“You mean selfishness,” I retorted; “and I am surprised to hear a man of the world—I mean of the _other_ world, or, indeed, of _any_ world whatever—assert so obvious a fallacy. Just as the liver, and not the heart, is the seat of our real well-being, so I maintain that self-indulgence, and not self-sacrifice, is the origin, the mainspring, the motive power of all effort, progress, improvement, moral, social, and physical. Researches of science, triumphs of art, masterpieces of genius,—what are these but results of the same instinct that directs the bee to the flower-garden, the vulture to the carcase? To eat is the first necessity of man. He labours that he may live. Grant this, as you cannot but concede the position to be unassailable, and you talk to me in vain of sentiment, philanthropy, benevolence, all the loathsome affectations of sympathy with which the earth-worm tries to impose upon its kind. A man begins by being honest. Why? Because without honesty, down the particular groove in which he spins, he cannot earn his daily bread. When he has enough of this and to spare, he turns his attention to decent apparel, a commodious house, a general appearance of respectability; that is, he aims at being respectable—in other words, at imposing on those who have been less successful in the universal scramble than himself. Soon he buys a warming-pan, a Dutch oven, china ornaments for his chimney-piece, and the History of the Prodigal to hang about his walls. By degrees, as wealth increases, he moves into a larger residence, he rolls upon wheels, he replaces the china ornaments with a French clock; the Prodigal Son with modern oil-paintings, and hides the warming-pan in the housemaid’s closet up-stairs. About this period he begins to subscribe to charitable institutions, to give away what he does not want, to throw little pellets of bread at the monster who is always famished and always roaring out of doors, lest it should come in, and snatch the roast beef off his table. Some day a team of black horses with nodding plumes, and a red-nosed driver, come to take him away, ‘very much respected,’ and, forgive the personality, there is an end of him, as far as _we_ are concerned. Will you tell me that man’s life has not been a continual concession to self?—waste, waste, utter waste, from the pap-boat that preserved his infancy, to the brass-nailed coffin that protects his putridity from contact with the earth to which he returns? Why his very virtues, as he called them, were but payments, so to speak, keeping up the insurance for his own benefit, which he persuaded himself he had effected on the other world.