motor-car—that’s all I want. You see, I’m a lazy man and like to read the newspaper and invite my soul, and everything I can’t get by working five or six hours a day I go without. Don’t take me for a pattern. I haven’t got the progress of civilization really at heart.”

“The express-drivers help it on, I suppose, Major, when they strike for more pay?” They were striking at that time.

“No doubt. All that should help distribution, provided the funds they are all striking to share exist in sufficient quantity. Distribution is next in importance to production. You’ve got to have something to distribute, and strikes are not immediately helpful to production, as you may have noticed, but the organization of labor ought to be helpful to distribution. Only nowadays when an important strike is won the cost of it is immediately shifted onto the general public by a gentle elevation of prices.”

The Major is a lawyer and practises considerably as a trustee, and is doubtless more concerned with the philosophy of business than if his energies were enlisted in selling goods and wresting a profit out of it. “Mankind can be eased considerably in this earthly competition,” he went on, “by great increases of production, great extensions of agriculture and manufacturing and transportation, and great economies in all of them, provided that distribution fairly keeps pace with production.” It comes nearer to doing so, he thought, than all the exhorters and socialist people admit, because products have to find a market; but when it comes to that, this is a fairly roomy world, with many mouths and backs in it, and transportation is cheap and markets are world-wide, and goods as yet don’t necessarily pile up on any of us because there are a lot of them produced.

And so the Major argued in effect that one way to help bring on the millennium was to increase the production and distribution of commodities. I suppose that is one way. There must be some connection between the millennium and civilization. The millennium isn’t going to swoop down on a world that has no meat in the house and where half the people live in trees. It is true that it was not a lack of commodities that drove Eve to eat the apple and brought on working for a living, and most of us realize that man cannot live by bread alone, and that with binsful of commodities on every corner free for the taking the world would not be saved nor the folks in it satisfied and happy. What an interesting simplification of wants would happen in that case, and how quickly people would come to ascertain what they really needed and refuse to be loaded up with anything else! Still, there is a connection between human progress and wants and the commodities that appease them. A missionary’s daughter told me once about her father’s experience with the South-African blacks. Now and then he would make a convert, and always, if it was a thorough job, the convert would begin to reach out after civilization—some clothes, a bigger dwelling—presently, I dare say, a top-hat. It wasn’t all mere acquisitiveness, either, for some of the incidents of conversion were inconvenient, especially the troublesome domestic readjustment called for by the theory of the sufficiency of one wife. Of course, the millennium may swoop down and find us running about in skins or less, and living on roots, but I bet it won’t. It is much more likely to be welcomed by flocks of aeroplanes to an enormously productive earth, worked for all it is worth by people intelligent enough to have abolished poverty and solved the problem of distribution.

What does man want here below, anyway? Room and bath, food, clothes, a newspaper, and a job and fair opportunities to better himself. He has got the newspaper already. In this country, at least, there are enough newspapers to go around, and in the cities any one who declines to buy one can supply himself out of the first ash barrel. There is nothing so cheap as newspapers, and that is a consequence of the pressure of commodities on the market. The advertiser pays all but a cent’s worth of the cost of the newspaper, and would gladly pay that, no doubt, but for the fear of arousing the reader’s suspicions. How much this has to do with the fact that I hear of likely young men who come out of the nurseries of learning and look wistfully at the newspapers and fail to see attractive jobs on them and go away and do something else, I don’t know. It may be that likely young men never did troop in large swarms into newspapering. Banking usually looks better to them, because men get rich at it, and law because a knowledge of it is no hindrance in any calling.

The supply of rooms and baths is not so nearly equal to human needs as the supply of newspapers, but it is gaining on the population. Out there at the Peytons’ house, for example, it has caught up. In all the newer country houses hereabouts the great architectural feature is room and bath. In a Long Island house just completed that I inspected last spring before the family moved in there were between twenty and twenty-five bathrooms. There were three in the family, with a liability to guests if the owner’s wife ever succeeded in getting rested. I thought this marked a considerable forward stride in civilization. Church unity still hangs back a bit, but we are getting pretty strong on plumbing, and the millennium may find us with a bath apiece.

The Peytons hadn’t so many bathrooms, because their house was not so large as the Long Island house, and they had to save part of it for clothed appearances; but they had many, and Cordelia and I admired them very much. Living in a six-hundred-dollar New York flat makes marvelously for the appreciation of space, light, air, and running water. Of course the Peytons’ country house had all these blessings, and, besides, was delightfully fresh and clean and embellished with very pleasing adornments. “No doubt, Cordelia,” said I, “you might have had a set of things like this if you had shown a little timely judgment.” “Possibly;” said Cordelia; “this is a nice set, too. How many bathrooms shall we need, Peregrine?”

“One—two—four—six; six will do us, I think, with a little management and a few extra sets of bath-robes and slippers. We don’t want to keep a plumber. To have more than a dozen makes a home too much like a hotel.”

But there are a number of things that we shall want before we have even one house with even six bathrooms in it. I do not greatly covet a superfluity of bathrooms, though enough of them is one of the great luxuries of our time. Hot water is one of the leading valuables of life—one of the things that help to reconcile humanity to civilization and to offset its interference with such privileges as living out-of-doors and not having newspapers. That has long been appreciated. I believe the Greeks liked hot water and made provision to have it. Certainly the Romans liked it and went in strong for baths. The English have liked it and had it in fair quantity, along with daily deluges of cold water. We Americans delight in it and have more of it already, I suppose, than any people ever had before, and our supply is constantly increasing and constantly spreading from the cities to the country. It is cheap, as things go, and there is fair prospect that there will eventually be enough to go around. To have a universal supply of hot water and newspapers and a long start toward a universal supply of what we call education is doing not so ill as things go. I can wait for the six bathrooms, or even three. We have one now. One is a great blessing. I suppose it is our egotism that makes us more or less indifferent to what is not ours and cannot be for the present. What most of us want is the next thing—the thing almost within our reach. We don’t think about the things that are altogether beyond the scope of our fortunes. We do not covet them, nor are we jealous of our neighbors who have them, unless we conclude that we have too little because they have too much. If the competition seems to us fair, we rather like to see prizes go to those who can win them, for a life with prizes in it for winners, even material prizes, looks richer and more attractive to most of us than a life planned on the principle of a division of the gate money among all who come in.

Do you notice how strong the propensity is among all the fairly comfortable people to consider their own condition and their own standards as normal and truly desirable, and those of other folks, whether they have more or less, as a little off? I think that propensity is a wonderful provision for human happiness. We value, as a rule, what seems the best thing obtainable for ourselves. Whether it is abundance or a stimulating degree of privation, we incline to think it is a good thing for us and a better thing than other people have who have something different.

“Cordelia,” said I, while we were talking about the bathroom, “you might have got a better set of things with some other man, but he would not have the experience or the discipline that I shall have by the time I have acquired the set of things that you ought eventually to get with me.” There you are! We think we’re better off than the Peytons because we haven’t got so much as they have, and better off than the Goves because we’ve got more (mostly prospective) than they have. We are the standard. We laugh at ourselves, but surely it’s a fine thing to have so strong a bent toward toleration of things as they are, and expectation of being pleased with them as they’re going to be. I suppose it is just a different form of this same self-satisfaction that makes the teetotalers want to vote away everybody’s grog, and the college authorities insist that all the boys shall want to be high scholars like themselves, and the appeased women deprecate the agitations of the unappeased for woman’s suffrage.

Probably Cordelia and I are exceptionally resigned to our condition; more so than the average of mankind. Yes, I suspect that is so, but I suspect also that it is only a provisional resignation. We reached out and got the next thing—each other. That was highly satisfactory and a good deal better than if we had waited for something else. But this reaching out for the next thing seems to be a continuing process, and I suspect it has to go on till stopping-time, and that satisfaction in life is pretty closely geared to the ability to maintain it effectively. That is not altogether a soothing reflection, but I don’t know that it is desirable that all reflections should be soothing. A fair proportion of them ought to be stimulating. I observe that I read the writings of the efficient when my energies are high, and when they are low find solace in those of the lazy—only they must not be too lazy to write. Some of the very best writers were lazy, and struggled with it. Maybe it’s hard work to be a writer, but then it’s hard work to be much of anything. But that’s nothing! Nobody wastes sympathy, or ought to, on hard workers, provided they get in fair measure what they go out after. And one of the greatest things they get is increased ability to work hard. This is not entirely my discovery. It was suggested by an aged friend, but as far as I have experimented with it I think it is so. Of course, the suggestion was accompanied by a reminder in quotation-marks that life would be endurable except for its pleasures, but that’s not to be accepted too confidently. It depends on the pleasures and whether they please or not. There are a lot of things that are labeled “pleasure,” and most of them are price-marked in more or less forbidding figures, but the considerable satisfactions of life seem to be conditions of the mind which may be related to living conditions that cost money, but which are not themselves price-marked in figures that are at all plain. There’s polo, a good, lively pleasure and fairly high-priced and consumptive also of time, but I judge the main value of active sports of that sort to aspiring men is indirect. They contribute to a physical efficiency which is useful just so far as it promotes mental efficiency—sanity and activity of mind, spontaneity of thought and speech and power. No doubt for some men sports are a form of discipline. They train some spirits to exertion, and make for energy and supply driving force for work, but, dear me, they take a lot of time and tend to consume more energy than they furnish. They are fine for boys, soldiers, Englishmen, and people with a disposition to grow fat, and an excellent vacation employment for some people, but I suspect there is an economic warrant for the disposition of the common run of American adults to intrust the transaction of their active sports to persons who can give their whole time to them, and whose skilful exertions it is restful now and then to watch.

I remember my classmate Hollaway saying one day of a group of sporty young gentlemen whom we were discussing, “The things that seem to amuse them would not give me pleasure.” That was true. Hollaway liked to think. That was the way he had most of his fun. He was willing to put in enough physical exertion to make his machinery run smoothly, and liked, as a rule, to do it quickly and have it over, but he got his fun out of what went on in his head, and in talk. He practised and enjoyed all the mental processes, observation, cogitation, consideration, reflection, rumination, imagination, and the rest, with resulting and accompanying discourse. Nobody around had more fun than Hollaway. Somebody said he had a “happy activity of the soul.” Maybe that is out of Emerson. I’ll ask Cordelia, who confesses to some acquaintance with Emerson. But, anyhow, the happy activity of the soul is good to have and not visibly price-marked nor denied necessarily, like the opera and polo, to the impecunious.

Going out to visit the Peytons was an enlivening change, and gave us new topics for discourse and reflection, but the best of it was to talk about it with Cordelia. I like the tranquillity of being married—married, that is, to Cordelia. Visiting the Peytons is a bit of embroidery on the fabric of life, but coming home to the flat and staying in all the evening and reading as many of the contemporary periodicals as I can manage to get hold of and get time to explore, and talking to Cordelia—that is the very web of life. I seldom have the sense of justification in life so strongly as in these domesticated discourses with Cordelia. I have got her to reading the contemporary periodicals and the newspapers and keeping some track of what is going on in the world. I don’t know what kind of radicals we will turn out to be if we keep our minds on that diet. But I get the other point of view down-town, where my employment is largely to assist my boss to help gentlemen with property to adjust the management of their concerns to laws contrived with intent to retard their processes of acquisition. It is nip and tuck in these days between the gentlemen who make the progressive political periodicals and the gentlemen who control the railroads and banks and trusts and their employees, to determine who is going to run the country. As things are, the country is run, after a fashion. The wheels do turn, and production and distribution are accomplished. To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and the production is pretty wasteful compared with what the professional economists say it might be, and the stream of distribution runs so lumpy that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion of the Lord’s will seems to be done, and hopeful people calculate that the proportion is increasing, though you might not always think so to read the progressive periodicals. A large part of the happy activity of nature consists of the big creatures eating the little ones, but we complain awfully about it when we think we see it going on in human society, and the law, whose humble but aspiring servant I am, was invented to check it. Everything that is invented to check that propensity tends to develop an appetite of its own. The law, the church, the walking delegate, all have in them the ingredients of voracity, and I dare say the same ingredients are latent in the progressive periodicals. Who has the brains to govern will govern, and the mere substitution of lean masters for fat ones is not necessarily an advantage. I suppose it is largely our own consciousness of that that restrains us from taking the country away from the interests and giving it to the periodicals; and besides, of course, it is harder, because the interests hang on so to what is theirs, and the law, which is me, finds so many obstacles to detaching them.

Well, practising law all day below Canal Street in the interest of the interests, and reading the progressive periodicals all the evening—there’s such a raft of them—in the interest of righteousness, altruism, and the people, ought to make me a very broad-minded person—so broad-minded probably that I shall lose sense of direction and fetch up in the driver’s place on a Brooklyn street-car.

And yet probably not, with Cordelia as a partner. I have consulted her about going to the Assembly. Not that anybody wants me to go there, but it looks interesting. I wish my boss would employ me to go there and see that I did not starve. But he couldn’t very well. I would be a legislator in the employ of an employee of the interests, and all the fun would be gone. Father and Father-in-law might finance me, but neither of them is that much of a patriot. If I were employed by one of the periodicals there would be less scandal in that, but that’s not a practical thought. I dare say that I shall have to make considerably more progress in the practice of my profession before I can go to Albany, and by that time I shall have become too valuable to myself and dependent associates to be spared to go there. After all, I got married, and I suppose that is as fatal an indiscretion as a person of my attenuated means should permit himself at this stage of his endeavors. It is about politics very much as it is about getting married—if you wait till you’re ready, you can’t. It seems as if everything had to be shot on the wing. We ought to be governed by people of independent means. They are the only people who can afford the employment. But most people who have independent means have a point of view to match, and there you are—it isn’t quite the point of view of a large proportion of the governed. Just so contradictory things are, and yet, after all, it’s that that makes the game.

My, my! We have been married nearly a year, and have not yet repented. Our circumstances improve a little from month to month. Besides The Firm’s regular contribution to my maintenance, I pick up odd jobs now and then on my own account. Father and Father-in-law take occasional chances in the lottery of my accomplishments by sending me bits of business, and I pick up other bits from other people. I have even made literary compositions, and tried, not always fruitlessly, to sell them. That is a good enough game, if one dared give himself to it, but, except as compounded with politics, economics, or public service of some sort, it leads away from law, so I don’t follow it hard.