Applied to human life, in the concrete environment which we call good and bad according to our lights, we observed further that this law seemed to work backward; that where a person had no difficulties, where all was made easy for him, he did not manifest energy. Then we felt sure we were right. We produced a lot of popular expressions of this general thought, a religious phase of it being “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”; its application in education leading us to believe that it is good to make the child labour and struggle in learning—bad to “make it too easy for him”; and in economics we apply it in our sad comments on the disadvantages of wealth, our cheerful assertion that “it is good for a man to be born poor.”
Of course no one ever thinks of staying poor because of its benefits; no one foregoes being rich, or trying to be rich because convinced of its evils; above all, we do not seek to work out this theory on our children. Its main mischief is in preventing us from trying to remove the obstacles to human progress in general. So long as we even partially believe that obstacles promote to progress, that the hurdles add to the speed of the racer—why, if we do not really give extra hurdles to aid the man we want to win, we at least do nothing to clear the track.
Now where does the essential error lie in this loosely hung together bunch of foolishness? In the first place separate “pain” from difficulty. Pain is merely a message; it is a telegram to headquarters to say that something is wrong. It always means that. Normal action does not hurt. It may be “good,” as the sentinel is good who gives the alarm so that you may save yourself; but his alarm is a warning of evil. It may accompany a “good” process, like that of resuscitating the drowning; but that is not a normal process, the pain is conditioned upon water in the lungs.
If a person is so situated that he must bear pain, then it is good to get used to it, if possible. On this basis the early savage used self-torture to help him bear the incidental miseries of life, and from that practice dated our views on the subject.
The most unblushing survival of this gross savagery is seen in our practice of hazing, calmly defended by its perpetrators as “it makes boys manly,” “it develops character.” The savage had at least the grace to do it to himself, and it was not practised upon children. Our imperfectly educated children maintain in this the customs of the lowest savages, in a rudimentary form. There are times in life when pain has to be borne for a greater good, but that does not make the pain good.
As to the other and a little more legitimate branch—difficulty. Here we feel more assurance. We do see the poor boy making tremendous struggles, and rising above his difficulties hardened, bruised, belated, but triumphant. We do see the rich boy making no struggle at all, and rising above nothing. Hence—but wait a bit. Do all poor boys thus struggle and rise?
Do the slums produce the best citizens? Is a well-bred, well-fed, well-educated boy so hopelessly handicapped in life by those advantages? Is our ceaseless attempt to provide for our children the best advantages all folly? We may not be logical, but have horse sense enough to know better than that.
We know that poverty coarsens, weakens, stunts, degrades; that under its evil influence “the dregs of society” are steadily and inevitably produced. We know that where one person of phenomenal capacity can rise in spite of it, thousands of ordinary capacity are ruined because of it.
Abraham Lincoln was a rail-splitter. Yes. Were there no others? There were and are many poor boys splitting rails, and yet the crop of Abraham Lincolns remains limited to one.
Our error is a very simple one. We confuse a coincidence with a cause. Most people are poor. Therefore most great people have risen from poverty. How many more great people we might have had under better conditions we shall never know.