This principle lies in the very roots of our being; and it is developed earliest in our nature. Before the love of right, of virtue, of truth, appears this self-regard. Disinterestedness is of later growth. Infancy comes into the world like a royal heir, and takes possession, as if the world were made for itself alone. Itself is all it knows; it will by and by, take a wider range. There is a natural process of improvement in the very progress of life. "You will get better," says a dramatic satirist,[7] "as you get older; all men do. They are worst in childhood, improve in manhood, and get ready, in old age, for another world. Youth with its beauty and grace, would seem bestowed on us, for some such reason, as to make us partly endurable, till we have time to become so of ourselves, without their aid, when they leave us. The sweetest child we all smile on, for his pleasant want of the whole world to break up, or suck in his mouth, seeing no other good in it--would be roughly handled by that world's inhabitants, if he retained those angelic, infantile desires, when he has grown six feet high, black and bearded; but little by little, he sees fit to forego claim after claim on the world, puts up with a less and less share of its good as his proper portion, and when the octogenarian asks barely for a sup of gruel or a fire of dry sticks, and thanks you as for his full allowance and right in the common good of life,--hoping nobody will murder him--he who began by asking and expecting the whole world to bow down in worship to him--why, I say, he is advanced far onward, very far, nearly out of sight." [Footnote 7: Browning: A Soul's Tragedy, p. 250.] This advancement, thus springing out of the very experience of life, I am yet to consider, and have it most at heart to consider. It is of such priceless worth, it so embraces all that is noble in humanity, that the importance of the opposite principle, is liable to be quite overlooked. Selfishness, which is the excess of a just self-regard, is the one form of all evil in the world. The world cries out upon it, and heaps upon it every epithet, expressive of meanness, baseness and guilt. And let it bear the branding scorn; but let us not fail to see, though selfishness be the satirist's mark, and the philosopher's reproach, and the theologian's argument, the real nature and value of the principle, from which it proceeds.