The Continental Monthly, Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 | Page 8

the same atoms and elements which once
formed mastodons and trilobites are here--and with about as much
chance of reappearing as mastodons as humanity has of reproducing

those antique horrors. The fragments of witch-madness and star-faith
may be still raked in tolerably perfect lumps out of the mire or chaff of
mankind; but I do not think, young lady, that you will ever be accused
of riding on a broom, though you unquestionably had an ancestress,
somewhere before or after Hengist, who enjoyed the reputation of
understanding that unpopular mode of volatility. Pommade Dupuytren
and Eau de toilette have taken the place of the witch-ointments; and if
the spice-powder of the old alchemist Mutio di Frangipani has risen
from the recipes of the Middle Ages into modern fashion, rest assured
that it will never work wonder more, save in connection with bright
eyes, rustling fans, and Valenciennes-edged pocket-handkerchiefs.
To the student to whom all battles of the past are not like the dishes of
certain Southern hotels,--all served in the same gravy, possessing the
same agrarian, muttony flavor,--and to whom Zoroaster and Spurgeon
are not merely clergymen, differing only in dress and language, it must
appear plain enough that as there are now on earth races physically
differing from one another almost as much as from other mammalia,
just so in the course of ages have been developed in the same single
descent even greater mental and moral differences. In fact, when we
remember that the same lust, avarice, ambition and warfare have
mingled with our blood at all times, it becomes wonderful when we
reflect how marvelously the mind has been molded to such myriad
varieties. It has in full consciousness of its power sacrificed all earthly
happiness, toiled and died for rulers, for ideas of which it had no idea,
for vague war-cries--it has existed only for sensuality, or beauty, or
food--for religion or for ostentation, according to different climate or
age or soil--it has groveled for ages in misery or roamed free and
proud--and between the degraded slave and the proud free-man there is,
as I think, a very terrible difference indeed. But, quitting the vast
variety of mental developments, faiths, and feelings, let us cast a glance
on the general change which history has witnessed in man's physical
condition.
First let us premise with certain general laws, that intelligence, physical
well-being and freedom have a decided affinity, and are most copiously
unfolded in manufacturing countries. That as labor is developed and

elaborated, it becomes allied to science and art, and, in a word,
'respectable.' That as these advance it becomes constantly more evident
that he who strives to accomplish his labor in the most perfect manner
is continually becoming a man of science and an artist, and rising to a
well deserved intellectual equality with the 'higher classes.' That, in fine,
the tendency of industry--which in this age is only a synonym for the
action of capital--is towards Republicanism.
I have already remarked to the effect that so far as the welfare of man
in the future is concerned, it is to be regretted that hero-worship should
still influence men so largely. When Mr. Smith runs over his scanty
historical knowledge, things do not seem so bad on the whole with
anybody. Mark Antony and Coriolanus and Francis the First, the
plumed barons of the feudal days, and their embroidered and belaced
ladies, with the whole merrie companie of pages, fools, troubadours
and heralds, seem on the whole to have had fine times of it. 'Bloweth
seed and groweth mead'--assuredly the sun shone then as now, people
wassailed or wailed--oh, 'twas pretty much the same in all ages. But
when we come to the most unmistakable facts, all this sheen of gilded
armor and egret-plumes, of gemmed goblet and altar-lace, lute,
mandolin, and lay, is cloth of gold over the ghastly, shrunken limbs of a
leper. Pass over the glory of knight and dame and see how it was then
with the multitude--with the millions. Almost at the first glance, in fact,
your knight and dame turn out unwashed, scantily linened, living amid
scents and sounds which no modern private soldier would endure. The
venison pasty of high festival becomes the daily pork and mustard of
home life, with such an array of scrofula and cutaneous disorders as are
horrible to think on. The household books of expenditure of the noblest
families in England in the fourteenth century scarcely show as much
linen used annually among a hundred people as would serve now for
one mechanic. People of the highest rank slept naked to save
night-clothes. If in Flanders or in Italy we find during their high
prosperity some exceptions to this knightly and chivalric piggishness
and penury, it is none the less true that they outbalanced it