Froudes History of England | Page 6

leave behind them a
fresh race which knows them not, and could win no honour by owning
them, and which owes them no more than if it had been produced, as
midden-flies were said to be of old, by some spontaneous generation?
It is not probable that this writer will be likely to undervalue political
economy, or the steam-engine, or any other solid and practical good
which God has unveiled to this generation. All that he does demand
(for he has a right to demand it) is that rational men should believe that
our forefathers were at least as good as we are; that whatsoever their

measure of light was, they acted up to what they knew as faithfully as
we do; and that, on the whole, it was not their fault if they did not know
more. Even now the real discoveries of the age are made, as of old, by a
very few men; and, when made, have to struggle, as of old, against all
manner of superstitions, lazinesses, scepticisms. Is the history of the
Minie rifle one so very complimentary to our age's quickness of
perception that we can afford to throw many stones at the prejudices of
our ancestors? The truth is that, as of old, 'many men talk of Robin
Hood who never shot in his bow'; and many talk of Bacon who never
discovered a law by induction since they were born. As far as our
experience goes, those who are loudest in their jubilations over the
wonderful progress of the age are those who have never helped that
progress forward one inch, but find it a great deal easier and more
profitable to use the results which humbler men have painfully worked
out as second-hand capital for hustings-speeches and railway books,
and flatter a mechanics' institute of self-satisfied youths by telling them
that the least instructed of them is wiser than Erigena or Roger Bacon.
Let them be. They have their reward. And so also has the patient and
humble man of science, who, the more he knows, confesses the more
how little he knows, and looks back with affectionate reverence on the
great men of old time--on Archimedes and Ptolemy, Aristotle and Pliny,
and many another honourable man who, walking in great darkness,
sought a ray of light, and did not seek in vain,--as integral parts of that
golden chain of which he is but one link more; as scientific forefathers,
without whose aid his science could not have had a being.
Meanwhile, this general tone of irreverence for our forefathers is no
hopeful sign. It is unwise to 'inquire why the former times were better
than these'; to hang lazily and weakly over some eclectic dream of a
past golden age; for to do so is to deny that God is working in this age,
as well as in past ages; that His light is as near us now as it was to the
worthies of old time.
But it is more than unwise to boast and rejoice that the former times
were worse than these; and to teach young people to say in their hearts,
'What clever fellows we are, compared with our stupid old fogies of
fathers!' More than unwise; for possibly it may be false in fact. To look
at the political and moral state of Europe at this moment, Christendom
can hardly afford to look down on any preceding century, and seems to

be in want of something which neither science nor constitutional
government seems able to supply. Whether our forefathers also lacked
that something we will not inquire just now; but if they did, their want
of scientific and political knowledge was evidently not the cause of the
defect; or why is not Spain now infinitely better, instead of being
infinitely worse off, than she was three hundred years ago?
At home, too--But on the question whether we are so very much better
off than our forefathers Mr. Froude, not we, must speak: for he has
deliberately, in his new history, set himself to the solution of this
question, and we will not anticipate what he has to say; what we would
rather insist on now are the moral effects produced on our young
people by books which teach them to look with contempt on all
generations but their own, and with suspicion on all public characters
save a few contemporaries of their own especial party.
There is an ancient Hebrew book, which contains a singular story
concerning a grandson who was cursed because his father laughed at
the frailty of the grandfather. Whether the reader shall regard that story
(as we do) as a literal fact recorded by inspired wisdom, as an instance
of one of the great root-laws of family life, and therefore of that
national