struggle; let me know all that common people endure, and endure with them; let me be no exception to the common rule, enjoy no special privilege, ask for no immunity from things harsh and disagreeable”—­the man who thinks and acts thus is the man who gets the best and most out of life.  But you, my friend, have simply copied the old monks in the arrangement of your life.  There is nothing novel in your action, though just now your egoism is gratified by the sense of novelty and originality.  You have simply gone out of the world to escape the evil of the world.  You have bought yourself out of the conscription of life.  You have yet to answer me one question:  are you the better for it?  That question cannot be answered in a day.  Ten years hence you will be able to tell me something about it, and I shall be much surprised if you do not then report more of loss than gain.  No man ever yet held aloof from his kind without paying the price in narrower sympathies, a narrower brain, and a narrower heart.  The eternal spirit of Progress which works throughout the universe never fails to punish the deserter, and the most common punishment is atrophy.  Not to submit to the process of evolution is to fall down the long slope of degeneracy.

’You do not need to be told that the entire history of nations confirms this rule.  The greatest nations are those which have found life most difficult, and they have thriven on their difficulties.  The soft climate, which reduces toil to a minimum, invariably means the enervated race.  Under the harsh skies of Britain a great race has been trained to great exploits; but what part have the islands of the South Pacific ever played in human history?  Give man a difficulty to overcome, and he at once puts forth his strength; difficulty is his spiritual gymnasium.  Impose on him no need of exertion, and he will rot out, just as the races of the South Pacific are rotting out.  I would measure the future of a man, or of a nation, by this simple test; do they habitually choose the easier or the harder path for themselves?  The nation that chooses the hard path, that is not afraid of the burden of empire, that glories in the strife for primacy and is not afraid to pay the price of primacy in incredible exertion, in blood and sacrifice, is the nation that shall possess the earth.  And is it not so with men?  Here, again, I press home the need for considering one’s actions in their collective aspect.  Your course of life is easily imitable:  would you have it imitated?  There are thousands of men in London who could readily retire into a peaceful life to-morrow, on terms more favourable than yours.  Every man possessed of a hundred pounds a year could do it.  Yet there are plenty of old men, with ample fortunes, who never dream of doing it.  They stick to their posts and they die at them.  And it is by such men that the great machinery of social life, of commerce, of national progress is kept going.