Ambrose Bierce
Cosmopolitan/December, 1908
Let us for a moment suppose this country’s reformers to have achieved their amiable purpose—their purposes, rather, for these are as the leaves of the forest, and no two alike. We have, then, a country in which are no poverty, no contention, no tyranny nor oppression, no peril to life or limb, no disease—and so forth. How delightful! What a good and happy people! Alas, no! With poverty have vanished benevolence, providence, and the foresight which, born of the fear of individual want, stands guard at a thousand gates to defend the general good. The charitable impulse is dead in every breast, and gratitude, atrophied by disuse, has no longer a place among human sentiments and emotions. With no more fighting among ourselves we have lost the power of resentment and resistance: a car-load of Mexicans or a shipful of Japanese can invade our fool’s paradise and enslave us, as the Spaniards overran Peru and the British subdued India. (Hailers of “the dawn of the new era” will, I trust, provide that it dawns everywhere at once or here last of all.) Having no oppression to resist and no perils to apprehend, we no longer need the courage to defy, nor the fortitude to endure. Heroism is a failing memory and magnanimity a dream of the past: for not only are the virtues known by contrast with the vices, they spring from the same seed, grow in the same soil, ripen in the same sunshine, and perish in the same frost. A fine race of mollycoddles we should be without our sins and sufferings! In a world without evils there would be one supreme evil—existence.
We need not fear any such condition. Progress is infected with the germs of reversion; on the grave of the civilization of to-day will squat the barbarian of to-morrow, “with a glory in his bosom” that will transfigure him the day after. The alternation is one that we can neither hasten nor retard, for our success baffles us. If, for example, we could abolish war, disease, and famine, the race would multiply to the point of “standing room only”—a condition prophesying war, disease, and famine. Wherefore the wisest prayer is this, “O Lord, make thy servant strong to fight and impotent to prevail.”
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