Another stumbling-block of progress is an extremely ancient belief of ours, not derived from the preceding five, but in flat contradiction to some of them, which the popular and poetic saying calls “the sweet uses of adversity.” We very generally believe that pain and difficulty are good for us, and the logical consequence of this belief—so far as practical life allows such an absurdity to have any consequence—is of course that we do nothing to remove pain and difficulty. The further logical consequence, that we should deliberately add pain and difficulty to our lives in order to improve them, is seldom allowed; it is too ridiculous even for our brains. Now what is the fraction of truth in this peculiar piece of idiocy? At its very base lies the law of physics: “action and reaction are equal.” As hard as you push against a wall does the wall push against you. Following this comes the early observation of the effect of environment. Where the channel is narrowest the stream is deepest; where it is widest the stream is shallowest; and if you dam the stream the water rises to the height of the dam. So in the action of the human forces we observe that, if you hinder and obstruct a man, he resists your pressure and rises against it—sometimes! Sometimes he does no such thing, but is crushed instead. However, we perceived numbers of cases where opposition called forth resisting energy where action and reaction were equal, and we made our easy generalisation as to the beneficent effects of difficulties. Applied to human life, in the concrete environment which we call good and bad according to our lights, we observed further that this law seemed to work backward; that where a person had no difficulties, where all was made easy for him, he did not manifest energy. Then we felt sure we were right. We produced a lot of popular expressions of this general thought, a religious phase of it being “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”; its application in education leading us to believe that it is good to make the child labour and struggle in learning—bad to “make it too easy for him”; and in economics we apply it in our sad comments on the disadvantages of wealth, our cheerful assertion that “it is good for a man to be born poor.” Of course no one ever thinks of staying poor because of its benefits; no one foregoes being rich, or trying to be rich because convinced of its evils; above all, we do not seek to work out this theory on our children. Its main mischief is in preventing us from trying to remove the obstacles to human progress in general. So long as we even partially believe that obstacles promote to progress, that the hurdles add to the speed of the racer—why, if we do not really give extra hurdles to aid the man we want to win, we at least do nothing to clear the track.