“True,” he replied, “but up to that time there had been no very severe competition for the means of living. But it became more and more difficult from that time on to make a living, and wherever there is strong competition between men, the strong positive, vigorous and hard, are sure to crowd the softer and weaker out, and take the prize they are struggling for. In your day the negroes were generally content, in fact were compelled to be content, with such humble employments as the whites did not care to engage in because there was enough of a more ambitious sort to employ them. But when the whites found it necessary to compete with the negroes for the work they had before monopolized, they easily beat them. The defeat of men in the struggle for life affects them in two ways; it discourages, worries and exhausts them mentally; and it destroys their vigor through want and starvation, physically. The latter of these effects tells at once in shortening the existence of the present generation, and both of them tell on the general force and vigor, the deterioration of which is seen in the reduced numbers and virility of the succeeding generations. Wild animals newly domesticated, fail to breed through mental strain and worry. The same is true of savages when the mental burdens of civilization are too suddenly laid upon them, and the same principle holds in civil life when from any cause the burden of life becomes too heavy—as, to the poor man when he struggles against odds for bread for his family, and to the rich when he struggles doubtfully for the superfluities required by fashion. The negro race is not extinct by any means even in the United States, but its extinction is only a question of comparatively short time easily estimated from the advance in that direction already made.”
“But it seems to me,” said I, “that there can no longer be such a desperate struggle for existence since the means of livelihood are within the reach of all, and the exertion required has been so much lessened by the state’s care of the young etc.”
“The means of mere existence,” he said, “are, in most of the states of the “Great Union,” within the reach of all, and no one need go hungry or naked. If he is able to work, the state will give him employment if no one else will, and if he is not able he will be cared for anyhow. But the style in which a man lives depends altogether on his ambition and ability. If his ability is equal to his ambition, he obtains what he wants and is happy and contented; unless, as often happens his ambition grows by what it feeds on and excites him to fresh exertions by a new allurement after every success. And so the wearing struggle may go on forever. People are mimics and none of them more so than the negroes. In imitating a stronger race they give out and gradually succumb. While they were slaves they were free from this competition, and rapidly increased. The African tribes were also free from it. But both have now been exposed to it for six generations and it has told on them heavily.”
“It would appear then that competition and selection go on under the present conditions of life almost as much as ever, for the law must apply to the weaker whites as well as to the negroes.”
“So it does, and always must, as long as men are competent to discriminate between the costly and the cheap, and continue to prefer the former, to the latter.”
“The reason for such preference,” I infer, “must be that more enjoyment of life is found in the possession of the more costly things. Is that your view?”
“It does not follow at all,” he replied. “Costly things give a fictitious enjoyment in anticipation while they are being pursued, but after they are obtained they give no more enjoyment than if they had been cheap. The possession of many things that have cost great worry and exertion frequently leads to nothing more than a perception of their vanity, and the uncovering of a new perspective of something bright and equally illusory beyond. From time immemorial your philosophers have sounded the praises of contentment. Contentment is nothing more nor less than happiness, and it is little to the purpose to ask a man to be happy unless the suggestion is backed up by the conditions of his environment. When people have absolutely nothing better to look forward to, they can almost always settle down to a comparative degree of contentment with what they have. But with an environment constantly showing chances of preferment, wealth, distinction, etc., and examples of the attainment of these things by others, contentment is constantly being unsettled and happiness always deferred to the future. A guest taking his dinner ‘out’ will reserve part of his appetite for the unseen, but commonly expected, desert of pudding and pie, but if he is informed that he “sees his dinner” before him, he will make himself quite satisfied without the desert.
“The fact is, the absolute contentment or happiness that your poets dream for you, and your priests sell to you in their heavens and nirvanas, is absolute satisfaction with whatever is. It can only come to an instinct in perfect harmony with its environment. People can never be perfectly happy except in a finished unchangeable state of existence. They may approach it under conditions in which change is very slow and slight.”
“Is our race likely to attain it or anything like it on earth?”
“Things on earth to-day look far more unsettled than ever before, and yet they are getting into a shape that promises peace and permanence in the not very distant future. When the earth gets as full of people as it will hold and they learn how to live by moderate exertion and above the fear of failure and want, the millennium will have come to the extent that it can come.”