Thoughts Suggested By Mr. Froudes Progress | Page 9

manufacture, for the
distribution of cheap literature and news, your cheap education, better
homes, and all the comforts and luxuries of your machine civilization,

is the average man, the agriculturist, the machinist, the laborer any
better for it all? Are there more purity, more honest, fair dealing,
genuine work, fear and honor of God? Are the proceeds of labor more
evenly distributed? These, it is said, are the criteria of progress; all else
is misleading.
Now, it is true that the ultimate end of any system of government or
civilization should be the improvement of the individual man. And yet
this truth, as Mr. Froude puts it, is only a half-truth, so that this single
test of any system may not do for a given time and a limited area. Other
and wider considerations come in. Disturbances, which for a while
unsettle society and do not bring good results to individuals, may,
nevertheless, be necessary, and may be a sign of progress. Take the
favorite illustration of Mr. Froude and Mr. Ruskin--the condition of the
agricultural laborer of England. If I understand them, the civilization of
the last century has not helped his position as a man. If I understand
them, he was a better man, in a better condition of earthly happiness,
and with a better chance of heaven, fifty years ago than now, before the
"era of progress" found him out. (It ought to be noticed here, that the
report of the Parliamentary Commission on the condition of the English
agricultural laborer does not sustain Mr. Froude's assumptions. On the
contrary, the report shows that his condition is in almost all respects
vastly better than it was fifty years ago.) Mr. Ruskin would remove the
steam-engine and all its devilish works from his vicinity; he would
abolish factories, speedy travel by rail, new- fangled instruments of
agriculture, our patent education, and remit him to his ancient
condition--tied for life to a bit of ground, which should supply all his
simple wants; his wife should weave the clothes for the family; his
children should learn nothing but the catechism and to speak the truth;
he should take his religion without question from the hearty,
fox-hunting parson, and live and die undisturbed by ideas. Now, it
seems to me that if Mr. Ruskin could realize in some isolated nation
this idea of a pastoral, simple existence, under a paternal government,
he would have in time an ignorant, stupid, brutal community in a great
deal worse case than the agricultural laborers of England are at present.
Three- fourths of the crime in the kingdom of Bavaria is committed in
the Ultramontane region of the Tyrol, where the conditions of popular
education are about those that Mr. Ruskin seems to regret as swept

away by the present movement in England--a stagnant state of things,
in which any wind of heaven would be a blessing, even if it were a
tornado. Education of the modern sort unsettles the peasant, renders
him unfit for labor, and gives us a half-educated idler in place of a
conscientious workman. The disuse of the apprentice system is not
made good by the present system of education, because no one learns a
trade well, and the consequence is poor work, and a sham civilization
generally. There is some truth in these complaints. But the way out is
not backward, but forward. The fault is not with education, though it
may be with the kind of education. The education must go forward; the
man must not be half but wholly educated. It is only half-knowledge
like half-training in a trade that is dangerous.
But what I wish to say is, that notwithstanding certain unfavorable
things in the condition of the English laborer and mechanic, his chance
is better in the main than it was fifty years ago. The world is a better
world for him. He has the opportunity to be more of a man. His world
is wider, and it is all open to him to go where he will. Mr. Ruskin may
not so easily find his ideal, contented peasant, but the man himself
begins to apprehend that this is a world of ideas as well as of food and
clothes, and I think, if he were consulted, he would have no desire to
return to the condition of his ancestors. In fact, the most hopeful
symptom in the condition of the English peasant is his discontent. For,
as skepticism is in one sense the handmaid of truth, discontent is the
mother of progress. The man is comparatively of little use in the world
who is contented.
There is another thought pertinent here. It is this: that no man, however
humble, can live a full life if he lives to himself alone. He is more of a
man, he