We cannot satisfy the greater part of our wants without pain or trouble, which may be considered as ‹suffering›. The same may be said of the act by which, exercising a noble control over our appetites, we impose on ourselves a privation. Thus, ‹suffering› is inevitable, and there remains to us only a choice of evils. Nothing comes more home to us than suffering, and hence ‹personal interest›—the sentiment which is branded now-a-days with the names of egotism and individualism—is indestructible. Nature has placed ‹sensibility› at the extremity of our nerves, and at all the avenues to the heart and mind, as an advanced guard, to give us notice when our satisfactions are either defective or in excess. Pain has, then, a purpose, a mission. We are asked frequently, whether the existence of evil can be reconciled with the infinite goodness of the Creator—a formidable [p076] problem that philosophy will always discuss, and never probably be able to solve. As far as Political Economy is concerned, we must take man as he is, inasmuch as it is not given to imagination to figure to itself—far less can the reason conceive—a sentient and mortal being exempt from pain. We should try in vain to comprehend sensibility without pain, or man without sensibility. In our days, certain sentimentalist schools reject as false all social science which does not go the length of establishing a system by means of which suffering may be banished from the world. They pass a severe judgment on Political Economy because it admits, what it is impossible to deny, the existence of suffering. They go farther—they make Political Economy responsible for it. It is as if they were to attribute the frailty of our organs to the physiologist who makes them the object of his study. Undoubtedly we may acquire a temporary popularity, attract the regards of suffering classes, and irritate them against the natural order of society, by telling them that we have in our head a plan of artificial social arrangement which excludes pain in every form. We may even pretend to appropriate God’s secret, and to interpret His presumed will, by banishing evil from the world. And there will not be wanting those who will treat as ‹impious› a science which exposes such pretensions, and who will accuse it of overlooking or denying the foresight of the Author of things. These schools, at the same time, give us a frightful picture of the actual state of society, not perceiving that if it be ‹impious› to foresee suffering in the future, it is equally so to expose its existence in the past or in the present. For the infinite admits of no limits; and if a single human being has since the creation experienced suffering, that fact would entitle us to admit, without ‹impiety›, that suffering has entered into the plan of Providence.