My Humble Opinion

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 136, 8 June 1907, Page 12

My Humble Opinion

ly PES2QT.

THE KINGDOM OF PATN. When the Socialists say there must be no luxurious class in Utopia I hope they make one big exception. There are people in the world who should in common justice be clothed in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously all their days. They are not the hardworking, the noble, the successful, the u_erupulo_; they are not those" who have gambled on the markets or secreted a new pill: they are those whose lives are spent in the Kingdom of Pain. Sadeyed sufferers, tortured by Nature through interminable years, surely they deserve tbe best that man can give in atonement for their cruel wrongs. In my Utopia the poorest of them shall he the richest. Their sunken eyes shall gaze on beauty, their wakeful ears shall be._ filled with music; they shall eat from china of Sevres; and the noblest of the land shall come to do them service, A goodly punishment shall reward the man who answers their querulous complainings with wrath: they shall be kings and queens to all the world; and their lives shall be a pageant of humanity's best gifts. The Aztecs of Mexico, you remember, however cruel in the righteousness of their tribe, had at least the grace to let their victim enjoy a merry time before his exit. For three weeks the youth was feasted upon the fat of the land, and he ascended the funeral pyre richly dight and honourably held. And what of these other victims, whose life is one long sacrifice?—are they not entitled to something better than our present scanty and ungracious gifts*; To see a sick man struggling to gain a mere subsistence is to mc a ghastly, horrible wrong. Indeed I know of nothing quite so wrong in all the World The sight of a mangled man selling things in the streets, or a consumptive girl struggling against a racking cough in a dirty little office is to my way of thinking an appalling indictment of our desperate if unthinking cruelty. But what shall we say of an employer who once stated to my knowledge that "We can have no sickness in this office." That meant, when you come to think of it, that for some there would be a double fight— a fight against, perhaps, a Calvary of pain and a fight to hide the signs of suffering and to struggle with what was now a crushing burden of work. Such a fiend as that—except that no m-n is wholly his own fault might fairly have a hereafter on an eternal treadmill, with an eternal cough and in the constant view of the legend "We can have no sic_ie&>;> here!"

It is a commonplace that many a man is utterly oblivious to the real nature i of Pain. Such people regard it as a sort of specialised discomfort, and utterly fail to grasp its cruel dignity. Tliat it is a great and crushing Force that rends and tears a man's whole nature till he actually becomes somebody else; thaf. the mind as well as the body is obsessed with its fell violence; that anyone under its mastery can serve it "alone; these things are either unknown to them, or else they are halfrealised abstractions. Let them learn that to the real sufferer all else but his suffering becomes inane and ridiculous. Pain is his king, and all other kings are not ouly usurpers but fools and lunatics. He has borrowed the greatness of his sovereign, and to him the man who talks business may be as irritating a.s a fly on the nose of a lion, but no whit more important. Charles Lamb recognised this on its lighter side, when he wrote that to be sick is " to enjoy monarchical privileges," and that the sick man "swells in tbe sole contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself." But if the sickness is grievous and torturing—as evidently Lamb's was not —the fact that the power and dignity is borrowed and not innate (borrowed from the tyrant Pain, whose subjects, however they may loTd it, are. still lorded) becomes more evident. It is a power in chains, the dignity of a Prometheus. The mere invalid is not to be pitied as an invalid —for who cannot remember _c deSlight-s in boyhood of German measles or chickenpox? Even now they bring back to mc 3Wfcet- memories of Grimm's fairy tales and calves-foot jelly. Disease, the fell tyrant, has much to answer for; and it is well the lowering ruffian can sometimes turn his hideous visage to a smile. It is not, say, the mere invalid who is to be pitied. It is those who are delivered body and soul to the horrors of consuming Pain. Such as beset a naturally gentle mortal the other day, whom at the cruellest deTee of agony to touch was to draw forth a bargee's vocabulary of execration. Do yo_ blame him *Kot if you are a Christian, I fancy; and certainly not, I am sure, if you are also a true man or woman. " Patience "is a pretty word that speaks a pretty thing; hut there is a diabolical access of agony to souls not made for heroes through which only heroism could smile. And heroes are not only not the only good people in the world, but they themselves require a certain gift of nature iv a wellordered and healthy nervous system. All honour, then, to the patient, but all pity also to the impatient and those, that groan aloud. But there is other honour, too. _ The other day the whole world —that is to say the'whole thinking world (which knows no nationality)—celebrated the seventieth birthday of probably the greatest saver of suffering the world has ever known. We read that even the Germans, who are alleged not to be enamoured of us Britons nowadays, celebrated Lord Lister's birthday, as though it were a national event; and letters and telegrams reached the Grand Old Man of the world of healing—this deadliest foe that Pain has ever known —from an army of grateful worshippers. But when he is gathered to his fathers you will see there will be little pageant, no glorious monument, nothing of the panegyric awarded a great actor or a victorious general. Because so few of us have measured the full greatness of the Kingdom of Pain, or have learned the strength that lies in the greatest of its foes.

And meantime each cf us has somewhere in his sight a poor tortured soul to whom to be gentle—to smile on when he is querulous, to shoulder something of his burden when he is utterly weighted down. In the Kingdom of Pain not only are there pathways of suffering, but there is an icy blast that blows in sometimes from the outer world, and adds to the wrongs of _*"aI tuxe the heaxtlessness of Man.