[VARIETIES OF HUMAN NATURE.]
SHOW me an "easy person," and I will show you a selfish one. Good-natured he may be; why not? since the disastrous consequences of his "easiness" are generally shouldered by other people. He always "guesses it is all right," though he knows it is all wrong. None so blind as they who don't wish to see. To right an abuse, is to tread on somebody's corns, and then that Somebody might turn and tread on his. For instance, some boys in the street are pelting a poor, drunken woman. "Well—boys will do such things." He takes a journey with his family and stops at a hotel in the dog-days, and the hotel clerk assigns him a room which is right over a fiery kitchen. He "guesses" there was no other to give; if so, why didn't the clerk say so? That might possibly do if the clerk didn't always give him the room over the hotel kitchen. He gets up from his seat in the car to step out upon the platform; a very odorous individual takes his seat, much to the disgust of his family. When asked to eject him, he replies, that he is not sure that the law in such cases is in his own favor; so he takes another seat, and leaves to them the new and uncongenial neighbor. The grocer sends him bad butter, instead of the good for which he bargained; but he thinks it was the grocer's boy who did it, and that he didn't do it purposely, and that he wont do it again. The milkman overcharges in his bill: well, very likely grass was scarce, or there was some good reason for it; beside, he can give his family a dollar or two less, the next time money is wanted,—and it is always wanted,—and that will make it all square; thus proving the adage, "that nobody can be generous without doing an injustice to somebody." Mr. Easy orders a coat; and when it comes home the sleeves are too short; but he don't like to send it back. He guesses the cutter understood the order to be just so; besides it is paid for and settled. Mr. Easy always pays for things before they come home;—he thinks it looks like distrust of your fellow-creatures if you don't;—and so he has perpetual short sleeves in his coats, and perpetually his trousers come home too long in the leg; and his wife has to keep on fibbing, and tell him they are just right, and it is the latest fashion; for fear he will ask her, as she goes by the tailor's store, just to step in and mention it, because she is so good at such things, you know, and don't mind speaking up; which accomplishment, desirable as it is, he prefers her to exercise outside the house; in-doors it must be kept in pickle.
The cook sends up the meat underdone. Mr. Easy remarks, apologetically, that it was a larger piece than usual; as if just there, the cook's judgment, if she had any, was not expected to come in, by putting it on to roast a little earlier, else what is the use of a cook?
Now, Mr. Easy's wife believes in eternal justice—obedience or the guillotine. She thinks that the person who, through indolence, offers a premium for carelessness or incompetency, commits a crime against society. She believes that he has no right to shirk a disagreeable duty because it is disagreeable; or because he is lazy, or because it is pleasant to be popular, and to appear amiable to the outside world. She believes that executive people are the hinges upon which alone the world turns—creaking awfully sometimes, it is true, but, thank God! turning! not rusting. She believes in using the dictionary, and plenty of it, when people need waking up to their duty; and, this accomplished, she believes in laying it on the shelf till again called for. A wrong un-righted pains Mrs. Easy; rouses her fiery indignation. Mr. Easy is never quite sure it is wrong; and, till he is, it is not necessary, in his opinion, to clear the deck for action.
Now, I have no doubt that both styles of persons have their mission in the world, else they wouldn't be here: I have known wasps and snails each to have their admirers. Some day I'll write a book of fables for you, to which Æsop's shall be no circumstance.
I wonder is a man justified, to his own conscience or his Maker, in allowing himself to be so absorbed by "business," beyond what is necessary to the comfortable support of his family, that he is as much a stranger to his own wife and children as if he were only a boarder in the family,—bodily present indeed at two or three meals a day, but totally ignorant of the ponderosity of the domestic machinery, or at what cost of health, or mental and moral deterioration, to his wife, this unrelieved strain is being carried out from day to day.
Perhaps you will answer, Who is to decide what is "a necessary and comfortable support for a family"? I can only ask, if there is not a great wrong unredressed, when a man knows nothing of the different mental or moral characteristics of the children he has launched into a world of temptation and trial, and is also quite content to remain ignorant. I think all intelligent, thinking persons will agree on this point. Also when a man, professional or other, seldom or never addresses a word to his wife about anything but the family expenses, or his favorite mode of cooking any pet article of food. Sure I am that any wife who is not a hopeless idiot, will chafe under such treatment, until, at last, her fate being too much for her, mental and moral deterioration fairly set in, and she hopelessly revolves in her narrow bounds without even a desire that the children, once so dear to her, should ever peep over and beyond them. The friends whom she might and ought to have retained for herself and them, she has gradually, one by one, lost sight of; her husband being never at home to care whether they came or stayed away—his interests, and his friends, being quite separate and apart. Meantime his house shines, his meals are well prepared, and his "buttons" are in place.
This picture is not overdrawn. I can produce you its counterparts any hour in the twenty-four. By and by, the oldest boy outgrows pinafores and jackets, and steps round in long-tails. No father has been at hand, to point out the quicksands he should have avoided, or to encourage him by his sympathy or love to do right. But the devil in all his Protean shapes has been at his elbow, delighted at that father's indifference. Presently some wild oat sown, brings to that home, as yet publicly undisgraced, its full-grown harvest of shame. Now come storms of reproach, under which the loving mother weeps and cowers, as if she, God help her! were guilty. Alas! and alas! were such young wayward feet ever turned right by such injudiciousness and injustice? Does not that boy know that it is the disgrace alone that father feels, and not the shipwreck of his child's soul? Does that father say, even to himself, "Oh, Absalom! my son! my son!" Not at all: he feels only a blind rage, a vexatious thwarting and hindering of his own affairs, which his son has brought about.