It is, at the first glance, not a little remarkable that the development of Pessimism to which I have referred should have taken place in an age of almost unparalleled public prosperity. Probably the sufferings caused by disease, by want, and by injustice, are now at their minimum in the settled countries of Europe. And yet it is in our time that men are now beginning formally to pronounce the evil of the world to exceed the good, and to treat what their fathers deemed the “beneficent order of Providence,” as too harsh and unjust a system to be attributed to a benevolent Deity, or indeed to any intelligent Being at all. It was not in the days of old oppression and tyranny, of the great famines or the “Black Death,” that there was any such revolt. When earth was much more like hell than it is at present, few men entertained any doubt that there was a God in heaven. Now that its worst wrongs are in course of alleviation or remedy, and that there opens before our eyes a vista of almost illimitable progress for our race in happiness and virtue, the whole stupendous scheme is not unfrequently pronounced to be nothing better than a huge blunder. The anomaly is certainly striking, and it may be carried further by noting _who_ are those persons who find the world so bad a place. As it is a prosperous age which has developed Pessimism, so it is almost always prosperous people who are Pessimists. It is the rarest thing possible to hear any expression of such ideas from the lips of the suffering or the dying, or even from those who see their beloved ones suffer and die. A hundred visits to sordid lodgings or miserable hovels, to workhouses, jails, hospitals, asylums for the blind or the incurably diseased, will scarcely afford us the chance of catching a phrase indicating that the inmate of the dreary abode thinks the world awry, and Providence to blame for it. We must pass to pleasanter scenes,--to the haunts of the well-paid lecture-frequenting artisan,--or the houses of the most cultivated and wealthy of the middle and upper classes, palaces which calamity has never visited, and where luxurious food, clothing, furniture, books, flowers, pictures, music, are accepted as matters of course; and _there_ we may, not improbably, be told that “none but bigots who voluntarily close their eyes to the terrible realities of life can dream of calling the world a happy place, or speak of its design as beneficent.” Sometimes there occurs in the experience of a single day a contrast, almost ludicrous, between the patience and gratitude manifested by some poor suffering creature--perhaps dying of cancer on a pauper’s pallet--and the expression of revolt and despair used by a cultivated gentleman who is possessed of nearly every source of human enjoyment.