A traveler newly
returned from the Pacific Ocean tells pleasant stories of the Patagonians. As
the steamer he was in was passing through Magellan’s Straits some natives came
out to her in boats. They wore no clothes at all, though there was snow in the
air. A baby that came along with them made some demonstration that displeased
its mother, who took it by the foot, as Thetis took Achilles, and soused it
over the side of the boat into the cold seawater. When she pulled it in, it lay
a moment whimpering in the bottom of the boat, and then curled up and went to
sleep. The missionaries there have tried to teach the natives to wear clothes,
and to sleep in huts; but, so far, the traveler says, with very limited
success. The most shelter a Patagonian can endure is a little heap of rocks or
a log to the windward of him; as for clothes, he despises them, and he is
indifferent to ornament. To many of us,
groaning under the oppression of modern conveniences, it seems lamentably
meddlesome to undermine the simplicity of such people, and enervate them with
the luxuries of civilization. To be able to sleep out-o-doors, and go naked,
and take sea-baths on wintry days with impunity, would seem a most alluring
emancipation. No rent to pay, no tailor, no plumber, no newspaper to be read on
pain of getting behind the times; no regularity in anything, not even meals;
nothing to do except to find food, and no expense for undertakers or
physicians, even if we fail; what a fine, untrammeled life it would be! It
takes occasional contact with such people as the Patagonians to keep us in mind
that civilization is the mere cultivation of our wants, and that the higher it
is the more our necessities are multiplied, until, if we are rich enough, we
get enervated by luxury, and the young men come in and carry us out. We want so many, many
things, it seems a pity that those simple Patagonians could not send missionaries
to us to show us how to do without. The comforts of life, at the rate they are
increasing, bid fair to bury us soon, as Tarpeia was buried under the shields
of her friends the Sabines. Mr. Hamerton, in speaking of the increase of
comfort in England, groans at the "trying strain of expense to which our
extremely high standard of living subjects all except the rich." It makes
each individual of us very costly to keep, and constantly tempts people to
concentrate on the maintenance of fewer individuals means that would in simpler
times be divided among many. "My grandfather," said a modern the
other day, "left $200,000. He was considered a rich man in those days;
but, dear me! he supported four or five families--all his needy relations and
all my grandmother’s." Think of an income of $10,000 a year being equal to
such a strain, and providing suitably for a rich man’s large family in the
bargain! It wouldn’t go so far now, and yet most of the reasonable necessaries
of life cost less to-day than they did two generations ago. The difference is
that we need so very many comforts that were not invented in our grandfather’s
time. …The trouble seems to
be with very many of us, in contemporary private life as well as in
institutions, that the enlightened experience of the day invents more
necessaries than we can get the money to pay for. Our opulent friends are
constantly demonstrating to us by example how indispensably convenient the
modern necessaries are, and we keep having them until we either exceed our
incomes or miss the higher concerns of life in the effort to maintain a
complete outfit of its creature comforts. And the saddest part
of all is that it is in such great measure an American development. We
Americans keep inventing new necessaries, and the people of the effete
monarchies gradually adopt such of them as they can afford. When we go abroad
we growl about the inconveniences of European life--the absence of gas in
bedrooms, the scarcity and sluggishness of elevators, the primitive nature of
the plumbing, and a long list of other things without which life seems to press
unreasonably upon our endurance. Nevertheless, if the res angustae domi [poor
circumstances or limited means] get straiter than usual, we are always liable
to send our families across the water to spend a season in the practice of
economy in some land where it costs less to live. Of course it all belongs to Progress, and no one is quite willing to have it stop, but it does a comfortable sufferer good to get his head out of his conveniences sometimes and complain. |
