“full resounding line,
The long majestic march and energy divine,”
against the sedition and discontent frequently manifested during the reign of Charles II, might serve for a thousand texts for present-day sermons, lectures, and editorials. The thought, common these last hundred years, that discontent is usually the result of privation, wrong, or oppression, is given over; and our modern moulders of opinion revert to the notion that it is fostered by ease and comfort.
“To what would he on quail and pheasant swell
That even on tripe and carrion could rebel?”
asks “Glorious John” in satirizing his rival Shadwell. Tripe and carrion did not form the usual nourishment for rebellion. We find the same idea constantly echoed in very recent days; and the demands of organized workmen for better pay are almost invariably regarded in certain intellectual circles as evidences, not of need, but of the pride and rebelliousness engendered by an already attained competency.
Honors are even between churchmen and lay publicists, when it comes to the denunciation of discontent. The pulpit, the stump, the college chair, and the editorial sanctum are alike busied with its condemnation. Perhaps a typical protagonist in the work was the late E. L. Godkin. The thought recurs again and again in his writings. “I must frankly say,” he avers in his essay, “Social Classes in the Republic,” “that I know of no more mischievous person than the man who, in free America, seeks to spread among them [the workers] the idea that they are wronged and kept down by somebody; that somebody is to blame because they are not better lodged, better dressed, better educated, and have not easier access to balls, concerts, or dinner parties.” Whereupon, to make clear his contention, he tells of the following pathetic little episode:—
“Two years ago I was in one of the University Settlements in New York, and was walking through the rooms of the society with one of the members. They were plain and neat and suitable, and he explained to me that the purpose in furnishing and fitting them up was to show the workingmen the kind of rooms they ought to have ‘if justice were done.’ To tell this to a workingman, without telling him in what the injustice consisted and who worked it if he had not such rooms, was, I held, to be most mischievous.”
Even President Roosevelt, doubtless impressed by the modern reiteration of the notion, felt called upon, in his Providence speech (August 23d), to rebuke discontent, and incidentally to identify it with envy. “Not only do the wicked flourish,” he says, “when the times are such that most men flourish, but what is worse, the spirit of envy and jealousy and hatred springs up in the breasts of those who, though they may be doing fairly well themselves, yet see others, who are no more deserving, doing far better.”