joy.... There are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most
perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of
life. Those who understand life's meaning, and know how to live and die
thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds,
thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and pains,
live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the
vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life,
the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live,
too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned
and of the rich, disgusted me--more than that, it lost all semblance of
meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences,
our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I understood that
these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them
no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that
multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared
to me in its true light. I understood that there veritably is life, that
the meaning which life there receives is the truth; and I accepted
it."[Q]

[Q] My Confession, X. (condensed).

In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental
virtue of mankind.

"What a wonderful thing," he writes,[R] "is this Man! How surprising are
his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably
condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,--who should have blamed him,
had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?
... [Yet] it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe
him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with
what erroneous morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and
vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened
trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple,
innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to
drown, for others;... in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his
virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps
in vain by the bright gin-palace,... often repaying the world's scorn
with se