Thoughts Suggested By Mr. Froudes Progress | Page 5

attitude and hears his roaring
cannot but have fears for the locomotive.
There are two sorts of infidelity concerning humanity, and I do not
know which is the more withering in its effects. One is that which
regards this world as only a waste and a desert, across the sands of
which we are merely fugitives, fleeing from the wrath to come. The
other is that doubt of any divine intention in development, in history,
which we call progress from age to age.
In the eyes of this latter infidelity history is not a procession or a
progression, but only a series of disconnected pictures, each little era
rounded with its own growth, fruitage, and decay, a series of incidents
or experiments, without even the string of a far-reaching purpose to

connect them. There is no intention of progress in it all. The race is
barbarous, and then it changes to civilized; in the one case the strong
rob the weak by brute force; in the other the crafty rob the unwary by
finesse. The latter is a more agreeable state of things; but it comes to
about the same. The robber used to knock us down and take away our
sheepskins; he now administers chloroform and relieves us of our
watches. It is a gentlemanly proceeding, and scientific, and we call it
civilization. Meantime human nature remains the same, and the whole
thing is a weary round that has no advance in it.
If this is true the succession of men and of races is no better than a
vegetable succession; and Mr. Froude is quite right in doubting if
education of the brain will do the English agricultural laborer any good;
and Mr. Ruskin ought to be aided in his crusade against machinery,
which turns the world upside down. The best that can be done with a
man is the best that can be done with a plant-set him out in some
favorable locality, or leave him where he happened to strike root, and
there let him grow and mature in measure and quiet--especially
quiet--as he may in God's sun and rain. If he happens to be a cabbage,
in Heaven's name don't try to make a rose of him, and do not disturb
the vegetable maturing of his head by grafting ideas upon his stock.
The most serious difficulty in the way of those who maintain that there
is an intention of progress in this world from century to century, from
age to age--a discernible growth, a universal development--is the fact
that all nations do not make progress at the same time or in the same
ratio; that nations reach a certain development, and then fall away and
even retrograde; that while one may be advancing into high civilization,
another is lapsing into deeper barbarism, and that nations appear to
have a limit of growth. If there were a law of progress, an intention of it
in all the world, ought not all peoples and tribes to advance pari passu,
or at least ought there not to be discernible a general movement,
historical and contemporary? There is no such general movement
which can be computed, the law of which can be discovered--therefore
it does not exist. In a kind of despair, we are apt to run over in our
minds empires and pre-eminent civilizations that have existed, and then
to doubt whether life in this world is intended to be anything more than
a series of experiments. There is the German nation of our day, the
most aggressive in various fields of intellectual activity, a Hercules of

scholarship, the most thoroughly trained and powerful--though its
civilization marches to the noise of the hateful and barbarous drum. In
what points is it better than the Greek nation of the age of its
superlative artists, philosophers, poets--the age of the most joyous,
elastic human souls in the most perfect human bodies?
Again, it is perhaps a fanciful notion that the Atlantis of Plato was the
northern part of the South American continent, projecting out towards
Africa, and that the Antilles are the peaks and headlands of its sunken
bulk. But there are evidences enough that the shores of the Gulf of
Mexico and the Caribbean Sea were within historic periods the seat of a
very considerable civilization--the seat of cities, of commerce, of trade,
of palaces and pleasure--gardens--faint images, perhaps, of the
luxurious civilization of Baia! and Pozzuoli and Capri in the most
profligate period of the Roman empire. It is not more difficult to
believe that there was a great material development here than to believe
it of the African shore of the Mediterranean. Not to multiply instances
that will occur to all, we see as many retrograde as advance movements,
and we see, also, that while one spot of