WHAT IS FRIENDSHIP? RIENDSHIP," says Cicero, "is the only point in human affairs concerning the benefit of which all, with one voice, agree." Jeremy Taylor echoes the thought of the classic philosopher, in the asseveration, "Friendship is that by which the world is most blessed and receives most good." Yet Bacon declares: "There is little friendship in the world." According to Shakespeare's misanthropic Timon of Athens, "friendship's full of dregs." And Napoleon, with his close knowledge of the human heart, asserts that "friendship is but a name." What is this Friendship which is so much to the world, and which is so rare in the world; concerning which all agree yet disagree? What does the very term itself include and imply? It is friendship as a personal sentiment, not friendship as a mutual relation, that must be considered in order to an understanding of the term as a term. The primary question is not, What is the nature of that state or condition into which two friends are brought by the fact of their being mutual friends? but it is, What is that sentiment which actuates any person, who is truly a friend, toward the person to whom he is a friend? What is the distinguishing characteristic of the feeling or sentiment of friendship, on the part of him who is a friend, apart from the question of any response to, or recognition of, that feeling or sentiment, by him toward whom it goes out? The more familiar a word, the greater its liability to vagueness of meaning in popular usage. And the deeper the underlying signification of a word, the rarer its recognition in any other than a superficial sense. The very fact that a word is the common possession of all, renders various conceptions of it inevitable in various minds; for no one idea, or its symbol, can be seen alike by all, and those who look only on the surface will gain no conception of a word's profounder sense. "Friendship" is a word that encounters these hindrances to its comprehending. It is too familiar to be well understood by all. It means too much to have its full sense easily perceived. Hence it means much or means little, in its varied use among men. Our English word "friend," in its Anglo-Saxon form, is freond," one who loves." Etymologically the words friend" and "lover" are synonymous, as are the words "love" and "friendship." But in common usage "love" and "friendship," as also "lover" and "friend,” have very different measures of meaning, and are supposed to rep I resent widely different grades of personal attachment. The question is, Wherein consists the true distinction between love that is friendship and love that is only love? 'Love," as we commonly employ that term when we speak of love as distinct from the love that is friendship, includes the idea of a reciprocal relation, existing or desired, between the one who loves and the one who is loved-the idea of possession, or of a possessory interest, secured or sought after. Thus, the love of parent and child, of brother and sister, of husband and wife, is supposed to proceed from and to rest on the intimate reciprocal relation existing between the two parties by the ties of nature or of conjugal compact; as, again, the love of "lovers" is recognized as growing out of, or as inevitably accompanied by, a desire for a reciprocal and possessory relation, "6 The end of love is to have two made one, Self-interest is, in fact, a large element in ordinary human love. "Friendship," on the other hand, does not of necessity include the idea of any mutual bond, or of any selfbenefiting relation, either attained or reached after, between the one who is a friend and the one to whom he is a friend. One's friendship is certainly not limited to one's relatives and family connections; nor yet, beyond these, to one who is desired in marriage. In fact, the very suggestion of the attachment of friendship is commonly supposed to differentiate the affection which it represents from that affection which grows out of, or |