[42: 618–25] A few days after my arrival in California I fell in with a man who had been one of the first to emigrate after the discoveries of gold were made known. Having failed in business fifteen years before, he had left a wife and children in the East and come hither to make a fortune. Of his own accord he narrated much of his subsequent life. After listening for some time, I asked:

“How many times have you taken up a new business and failed in it since you came to California?”

“I have been dead broke six times.”

“And how many times have you changed your business?”

“I’m sure I can’t tell; I always change when I see a better chance.”

A few weeks afterwards he made another change and leaving the part of the country where I was, I lost sight of him. Yet experience afterwards led me to regard the man as one much more likely to be successful in the long run, than most of those with whom I became acquainted, who had yielded to the California fever of 1849.

Some time afterwards a company of twenty four working men [654]proposed to me to give them a lease of certain property in consideration of some desireable improvements which they proposed to make upon it. In drawing up a form of agreement for the purpose I assumed that each one of these men would do his part of the work, during the whole period required for the service, which was estimated at three months. But this was objected to on the ground that though they all now intended to continue at the work for that period, some would be sure to get tired of it and wish to quit and it would be necessary to provide for supplying their places.

“Do you not think,” then said I, “that you could all depend on each other to go through with it?“

“No sir,” replied their spokesman, who was the master workman,“I don’t believe you could find twenty four men in California who could be depended on to stick together at any job for three months. There will always be some who will take a sudden start and when they do there’s no reasoning with them. When they once get their heads set on it they are bound to go, no matter what they lose by it. I have known many men strike off and leave five or six hundred dollars that would have been coming to them soon if they had kept on where they were.“To this there was a unanimous expression of assent from all present, of whom nine-tenths were European born and fully one half Englishmen.

What are called in California, Forty-niners, that is, early emigrants, frequently apply to me for employment, representing themselves to be of most industrious disposition but the victims of singular misfortune which has hitherto followed them wherever they have turned. They want to be tried in humble capacities, only asking that they may have before them a chance of working up to something better by hard labor and the exercise of the severest virtue. Generally, however, if successful in their application, they soon find some occasion for resigning the opportunity, often frankly avowing that they find it impossible to hold themselves steadily to any drudgery. Upon enquiry I find that this is a common experience and that the“forty niners” are good for nothing in any undertaking which requires long, plodding, steadfast application is generally understood. But it has occurred to me to question and the more I have thought of it, the more reason I have found to question whether the earliest emigrants are defective in this respect in a degree more marked when compared with the great body of emigrants who now occupy California than this body is itself defective in the same respect, compared with the population as a whole of New England, or of any part of Europe. The region about me has been “settled,” as they say, more than fifteen years. For more than ten years its whole population has been covered by the forms of systematic civilized government, has had its`actual courts of law, elections, taxes, sheriffs, post-offices with mails from San Francisco three times a week. It has its schools and churches, its [655]dozen of lawyers’ offices, its jail, its free hospital; temperance societies, Odd-Fellows and Masonic lodges, two newspapers and a brass band_ Much more than a million dollars in gold has been invested here in buildings, bridges, mill dams, fences and other substantial means of providing for civilized requirements. Nevertheless the people are very strikingly more shifting and consequently shiftless than those of any part of the Eastern states or of Europe. Since I have been here (two years) the District Attorney’s office has been twice vacated by resignation and is now filled by the third incumbent The two leading lawyers in the county have left it; four other lawyers have changed their residence. Three citizens previously engaged in other occupations have entered upon the practice of law. The principal capitalist, the largest merchant and three other leading merchants have left the county; at least a dozen other storekeepers have sold out and as many more come in. Ten men of my acquaintance who were running mills of various kinds (saw, grain and stamp), when I came here, have left them. In one case a mill has changed hands three times, in several others twice; I know of not one which has not changed hands. The Justice of the peace; the seven successive school-committeemen; three out of four of the physicians; the five butchers; the five innkeepers, eight out of twelve of the tradesmen and their assistants; the blacksmith; the two iron-founders; the two barbers; the daguerrotypist; the bathing-house keeper; the seven livery-stable-keepers; the three principal farmers; the three school-teachers and about seventy out of a hundred of the miners and laboring men who have lived nearest me or who have been most readily accessible and observable to me, have moved from one house, office or shop to another, or have left the county within two years. I count in this village forty-seven separate places of residence and of business which have been occupied by eighty-seven persons, not including housewives or children. Of these eighty-seven, eighty-five have changed their residences or place of business within two years. This has not been on account of a destructive fire or any extraordinary occurrence; population on the whole has not decreased, and so far as I can ascertain the changes have not been markedly greater than at previous periods of the early history of the district

In 1850 the population of San Francisco was thirty thousand (30,000). Twelve years afterwards it had advanced to 90,000. Distant from the mines, possessing the only good harbor in a coastline of fifteen hundred miles and being the centre of finance and wholesale commerce for nearly a third part of the United States and much of Mexico, this population was one of more steadfast character than any other on the Pacific coast, yet of five thousand five hundred of the more important merchants, [656] tradesmen and manufacturers who were registered in the San Francisco Directory of 1861 only three thousand four hundred remained in 1862, and of the smaller dealers it is estimated by the compiler of the Directory that at least forty per cent had “declined business” during the same year. This was during a period of general prosperity and when the total number of business firms greatly increased.

An agricultural population is almost necessarily [a] more abiding one in its habits than any other, but the same characteristic unsteadiness is observable among the farmers of California, comparing them with farmers elsewhere. Of the agriculturists among my neighbors, seven out of twelve have moved within two years and those who have not are men who were originally bred for different callings & have late in life taken to farming. Going out of the county on the only road which I have had occasion to travel over enough to gain an acquaintance with the farmers on it, I have noticed that seven out of twelve properties have changed hands within two years, one of them twice.

[The general fact thus illustrated is to be partly attributed to the experimental character of all industrial undertakings in new settlements and especially in California, owing to the variableness of its seasons and to the capricious distribution of its primary source of wealth in deposits of gold. But careful study has satisfied me that this is not the main cause of the more shifting character of its population compared with that of established civilized communities. The main cause is independent of all local and temporary conditions: it lies in the natal character of the pop] [42: 87] ulation and in those qualities of character which govern the circumstances under which members of civilized communities most readily yield to the temptations to break loose from the opportunities and the duties in which they have become established.

---

[42: 626–37] I trust I have made it obvious to the reader that the organization of society here, however advanced from what it has been at an earlier period, is yet very crude and that the reason why it is so is that the people are generally unprepared to take part in a higher organization. [but something more—] There is nothing which has been more strongly impressed upon me than the absence of a desire for a more coherent community on the part of the more intelligent, and the feeling, which is more than one of indifference, of the greater number in regard to what should be the common concerns of all. The explanation is a simple one, more personal concern in common affairs would be equivalent to a loss of the enjoyment of personal independence. Men do not constrain others or influence others because to do so would be to invite constraints upon their own caprice or judgment.

Most men who leave the old communities of the East for the pioneer settlements do so with the hope of returning when they shall have acquired a certain amount of wealth. This hope they retain for [657]many years more or less distinctly. It is nevertheless notorious that most of those who succeed in returning are not satisfied to remain long. They say that it appears to them that the character of the old community has changed. It is not what they had remembered it to be and there is something very oppressive to them in it. No doubt old communities do change; old friends pass away or new interests and habits are taken on, but in most of these cases the greatest change is that which has occurred in the emigrant himself. In a frontier or immature state of society, each individual becomes connected by ties of interest or otherwise with a certain number of others who are of distinct importance to him and to whom he is of distinct importance. He knows what he has to do with everyone about him and what everyone about him has to do with him. When he comes into the midst of an older or more fully organized community, he finds individuals comparatively unimportant and a large part of every man’s interest in others so indirect, attenuated, ramified and subtle that it appears to him that there is no genuine friendship, trust or truth, any more than there is thorough-going hatred, enmity or manly courage in regard to injuries. The fact is that friendship, the obligation of truth and trust or dependence on others is exercised in a much more extended and elaborate way, the heart and mind are both more liberal than he is able to appreciate, and in truth it is he who has been growing contracted, concentrated and direct in the exercise of his natural qualifications for helping and being helped by his fellow-men otherwise.

Notwithstanding the constant changes which I have described, the immediate community about me is so small, and my business responsibility has been of such a character, that I have taken an interest more or less active in the condition, the habits and tendencies of nearly every individual sojourner near me. I have been anxious for the introduction of conditions favorable to progress toward a thriftier state of things, toward a community of larger and steadier commercial demands, larger and steadier productive power. On this account, it has naturally become a habit with me to weigh the value of individuals, with reference to the general end which I should like to feel that I am aiding my neighbors to approach, and I find that whenever my attention is called to a man I at once rank him according to an intuitive estimate of the part he is likely to bear, if any, in this respect. I find that for convenience of thinking I habitually classify my neighbors according to my estimate of their measurement by some scale which exists in my mind. I have never to this moment attempted to define clearly to myself what this scale is, but looking out the window as I write, I see two men and I know that both stand near the bottom notch and that the scale is too rude to show any difference between them. It interests me to find that this is the case because there are striking differences between them.

One stands idle but erect, and though of feeble form, with the [658]pose of a noble statue; his face is streaked with vermilion; a quiver of undressed fox skin, full of arrows, hangs over one naked shoulder, a ragged blanket over the other and there is a bow in his hand. I saw him standing within six feet of where he now is an hour ago and with no difference of position except that his vacant eyes were directed toward the other end of the village. He is a dull, silent, stupid savage. He was born near here and when he was born his mother had never seen a white man.

The other reclines near the tavern-door. He has a cigar in his mouth, a Colt’s revolver in one pocket, a Geneva watch in another and scores of machines and many hundreds of hands have been employed in preparing his apparel. When freshly and mildly stimulated, he has a very active mind and a ready utterance. It is not unlikely that tomorrow morning, after he has taken a warm bath, his cognac and soda water, coffee and one or two after breakfast drams, [I shall] again hear him discoursing, as I did this morning, with indignant eloquence on “the mockery of justice, the debasement of the ermine, the ignorance of law, the degrading demagogueism, the abominable infidelity by——!” of a recent decision of a Court with regard to the rights of colored people in public conveyances, reported in a San Francisco newspaper. In twenty minutes he will have made use of words primarily prepared for him by Saxon, Roman, Greek, Sanscrit and I know not what other brains. Then again he will pass under my window humming a hymn of Handel, or I shall find him at the Post Office sitting in an arm chair, made for him in New Hampshire, and reading a novel first written in France, translated in England and printed for him in Boston. He will have been served before the day is over by your work and by mine and by that of thousands of other men, and yet will think of nothing so often or so intensely as the “cursed luck” by which he is served no better. And what will he do for us? Playa game of billiards with you or take a hand at cards if you want amusement, and if he wins money in this or any other way of speculating he will use it “generously.” Within a year by pledging his word to drink no more he induced a poor hard worked widow to become his wife, having been previously the father of several children of different colors for [whose] maintenance or education he has never worked an hour or concerned himself a moment. He is [a] tall and large framed white man of English stock, born in a state of society which he speaks of [as] “the highest reach of civilization.”

While I see no other men but these, I am reminded of two others by hearing the strokes of an axe and the dull rap of a hammer. The first comes from a Chinese servant preparing wood for the baker’s oven over the way, the other from a crippled German shoemaker. These two men again I at once range together and very far above the Indian and the Fruit of civilization—not, perhaps more than half way to the higher [659]notches—yet, not a majority of my neighbors stand higher than these two steady, plodding, short-sighted, frugal workers. But it is not industry, nor well-balanced demand and supply, nor sobriety and inoffensiveness only that I lay to the scale. There is some general quality which these lie back of and support perhaps, but which I look most for and find feeble in the stolid German and weazen Chinaman.

Trying one man and another and reflecting upon what it is in each that sets him high or low in my scale, I come to the conclusion that the highest point on my scale can only be met by the man who possesses a combination of qualities which fit him to serve others and to be served by others in the most intimate, complete and extend[ed] degree imaginable. Shall we call it communitiveness? Then I find not merely less of a community but less possibility of community, of communitiveness, here among my neighbors of all kinds than in any other equal body of men, I ever saw. And the white men, the Englishmen, the Germans, and other civilized men do not possess [it] often in as high degree as the Mexicans, Chinese and negroes—nor do the good men always possess as much of it as the rogues, the wild-fellows.

Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute the population of the entire globe, says Mr Mayhew in London Labor & London Poor, there are but two distinct and broadly marked races, namely, the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen, the nomadic and the civilized tribes.

I believe this in the main to be a true statement and that a similar division may be made of every so called civilized community. Every now and then we find in an Eastern society an Indian who lives peaceably and industriously, who has adopted the usual fashions and manners of the community very closely and who respects and obeys the laws as a good citizen. Yet those who know this man thoroughly are generally aware that the Indian propensities and habits remain and are really stronger than usual with him because of the prolonged suppression to which they have been subject. Occasionally in a furtive solitary way he gives rein to them. After a time, in many cases, he will suddenly, at what appears to be a great sacrifice, abandon whatever he has gained as a citizen, part from his friends, make his way to the frontier or to some other opportunity for escaping from the restraints of organized society and for the indulgence of his independent, vagabond, deep seated proclivities. White men brought up in mature communities are to be found with much the same proclivities. Under favorable circumstances they may be controlled and obtain little attention; under other circumstances they make men gamesters, filibusters and, whatever their ostensible profession or calling, speculators. If they are industrious it is in some irregular, unmethodic way, involving so much risk, guess work and shifts that on the whole it causes more embarrassment than it contributes assistance to the methods by [660]which the community altogether advances in prosperity.

Such men are not solitary in their habits, they are by no means incapable of love, of generosity, of magnanimity; of staunch fidelity to friends or to the trusts which they assume. They enjoy the fruits of civilization, and are often extraordinarily covetous of them. But they seem to be incapable of catholic relationships or of faith in the existence of a unity of interests between themselves and any others to whom they are not bound by some special tie or assurance of sympathy. They are not disinclined to have a few chums; they can extend their chumming for special purposes so as to include a band. They are most thorough-going partisans. They are capable of strong family attachments and they can extend the chumming relation and the family relation and the partisan relation so as to include their tribe, clan or race, so far as the interests of tribe, clan or race may appear to be in conflict with those of others with whom they have no similar relationships. But aside from these ties which are all commonly very strong with the lowest savages, their instincts or intuitions toward other men seem to be those of beasts toward other beasts, as if their only interest in them could be as towards objects of prey or of preying.

I have been most struck by evidences of this characteristic in men who were most attractive from their boldness, tender heartedness and general natural nobleness.

This quality is the result of education and being transmitted like other educated intuitions from parent to child constantly gains ground in communities which are advancing in civilization. In communities falling back in civilization it diminishes.

It is very strongly impressed upon me that the representatives of all the older communities whom I find living together and constituting whatever there is that can be properly called a new community here were much behind the general state of advancement of those older communities when they came out from them, in respect to this quality, and that the most advanced are here falling back very rapidly.

---

[The following section is an alternate—and probably earlier—version of Olmsted’s discussion of the Kentucky gambler,. the Indian, and the German shoemaker in relation to his standard for measuring civilization.]

[42: 292–300] . . . And I see a roof under which there lives a crippled German shoemaker with a dark haired wife and one little girl who has learned to read English and who speaks three languages brokenly—a man who renders more good service to the rest of the world in a day than the Kentuckian in a year, yet the shoemaker is the more [661]contented and his requirements appear to be less than those of the gambler.

[The red-man is a better man physically than the German; he is a better man morally than the Kentuckian, idle but less idle, treacherous but less sophistical.]

The Indian has choice in his food, preferring to drive the dogs away from the carcass of a mule and to take the trouble to tear off the less tough parts wherewith to satisfy his hunger, rather than to stuff his stomach with clover heads or acorns or clay, either of which he will do if no dead mule or other matter of preference is conveniently near when hunger comes upon him. He has a choice where he shall sit; he has a choice in what shelter he shall lodge; he has a choice as to his garments, he measures time by moons and days and more vaguely, by the eighth part of days, holding his hand toward one or another quarter of the heavens, he even has a choice in colors, as his painted face shows, he will make a noise and move his legs for a glass of whiskey, in a manner that shows he has ideas of tones and of movements which are vaguely elemental to the civilized ideas of music and dancing. In all these matters he takes some trouble and does a little work on account of his choice. He will spend an hour or two in building a hut, he will turn over a stone to get a smoother seat, and there are several days’ labor and skill that must have been acquired by somewhat careful practice, shown in his bow and arrows.

Thus I see even in the savage the germ of the same requirements which in their more mature & elaborate form are met by civilized homes, by the raiment, the easy chairs, the food, the picture galleries, the opera houses, the chronometers and the ironclad-armed steamships of civilization. In his few words and in his “blazes” on the tree trunks whereby he shows those who follow him whither he has gone, I see the germ of the printing press and the telegraph.

It is plain that the requirements and impulses or motives to exertion of the civilized man are the same with those of the savage but the former have been educated or drawn out more elaborately than the latter.

But why do we regard the shoemaker as a more civilized man than the gambler, when the gambler’s requirements have evidently been educated more elaborately than those of the shoemaker? The most obvious difference between them is that while the gambler’s requirements are more fully educated than that of the shoemaker, the shoemaker’s capacity for serving other men is more fully educated than that of the gambler.

Yet in knowledge, in knowledge of history for example, in knowledge of the laws, in knowledge of theology, the gambler’s education has been much more elaborate than the shoemaker’s. In capacity to make rapid calculations, to average chances; in capacity of memory, in capacity [662]of language, the gambler is far more educated than the shoemaker. The gambler has skill which rightly directed would enable him to serve others more than the shoemaker.

Again the shoemaker could not as well resist the attack of a bear, or of cold or heat, as the Indian; and with the bow and arrow the Indian has far greater skill or more educated capacity than the shoemaker.

Shall we say that in applying the scale of civilization to these three men then, we measure their capacities with relation to their effectiveness in serving civilized requirements?

Our analysis is still obviously incomplete. For example; by perjury or other means, the gambler might have the shoemaker sent to jail, or the Indian might set his house on fire, and destroying the tools and materials with which he works render his capacities in a great degree ineffective for serving civilized requirements, yet we should not then at once consider him less civilized than before.

It also appears that the faculties of our more advanced example of civilization are educated less effectively even than those of the savage in this respect. Detach them both from all other men and the shoemaker would be in want of food under circumstances wherein the savage would have plenty. It is in effectiveness for meeting certain requirements of other men, that is to say in making shoes for them, that the civilization appears. And it is by means of this service of the civilized requirements of others that the shoemaker’s own civilized requirements are served.

The shoemaker’s effectiveness in meeting civilized requirements then could not be measured if the requirements of his community were insufficient to test his effectiveness in supplying shoes. Nor again could the education of his own requirements be tested if the community was ineffective to provide him with the means of meeting his requirements, in exchange for that which he offered for the supply of the requirements of the community.

The civilization of a community then is to be tested by the effectiveness with which the means of satisfying the educated requirements of men are offered to each individual in exchange for the means of satisfying those requirements which each individual offers the community.

Whatever then interferes either with the education of individuals in civilized requirements, whatever interferes with the effectiveness of individuals in meeting the civilized requirements of the community or of the community in meeting the civilized requirements of individuals, interferes with civilization and is uncivilized. Whatever destroys means of [663]satisfying civilized requirements is uncivilized, unless by the destruction of these means others are formed of equal effectiveness. Whatever hinders the exchange of means of satisfying the civilized requirements between those producing them and those requireing them, is uncivilized. Thus it is the want of civilization of the indians that so frequently interrupts the overland mails, that decimates the emigrant parties, that destroys the merchants’ trains and that prevents agricultural settlements in large districts of Northern Mexico.

But let us take a case or two less generally recognized in our common talk. We have here a class of men called Pikes, so denominated from a frontier county of that name in Missouri, which has been a chief nursery of them, though many of ours come from Arkansas and Texas. They are mostly teamsters and are universally regarded by other white men as of the lowest measure of civilization among our white population. A few months after I came here I was driving with a Virginian in a light carriage along a road which for a distance of a mile passed through a gulch or gorge of the hills with precipitous banks on each side. Here we overtook two waggons each drawn by six pair of half starved oxen, moving at a snail’s pace, but raising such clouds of dust as I have seen nowhere else in the world but in the slate districts of California. It was late in the day and we had yet thirty miles to make before we could feed our horses. Following us and soon coming up there came another light carriage in which was a woman taking her first airing after a severe illness of several months. There were frequent openings where, if the cattle had been stopped or turned a little one side, we might have passed. As the wind now and then whiffed aside the dust, we could see the teamsters and it was plain they saw us sometimes holding back for fresh air, sometimes driving up in hopes of getting by them, but not the slightest move did they make to enable us to get by so that we had to follow them for fully twenty minutes, till we reached a fork where we could turn away.

“Now those fellows are Pikes,” said my companion, “and they would let us follow them all day before they would stop a moment to accommodate us.”

“Can’t we make them turn out for a moment in some way?”

“There is only one way to do it, and I reckon they carry more guns than we do.”

Once when arriving from Europe in New York, I was driving in a hackney coach up the wharf at which the steamer landed, I was stopped by a drayman who had just turned his horse’s head so as to obstruct the narrow way. I, at once, stepped out and going to him, said,“Will you oblige me turning your horse so that I can pass?”

“No, I won’t.”

“I have just landed off the steamer from Liverpool, and am anxious [664]to get to the four o’clock boat for ——, so that I can reach my family tonight. It is now ten minutes to four, and if I am delayed I shall be obliged to remain here twenty four hours.“

“What the hell is that to me.”

“You refuse to do it?”

“Of course I do.” I looked in vain for a policeman.

“Then you will allow me to do it.”

“I’ll knock your head off if you do.”

What we call the manners of the Pike and the New York “rowdy,” as thus illustrated, are uncivilized for the same reason that arson and burglary, Indian robbery and Malay piracy are uncivilized. And so, if we apply this rule, always, in all society, whether of the wigwam or the drawing room, the dead-fall or the House of Lords, arrogance and servility, cautious reserve and careless presumption, are alike uncivilized, in so far as they have the effect of restricting or increasing the difficulties of a free exchange of services whether of commerce, or friendship, or civility, and thus of restraining the development of individual capacities of service and of the education of the requirements of service.

A rich miser in London is likely to be a less civilized and a more barbarous man than most savages in the wilderness. A despot, a tyrant, a swindler, a gambler, a tradesman who gives short measure, a thief, a demagogue, each in his way lacks civilization, and obstructs civilization. The laws, the customs, the churches, the schools, the roads, the houses, the books, the professions, the trades, the “classes” of any people, are more or less civilized in proportion to their effectiveness in leading to the development and useful appropriation of each man’s special combination of faculties and to his facility of imparting the results thereof to others and receiving and making use for the satisfaction of his own requirements of the results of other men’s doings, past and cotemporary.

Thus in all communities, even in those most civilized, besides the men who are recognized as active enemies of civilization and whose attacks are resisted by that part of the machinery of civilization, termed the law, there are also many more who are less distinctly the enemies of civilization, men who aid in supplying the wants of the community but who do so dishonestly, unfairly, takeing or trying to take more than a fair compensation for their services. Such are all men who give false measure, or who adulterate or hide the defects of their goods or who render eye-service. As men advance in the education of civilization, the law of competition acts in counteraction of these evils, and the tendency of civilization is on the whole to honesty and fair dealing. That honesty is the best policy, in all civilized dealings between men, is a maxim, faith in which grows with civilization. But as the advance of a nation in civilization tends to diffuse wealth and knowledge and to remove the distinctive lines between the more and the less civilized classes, the more civilized [665]classes suffer more directly from the dishonesty of the less civilized, and thus there appears to be the anomaly of an advancing civilization with an increase of fraudulent practices. The appearance is deceptive, however; it is simply an evidence of the increasing community of interests.

---

[42: 303–5] One measure of civilization is a measure of the extent and diversity of the civilized communication. Two men, living together and having no intercourse with others, cannot live in a highly civilized way because the division of employment between them cannot be great enough to provide employment for each fitting to his peculiar natural assortment of faculties. But in any thousand men, there may be one fit for some peculiar employment wherein he can be of peculiar service to all the others, as by inventing an engine or composing a story or a song. He may be qualified but very poorly for anything else, and it may be disagreeable to him and to them that he should be employed in anything else. He may be quite unfit and sure to be unsuccessful and to work mischief in any of the employments in which the others can be useful and happy. If then these thousand men are well-civilized, it will be easy for him to make his way in that peculiar employment for which he alone is peculiarly fitted. If they are barbarous, he will be despised and starve. The more men are constrained by others or by difficulties of intercourse with others from following their natural bent, the cruder is the civilization. [Hence in proportion as a community is civilized each member of it does that by which he can best meet the general demand and the general demand is met by those best able to meet it, while those who do most to meet the general demand find their own individual demands, however complex, best supplied.] Thus civilization requires men to forecast carefully the course by which each can best serve others and to keep steadily to that course; hence one of the chief distinctive habits of the civilized man is that of providing for himself by a sustained and prearranged method of providing something for others. Hence men who live in an uncivilized manner within a civilized community are termed vagabonds or vagrants, that is wanderers who do not provide for themselves by any fixed or sustained method of providing something for others. Their talents, whatever they are, are not under civilized control. They are dissipated in the attempt to live without thought of other men’s wants or fixed method of providing for them.

Intemperance (I do not mean intemperance in the use of stimulants merely, but including that form of intemperance) is characteristic of uncivilized men; temperance, of civilized men. The aboriginal savage of America, and I believe of all other kinds, is more like a wild beast than a civilized man in his habits of eating. He suffers less when straitened for [666]food, is less nice in his selection and puts no constraint upon his feeding when opportunity offers until his stomach will contain no more. With all his natural desires he is commonly equally intemperate. So when he has once acquired the appetite for intoxicating drinks, he makes himself dead drunk at every opportunity. He has no conception of the proper use of stimulants, but only asks for them that he may abuse them. Among men growing in civilization, habits of self constraint and temperance—of useing good things without abusing them—become stronger and stronger. With men lapsing from civilization, intemperance, imprudence and laxity of self control increase. This is generally most readily seen in the disposition to intoxication, but not only in that. It may [be] observed in language, in manners, & in all the habits.

[42: 307] The reverse of this is found where men by excessive application of certain means of giving & receiving what is desirable of others, give and receive less than they otherwise might do on the whole of that which is desireable, waste by suppression being equally uncivilized with waste by dissipation. The degree of civilization which exists with any people corresponds with the degree of economy with which the natural capacities of that people are used. Civilized men are, therefore, more virtuous than barbarians, for the economical exercise of any quality is a virtue, the improvident exercise of any quality, a vice. The virtues of firmness and self-control, for instance, are the prudent exercise of qualities, in the imprudent exercise of which consists the vices of obstinacy and insensibility. As abstinence from the use of anything which when prudently used is gratifying, deducts from the total amount of that which is desireable which men are qualified to make use of, asceticism and profligacy are alike wasteful and defalcative, alike barbarous or uncivilized.

[42: 303] A savage is not suited with the customs of civilization because they require of him a power of self restraint in the exercise of his inclinations, in a manner or under circumstances which would make their exercise directly or indirectly inconsistent with what is desireable for others. For the same reason a thief or a bigamist when sent to prison by civilization, or a vagrant when sent to the workhouse, a demagogue when beaten at the ballot, an ambitious rebel when brought to the gallows, an impertinent dandy when snubbed, all are dissatisfied with the requirements of civilization. So too the lazy school-boy, the indolent housemaid, the careless workman, are apt to be discontented with the requirements of civilization.

On the other hand a woman sickened by a smoker with whom she is compelled to travel in a stage coach may properly complain of his want of civility or civilization. But if both are on a railway train, the [667]smoker may himself properly complain of the lack of civilized accommodation which compels him either to deny himself the gratification of his inclination to smoke or to sicken a woman. Thus the introduction of smoking apartments on railway trains marks an advance in civilization, if the comfort or free exercise of the inclinations of all is on the whole increased by it.

[42: 308–11] The wants of the savage are simple and he is able to supply them with little assistance from others. What he requires from others he obtains by compulsion more than by exchange of service. The first influence of civilization upon the savage is seen in the increase of his wants and by his offers of service in exchange for the supply of his wants.

The wants of the civilized man are complex and he is able to supply but few of them without assistance from others. What he requires from others he obtains by offering some service which he is more able than they to perform.

The requirements or impulses of the civilized man have been educated more elaborately than those of the savage, while his capacities for meeting the human requirements and answering to the human impulses have also been more elaborately educated than those of the savage.

But how can we measure degrees of education? I find myself regarding the German shoemaker as a more civilized man than the Kentucky gambler, though the demands of the latter seem to be much greater than those of the former. The difference between them is that the shoemaker regularly gives in exchange for what he demands of others a return of his own services. His disposition manifests itself not merely in having his wants more completely satisfied but in working more completely for that satisfaction by methods which tend to the greater satisfaction of other men’s wants.

---

[42: 107–10] There are many cases in which men exhibit extraordinary capacity in certain respects for serving their community, who yet fail to serve it or be served by it as well as others simply because they are themselves not civilized. Civilization is not moral disposition but a condition of mind and of circumstances favorable to the development of this disposition in wise industry, benevolence and the working out of happiness extensively and soundly. In other words, civilization is or leads to a wise education or drawing out and making available of the natural capacities or virtuous disposition.

[668]

For instance, a man was once pointed out to me as being gifted with extraordinary taste and skill in the arrangement of colors. He was employed in making designs for a manufacturer. “No other man I have tried,” said his employer, “can combine colors, with ever so much study, as pleasingly as he can apparently without any deliberation at all, but he can never be made to be careful in measurements; his work has constantly to be done over after him by others; he never finishes it well; he is never punctual or exact; nor can he be depended on to keep his promises; he is tricky.” So infact he earns much less than any man of ordinary taste in colors and facility of working who is disposed to work steadily, honestly and painstakingly. This was in England. The man afterwards came to America, leaving a wife and child unprovided for, and had not been long here before he was arrested for obtaining money on false pretences from a gentleman who, from regard to his artistic ability, had helped him to obtain employment.

So some lawyers have a gift of eloquence who are not at all successful in their profession because they habitually neglect to thoroughly study their cases or because they lack persistent method in their service to others.