Chapter 19

ORDER; OR DUTIES AS TO OBJECTS UNDER ONE’S OWN CONTROL.

There are many duties that are self-defined and self-limited. Thus, the ordinary acts of justice and many of the charities of daily life include in themselves the designation of time, place, and measure. There are other duties, of equal obligation, which admit of wide variance as to these particulars, but which can be most worthily and efficiently performed only when reference is had to them. There are, also, many acts, in themselves morally indifferent, which acquire their moral character as right or wrong solely from one or more of these particulars. Thus recreations that are innocent and fitting on Saturday, may be inconsistent with the proprieties of Sunday; conversation and conduct perfectly befitting the retirement of home may be justly offensive in a place of public concourse; or there may be great guilt in the excessive use of that which used in moderation may be blameless, fitting, and salutary.

Section I.

Time.

*A life-time is none too long for a life’s work.* Hence the fitness, and therefore the duty, of a careful economy of time. This economy can be secured only by a systematic arrangement of one’s hours of labor, relaxation, and rest, and the assignment to successive portions of the day, week, or year, of their appropriate uses. The amount of time wasted, even by an industrious man who has no method or order in his industry, bears a very large proportion to the time profitably employed. In the needlessly frequent change of occupations, there is at each beginning and ending a loss of the working power, which can neither start on a new career at full speed, nor arrest itself without previous slackening. This waste is made still greater by the suspense or vacillation of purpose of those who not only have no settled plans of industry, but often know not what to do, or are liable, so soon as they are occupied in one way, to feel themselves irresistibly drawn in a different direction.

But in the distribution of time *a man should be the master, not the slave of his system*. The regular work and the actual duty of the moment do not always coincide. Due care for health, the opportunity for earned and needed recreation, the claims of charity, courtesy, and hospitality, in fine, the immediate urgency of any duty selfward, manward, or Godward, should always take precedence of routine-work however wisely planned. Obstinate adherence to system may lead to more and greater criminal omissions of duty than would be incurred, even in the spasmodic industry which takes its impulse from the passing moment. It must be remembered that timeliness is the essential element of right and obligation in many things that ought to be done, especially in all forms of charity, alike in great services, and in those lesser amenities and kindnesses which contribute so largely to the charm of society and the happiness of domestic life. There are many good offices which, performed too late, were better left undone,—courtesies which, postponed, are incivilities,—attentions which, out of season, are needless and wearisome.

*Every day, every waking hour has its own duty*, either its special work, or its due portion of one’s normal life-work. Procrastination is, therefore, as unwise as it is immoral, or rather, it is immoral because it is unwise and unfitting. The morrow has its own appropriate duties; and if to-day’s work be thrown into it, the massing of two days’ good work into one exceeds ordinary ability. The consequence is, either that both days’ works are imperfectly performed, or that part of what fitly belongs to the morrow is pushed farther on, and the derangement of duty made chronic. Thus there are persons who are always in arrears with their engagements and occupations,—in chase, as it were, after duties which they never lose from sight, and never overtake.

*Hardly less grave,* though less common, *is the error of those who anticipate duty*, and do to-day what they ought to do to-morrow. The work thus anticipated may be superseded, or may be performed under better auspices and with fewer hindrances in its own time; while it can hardly fail to interfere injuriously with the fit employment or due relaxation of the passing day. Moreover, the habit of thus performing work before its time at once betokens and intensifies an uneasy, self-distrusting frame of mind, unfavorable to vigorous effort, and still more so to the quiet enjoyment of needed rest and recreation. There are those, who are perpetually haunted by the forecast shadows, not only of fixed, but of contingent obligations and duties,—shadows generally larger than the substance, and often wholly destitute of substance.

*Punctuality*(17) denotes the most scrupulous precision as to time,—exactness to a moment in the observance of all times that can be designated or agreed upon. In matters with which we alone are concerned, we undoubtedly have of right, and may often very fittingly exercise, the dispensing power. Thus, in the arrangement of our own pursuits, the clock may measure and direct our industry, without binding us by its stroke. It is often of more consequence that we finish what is almost done, than that we change our work because the usual hour for a change has arrived. But where others are concerned, rigid punctuality is an imperative duty. A fixed time for an assembly, a meeting of a committee or board of trust, or a business interview, is a virtual contract into which each person concerned has entered with every other, and the strict rules that apply to contracts of all kinds are applicable here. Failure in punctuality is dishonesty. It involves the theft of time, which to some men is money’s worth, to others is worth more than money. It ought not to surprise us if one wantonly or habitually negligent in this matter should prove himself oblivious of other and even more imperative obligations; for the dullness of conscience and the obscure sense of right, indicated by the frequent breach of virtual contracts as to time, betoken a character too feeble to maintain its integrity against any strong temptation.

Section II.

Place.

The trite maxim, *A place for everything, and everything in its place*, so commends itself to the sense of fitness, as hardly to need exposition or enforcement; yet while no maxim is more generally admitted, scarce any is so frequently violated in practice. In duty, the elements of time and place are intimately blended. Disorder in place generates derangement in time. The object which is out of place can be found only by the waste of time; and the most faithful industry loses a large part of its value when its materials are wanting where they ought to be, and must be sought where they ought not to be.

Apart from considerations of utility, order is an æsthetic duty. It is needed to satisfy the sense of beauty. Its violation offends the eye, insults the taste. The æsthetic nature craves and claims culture. It has abundant provision made for it in external nature; but so large a part of life must be passed within doors, at least in a climate like ours, that it is starved and dwarfed, if there be not in interior arrangements some faint semblance of the symmetry and harmony of the universe. To effect this needs neither abundance nor costliness of material. A French man or woman will charm the eye at a cost which in England would be represented by bare and squalid poverty. A Parisian shop-window will make with a few francs’ worth of goods an exhibition of artistical beauty which might challenge the most fastidious criticism. These effects are produced solely by prime reference to fitness of place,—to orderly arrangement,—to a symmetry which all can understand, and which any one might copy. Our very capacity of receiving gratification from this source is the measure of our duty in this regard. If with the simplest materials we can give pleasure to the soul through the eye by merely assigning its fit place to every object, order is among the plainest dictates of beneficence.

*Order is essential to domestic comfort and well-being*, and thus to all the virtues which have their earliest and surest nurture in domestic life. There are homes at once affluent and joyless, groaning with needless waste and barren of needed comfort, in which the idea of repose seems as irrelevant as Solomon’s figure of lying down on the top of a mast, and all from a pervading spirit of disorder. In such dwellings there is no love of home. The common house is a mere lodging and feeding place. Society is sought elsewhere, pleasure elsewhere; and for the young and easily impressible there is the strongest inducement to those modes of dissipation in which vice conceals its grossness behind fair exteriors and under attractive forms. On the other hand, the well-ordered house affords to its inmates the repose, comfort, and enjoyment which they crave and need, and for those whose characters are in the process of formation may neutralize allurements to evil which might else be irresistible.

Section III.

Measure.

There are many objects, as to which *the question of duty is a question of more or less*. To this class belong not only food and drink, but all forms of luxury, indulgence, recreation, and amusement. In all these the choice lies between excess, abstinence, and temperance. The tendency to excess is intensely strong, when not restrained by prudence or principle. This tendency is by no means confined to the appetite for intoxicating liquors, though modern usage has restricted to excess in this particular the term _intemperance_, which properly bears a much more extended signification. There is reason to believe that there is fully as much intemperance in food as in drink, and with at least equally ruinous consequences as to capacity, character, health, and life,—with this difference only, that gluttony stupefies and stultifies, while drunkenness maddens; and that the glutton is merely a dead weight on the community, while the drunkard is an active instrument of annoyance and peril. There are probably fewer who sink into an absolutely beastly condition by intemperance in food than by intemperance in drink; but of persons who do not expose themselves to open scandal, those whose brains are muddled, whose sensibilities are coarsened, and whose working power is impaired by over-eating, are more numerous than those in whom similar effects are produced by over-free indulgence in intoxicating drinks. Intemperance in amusements, also, is not uncommon, and would undoubtedly be more prevalent than it is, were not the inevitable necessity of labor imposed on most persons from a very early period. In this matter the limit between temperance and excess is aptly fixed by the term _recreation_, as applied to all the gay and festive portions of life. _Re-creation_ is making over, that is, replacing the waste of tissue, brain-power, and physical and mental energy occasioned by hard work. Temperance permits the most generous indulgence of sport, mirth, and gayety that can be claimed as needful or conducive to this essential use, but excludes all beyond this measure.

*Abstinence* from all forms of luxury and recreation, and from food and drink beyond the lowest demands of subsistence, has, under various cultures, been regarded as a duty, as an appropriate penance for sin, as a means of spiritual growth, as a token of advanced excellence. This notion had its origin in the dualistic philosophy or theology of the East. It was believed that the sovereignty of the universe was divided between the semi-omnipotent principles of good and evil, and that the earth and the human body were created by the evil principle,—by Satan or his analogue. Hence it was inferred that the evil principle could be abjured and defied, and the good principle propitiated in no way so effectually as by renouncing the world and mortifying the body. Fasting, as a religious observance, originated in this belief. It was imported from the East. The Hebrew fasts were not established by Moses; they were evidently borrowed from Babylon, and seem to have been regarded with no favor by the prophets. The Founder of Christianity prescribed no fast, nor have we any reason to believe that his immediate disciples regarded abstinence as a duty. Christian asceticism in all its forms is, like the Jewish fasts, of Oriental origin, and had its first developments in close connection with those hybrids of Christianity and Oriental philosophy of which the dualism already mentioned forms a prominent feature.

With regard to all objects of appetite, desire, and enjoyment, *temperance* is evidently fitting, and therefore a duty, unless there be specific reasons for abstinence. Temperance demands and implies moral activity. In the temperate man the appetites, desires, and tastes have their continued existence, and need vigilant and wise control, so that he has always work to do, a warfare to wage; and as conflict with the elements gives vigor to the body, so does conflict with the body add strength continually to the moral nature. The ascetic may have a hard struggle at the outset; but his aim is to extirpate his imagined enemies in the bodily affections, and when these are completely mortified, or put to death, there remains no more for him to do, and moral idleness and lethargy ensue. Simon Stylites, who spent thirty-seven years on pillars of different heights, had probably stupefied his moral faculties and sensibilities as effectually as he had crushed to death the appetites and cravings of the body. It must not be forgotten that the body no less than the soul is of God’s building, and that in his purpose all the powers and capacities of the body are good in their place and uses, and therefore to be controlled and governed, not destroyed or suppressed. The mediæval saint, feeding on the offal of the streets, was unwittingly committing sacrilege, by degrading and imbruting an appetite for which God had provided decent and wholesome nutriment.

Temperance is better than abstinence, also, because *the moderate use of the objects of desire is a source of refining and elevating influences*. It is not without meaning that, in common speech, the possession or loss of the senses is made synonymous with mental sanity or derangement. By the temperate gratification of the senses the mind is sustained in its freshness, vigor, and serenity; while when they are perverted by excess, impaired by age, or deadened by disease, in that same proportion the mental powers are distracted, enfeebled, or benumbed. Taste, the faculty through which we become conversant with the whole realm of beauty, and than which devotion has no more efficient auxiliary, derives its name from what the ascetic deems the lowest animal enjoyment, which, however, has its range of the very highest ministries. The table is the altar of home-love and of hospitality, and there are clustered around it unnumbered courtesies, kindnesses, and charities that make a large part of the charm and joy of life. So far is thoughtfulness for its graceful and generous service from indicating a low type of character, that there is hardly any surer index of refinement and elegant culture than is furnished by the family meal. Similar remarks apply to the entire range of pleasurable objects and experiences. While there are none of them in which excess is safe, they all, when enjoyed in moderation, stimulate the mental powers, develop and train the æsthetic faculty, and multiply beneficial relations alike with nature and with society.

*Temperance*, rather than abstinence, *is needed on grounds connected with social economy*. Labor for the mere necessaries of life occupies hardly a tithe of human industry. A nation of ascetics would be a nation of idlers. It is the demand for objects of enjoyment, taste, luxury, that floats ships, dams rivers, stimulates invention, feeds prosperity, and creates the wealth of nations. It is only excess and extravagance that sustain and aggravate social inequalities, wrongs, wants, and burdens; while moderate, yet generous use oils the springs and speeds the wheels of universal industry, progress, comfort, and happiness.

But there are *cases in which abstinence*, rather than temperance, *is a duty*.

*Past excess* may render temperance hardly possible. From the derangement consequent upon excess, an appetite may lose the capacity of healthy exercise. In such a case, as we would amputate a diseased and useless limb, we should suppress the appetite which we can no longer control. Physiological researches have shown that the excessive use of intoxicating drinks, when long continued, produces an organic condition, in which the slightest indulgence is liable to excite a craving so intense as to transcend the control of the will.

*Inherited proclivities* may, in like manner, render temperance so difficult as to make abstinence a duty. It is conceivable that a nation or a community may, by the prevalence of excess in past generations, be characterized by so strong a tendency to intemperance as to render general abstinence a prerequisite to general temperance.

Abstinence may also become a duty, if to many around us our *example* in what we may enjoy innocently would be ensnaring and perilous. The recreation, harmless in itself, which by long abuse has become a source of corruption, it may be our duty to forego. The indulgence, safe for us, which would be unsafe for our associates, it may be incumbent on us to resign. The food, the drink which would make our table a snare to our guests, we may be bound to refrain from, though for ourselves there be in it no latent evil or lurking danger. This, however, is a matter in which each person must determine his duty for himself alone, and in which no one is authorized to legislate for others. It may seem to a conscientious man a worthy enterprise to vindicate and rescue from its evil associations an amusement or indulgence in itself not only harmless, but salutary; and there may be an equally strong sense of right on both sides of a question of social morality falling under this head. The joyous side of life must be maintained. The young, sanguine, and happy will at all events have recreations, games, festivities, and of these there is not a single element, material, or feature that has not been abused, perverted, or invested with associations offensive to a pure moral taste. To disown and oppose them all in the name of virtue, is to prescribe a degree of abstinence which can have the assent of those only who have outlived the capacity of enjoyment. The more judicious course is to favor, or at least to tolerate such modes of indulgence as may for the present be the least liable to abuse, or such as may in prospect be the safest in their moral influence, and by sanctioning these to render more emphatic and efficient the disapproval and rejection of such as are intrinsically wrong and evil.

Section IV.

Manners.

The ancients had but one word for *manners and morals*. It might be well if the same were the case with us,—yet with this essential difference, that while they degraded morals to the level of manners, a higher culture would lead us to raise manners to the level of morals. The main characteristics of good manners are comprised in the three preceding Sections. They are the observance, in one’s demeanor and conduct toward others, of the fitnesses of time and place, and of the due and graceful mean between overwrought, extravagant, or fantastic manifestations of regard on the one hand, and coldness, superciliousness, or indifference on the other. Courtesies, like more substantial kindnesses, are neutralized by delay, and, when slow, seem forced and reluctant. Attentions, which in their place are gratifying, may, if misplaced, occasion only mortification and embarrassment, as when civilities befitting interior home-life are rehearsed for the public eye and ear. Nor is there any department of conduct in which excess or deficiency is more painfully felt,—a redundance of compliments and assiduities tending to silence and abash the recipient, while their undue scanting inflicts a keen sense of slight, neglect, and injury.

*Politeness* must, indeed, in order even to appear genuine, be the expression of sincere kindness. There is no pretence so difficult to maintain as the false show of genial and benevolent feeling. The mask cannot be so fitted to the face as not to betray its seams and sutures. Yet kindness is not of itself politeness. Its spontaneous expressions may be rude and awkward; or they may take forms not readily understood and appreciated. There are conventional modes of polite demeanor no less than of courteous speech. These modes may have no intrinsic fitness, yet they acquire a fitness from their long and general use; and while the mere repetition of stereotyped formulas whether in word or deportment is justly offensive, he who would have his politeness recognized and enjoyed must beware lest he depart too widely from the established sign-language of society. There is a _brusquerie_ often underlying hearty kindness and good fellowship, which at the outset pains, wounds, and repels those brought within its sphere, and which the most intimate friends endure and excuse rather than approve.

*Politeness is to be regarded as an indispensable duty.* It is believed that from its neglect or violation more discomfort ensues than from any other single cause, and in some circles and conditions of society more than from all other causes combined. There are neighborhoods and communities that are seldom disturbed by grave offences against the criminal law, but none which can insure itself against the affronts, enmities, wounded sensibilities, rankling grievances, occasioned by incivility and rudeness. Moreover, there are persons entirely free from vice, perhaps ostentatious in the qualities which are the opposites of vices, and not deficient in charitable labors and gifts, who cultivate discourtesy, are acrid or bitter in their very deeds of charity, and carry into every society a certain porcupine selfhood, which makes their mere presence annoying and baneful. Such persons, besides the suffering they inflict on individuals, are of unspeakable injury to their respective circles or communities, by making their very virtues unlovely, and piety, if they profess it, hateful. On the other hand, there is no truer benefactor to society—if the creation of happiness be the measure of benefit—than the genuine gentleman or gentlewoman, who adds grace to virtue, politeness to kindness; who under the guidance of a sincere fellow-feeling, studies the fitnesses of speech and manner, in civility and courtesy endeavors to render to all their due, and in the least details that can affect another’s happiness, does carefully and conscientiously all that the most fastidious sensibility could claim or desire.

Section V.

Government.

*The establishment and preservation of order is the prime and essential function of government*; the prevention and punishment of crime, its secondary, incidental, perhaps even temporary use. In a perfect state of society, government would still be necessary; for it would be only by the observance of common and mutual designations of time, place, and measure, that each individual member of society could enjoy the largest liberty and the fullest revenue from objects of desire, compatible with the just claims and rights of others. These benefits can, under no conceivable condition in which finite beings can be placed, be secured except by system, under a central administration, and with the submission of individual wills and judgments to constituted and established authority. A bad government, then, is better than none; for a bad government can exist only by doing a part of its appropriate work, while in a state of anarchy the whole of that work is left undone and unattempted.

*Obedience to government is*, then, fitting, and therefore a duty, independently of all considerations as to the wisdom, or even the justice of its decrees or statutes. If they are unwise, they yet are rules to which the community can conform itself, and by which its members can make their plans and govern their expectations, while lawlessness is the negation alike of guidance for the present and of confidence in the future. If they are unjust, they yet do less wrong and to fewer persons, than would be done by individual and sporadic attempts to evade or neutralize them. Nay, unwise and inequitable laws, to which the habits and the industrial relations of a people have adjusted themselves, are to be preferred to vacillating legislation, though in a generally right direction. Laws that affect important interests should be improved only with reference to the virtual pledges made by previous legislation, and so as to guard the interests involved against the injurious effects of new and revolutionary measures. The tariff regulations of our own country will illustrate the bearing of this principle. It forms no part of our present plan to discuss the mooted questions of free trade and protection. But in the confession of even extreme partisans on either side, the capital and industry of our people could never have suffered so much from any one tariff of duties, however injudicious, as they suffered for a series of years from sudden changes of policy, by which investments that had been invited by the legislation of one Congress were made fruitless by the action of the next, and manufactures stimulated into rapid growth by high protective duties, were arrested and often ruined by their sudden repeal. The stability of laws is obviously a higher good than their conformity to the theoretical views of the more enlightened citizens. Except under a despotism, laws are virtually an expression of the opinion or will of the majority; and laws which by any combination of favoring circumstances are enacted in advance of the general opinion, are always liable to speedy repeal, with a double series of the injurious consequences which can hardly fail to ensue immediately on any change.

But are there no *limits to obedience*? Undoubtedly there are. A bad law is to be obeyed for the sake of order; an immoral law is to be disobeyed for the sake of the individual conscience; and of the moral character of a particular law, or of action under it, the individual conscience is the only legitimate judge. Where the law of the land and absolute right are at variance, the citizen is bound, not only to withhold obedience, but to avow his belief, and to give it full expression in every legitimate form and way, by voice and pen, by private influence and through the ballot-box. But in the interest of the public order, it is his duty to confine his opposition to legal and constitutional methods, to refrain from factious and seditious resistance, to avoid, if possible, the emergency in which disobedience would become his duty, and in case his conscience constrains him to disobedience, still to show his respect for the majesty of law by quietly submitting to its penalty. The still recent history of our country furnishes a case in point. By the Fugitive-Slave Law—which the Divine providence, indeed, repealed without waiting for the action of Congress—the private citizen who gave shelter, sustenance, or comfort to a fugitive slave; who, knowing his hiding-place, omitted to divulge it, or who, when called upon to assist in arresting him, refused his aid, was made liable to a heavy fine and a long imprisonment. Now as to this law, it was obviously the duty of a citizen who regarded the slave as entitled to the rights of a man, to seek its repeal by all constitutional methods within his power. It was equally his duty to refrain from all violent interference with the functionaries charged with its execution, and to avoid, if possible, all collision with the government. But if, without his seeking, a fugitive slave had been cast upon his humane offices, the question then would have arisen whether he should obey God or man; and to this question he could have had but one answer. Yet his obedience to God would have lacked its crowning grace, if he had not meekly yielded to the penalty for his disobedience to the law of the land. It was by this course that the primitive Christians attested their loyalty at once to God and to “the powers that be,” which were “ordained of God.” They refused obedience to the civil authorities in matters in which their religious duty was compromised; but they neither resisted nor evaded the penalty for their disobedience. Similar was the course of the Quakers in England and America almost down to our own time. They were quiet and useful citizens, performing the same functions with their fellow-citizens, so far as their consciences permitted, and, where conscience interposed its veto, taking patiently the distraining of their goods, and the imprisonment of their bodies, until, by their blameless lives and their meek endurance, they won from the governments both of the mother country and of the United States, amnesty for their conscientious scruples.

There may be a state of society in which it becomes *the duty of good citizens to assume an illegal attitude, and to perform illegal acts, in the interest of law and order*. If those who are legally intrusted with executive and judicial offices are openly, notoriously, and persistently false to their trusts, to such a degree as to derange and subvert the social order which it is their function to maintain, good citizens, if they have the power, have undoubtedly the right to displace them, and to institute a provisional government for the temporary emergency. A case of this kind occurred a few years ago in San Francisco. The entire government of the city had for a series of years been under the control of ruffians and miscreants, and force and fraud had rendered the ballot-box an ineffectual remedy. No law-abiding citizen deemed his life or property safe; gross outrages were committed with impunity; and thieves and murderers alone had the protection of the municipal authorities. Despairing of legal remedy, the best citizens of all parties organized themselves under the direction of a Committee of Safety, forcibly deposed the municipal magistrates and judges, brought well-known criminals to trial, conviction, and punishment, reëstablished the integrity of suffrage, and resigned their power to functionaries lawfully elected, under whom and their successors the city has enjoyed a degree of order, tranquillity, and safety at least equal to that of any other great city on the continent.

*The right of revolution* undoubtedly is inherent in a national body politic; but it is an extreme right, and is to be exercised only under the most urgent necessity. Its conditions cannot be strictly defined, and its exercise can, perhaps, be justified only by its results. A constitutional government can seldom furnish occasion for violent revolutionary measures; for every constitution has its own provisions for legal amendment, and the public sentiment ripe for revolution can hardly fail to be strong enough to carry the amendments which it craves, through the legal processes, which, if slow and cumbrous, are immeasurably preferable to the employment of force and the evils of civil war. On the other hand, a despotic or arbitrary government may admit of abrogation only by force; and if its administration violates private rights, imposes unrighteous burdens and disabilities, suppresses the development of the national resources, and supersedes the administration of justice or the existence of equitable relations between class and class or between man and man, the people—the rightful source and arbiter of government—has manifestly the right to assert its own authority, and to substitute a constitution and rulers of its own choice for the sovereignty which has betrayed its trust. Under similar oppression, the same right unquestionably exists in a remote colony, or in a nation subject by conquest to a foreign power. If that power refuses the rights and privileges of subjects to a people over which it exercises sovereignty, and governs it in its own imagined interests, with a systematic and persistent disregard to the well-being of the people thus governed, resistance is a right, and may become a duty. In fine, the function of government is the maintenance of just and beneficent order; a government forfeits its rights when it is false to this function; and the rights thus forfeited revert to the misgoverned people.