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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Mr. Froude's Progress by Warner
+#25 in our series by Charles Dudley Warner
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+Title: Mr. Froude's Progress
+
+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: March, 2002  [Etext #3121]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 01/16/01]
+[Last modified date = 11/26/01]
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+Edition: 11
+
+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Mr. Froude's Progress, by Warner
+*****This file should be named cwfpg11.txt or cwfpg11.zip******
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+
+THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. FROUDE'S "PROGRESS"
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+To revisit this earth, some ages after their departure from it, is a
+common wish among men.  We frequently hear men say that they would give
+so many months or years of their lives in exchange for a less number on
+the globe one or two or three centuries from now.  Merely to see the
+world from some remote sphere, like the distant spectator of a play which
+passes in dumb show, would not suffice.  They would like to be of the
+world again, and enter into its feelings, passions, hopes; to feel the
+sweep of its current, and so to comprehend what it has become.
+
+I suppose that we all who are thoroughly interested in this world have
+this desire.  There are some select souls who sit apart in calm
+endurance, waiting to be translated out of a world they are almost tired
+of patronizing, to whom the whole thing seems, doubtless, like a cheap
+performance.  They sit on the fence of criticism, and cannot for the life
+of them see what the vulgar crowd make such a toil and sweat about.  The
+prizes are the same dreary, old, fading bay wreaths.  As for the soldiers
+marching past, their uniforms are torn, their hats are shocking, their
+shoes are dusty, they do not appear (to a man sitting on the fence) to
+march with any kind of spirit, their flags are old and tattered, the
+drums they beat are barbarous; and, besides, it is not probable that they
+are going anywhere; they will merely come round again, the same people,
+like the marching chorus in the "Beggar's Opera."  Such critics, of
+course, would not care to see the vulgar show over again; it is enough
+for them to put on record their protest against it in the weekly
+"Judgment Days" which they edit, and by-and-by withdraw out of their
+private boxes, with pity for a world in the creation of which they were
+not consulted.
+
+The desire to revisit this earth is, I think, based upon a belief, well-
+nigh universal, that the world is to make some progress, and that it will
+be more interesting in the future than it is now.  I believe that the
+human mind, whenever it is developed enough to comprehend its own action,
+rests, and has always rested, in this expectation.  I do not know any
+period of time in which the civilized mind has not had expectation of
+something better for the race in the future.  This expectation is
+sometimes stronger than it is at others; and, again, there are always
+those who say that the Golden Age is behind them.  It is always behind or
+before us; the poor present alone has no friends; the present, in the
+minds of many, is only the car that is carrying us away from an age of
+virtue and of happiness, or that is perhaps bearing us on to a time of
+ease and comfort and security.
+
+Perhaps it is worth while, in view of certain recent discussions, and
+especially of some free criticisms of this country, to consider whether
+there is any intention of progress in this world, and whether that
+intention is discoverable in the age in which we live.
+
+If it is an old question, it is not a settled one; the practical
+disbelief in any such progress is widely entertained.  Not long ago Mr.
+James Anthony Froude published an essay on Progress, in which he examined
+some of the evidences upon which we rely to prove that we live in an "era
+of progress."  It is a melancholy essay, for its tone is that of profound
+skepticism as to certain influences and means of progress upon which we
+in this country most rely.  With the illustrative arguments of Mr.
+Froude's essay I do not purpose specially to meddle; I recall it to the
+attention of the reader as a representative type of skepticism regarding
+progress which is somewhat common among intellectual men, and is not
+confined to England.  It is not exactly an acceptance of Rousseau's
+notion that civilization is a mistake, and that it would be better for us
+all to return to a state of nature--though in John Ruskin's case it
+nearly amounts to this; but it is a hostility in its last analysis to
+what we understand by the education of the people, and to the government
+of the people by themselves.  If Mr. Froude's essay is anything but an
+exhibition of the scholarly weapons of criticism, it is the expression of
+a profound disbelief in the intellectual education of the masses of the
+people.  Mr. Ruskin goes further.  He makes his open proclamation against
+any emancipation from hand-toil.  Steam is the devil himself let loose
+from the pit, and all labor-saving machinery is his own invention.
+Mr. Ruskin is the bull that stands upon the track and threatens with
+annihilation the on-coming locomotive; and I think that any spectator who
+sees his menacing 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 the earth at one time seems to
+be the chosen theatre of progress, other portions of the globe are
+absolutely dead and without the least leaven of advancing life, and we
+cannot understand how this can be if there is any such thing as an all-
+pervading and animating intention or law of progress.  And then we are
+reminded that the individual human mind long ago attained its height of
+power and capacity.  It is enough to recall the names of Moses, Buddha,
+Confucius, Socrates, Paul, Homer, David.
+
+No doubt it has seemed to other periods and other nations, as it now does
+to the present civilized races, that they were the chosen times and
+peoples of an extraordinary and limitless development.  It must have
+seemed so to the Jews who overran Palestine and set their shining cities
+on all the hills of heathendom.  It must have seemed so to the Babylonish
+conquerors who swept over Palestine in turn, on their way to greater
+conquests in Egypt.  It must have seemed so to Greece when the Acropolis
+was to the outlying world what the imperial calla is to the marsh in
+which it lifts its superb flower.  It must have seemed so to Rome when
+its solid roads of stone ran to all parts of a tributary world--the
+highways of the legions, her ministers, and of the wealth that poured
+into her treasury.  It must have seemed so to followers of Mahomet, when
+the crescent knew no pause in its march up the Arabian peninsula to the
+Bosporus, to India, along the Mediterranean shores to Spain, where in the
+eighth century it flowered into a culture, a learning, a refinement in
+art and manners, to which the Christian world of that day was a stranger.
+It must have seemed so in the awakening of the sixteenth century, when
+Europe, Spain leading, began that great movement of discovery and
+aggrandizement which has, in the end, been profitable only to a portion
+of the adventurers.  And what shall we say of a nation as old, if not
+older than any of these we have mentioned, slowly building up meantime a
+civilization and perfecting a system of government and a social economy
+which should outlast them all, and remain to our day almost the sole
+monument of permanence and stability in a shifting world?
+
+How many times has the face of Europe been changed--and parts of Africa,
+and Asia Minor too, for that matter--by conquests and crusades, and the
+rise and fall of civilizations as well as dynasties?  while China has
+endured, almost undisturbed, under a system of law, administration,
+morality, as old as the Pyramids probably--existed a coherent nation,
+highly developed in certain essentials, meeting and mastering, so far as
+we can see, the great problem of an over-populated territory, living in a
+good degree of peace and social order, of respect for age and law, and
+making a continuous history, the mere record of which is printed in a
+thousand bulky volumes.  Yet we speak of the Chinese empire as an
+instance of arrested growth, for which there is no salvation, except it
+shall catch the spirit of progress abroad in the world.  What is this
+progress, and where does it come from?
+
+Think for a moment of this significant situation.  For thousands of
+years, empires, systems of society, systems of civilization--Egyptian,
+Jewish, Greek, Roman, Moslem, Feudal--have flourished and fallen, grown
+to a certain height and passed away; great organized fabrics have gone
+down, and, if there has been any progress, it has been as often defeated
+as renewed.  And here is an empire, apart from this scene of alternate
+success and disaster, which has existed in a certain continuity and
+stability, and yet, now that it is uncovered and stands face to face with
+the rest of the world, it finds that it has little to teach us, and
+almost everything to learn from us.  The old empire sends its students to
+learn of us, the newest child of civilization; and through us they learn
+all the great past, its literature, law, science, out of which we sprang.
+It appears, then, that progress has, after all, been with the shifting
+world, that has been all this time going to pieces, rather than with the
+world that has been permanent and unshaken.
+
+When we speak of progress we may mean two things.  We may mean a lifting
+of the races as a whole by reason of more power over the material world,
+by reason of what we call the conquest of nature and a practical use of
+its forces; or we may mean a higher development of the individual man,
+so that he shall be better and happier.  If from age to age it is
+discoverable that the earth is better adapted to man as a dwelling-place,
+and he is on the whole fitted to get more out of it for his own growth,
+is not that progress, and is it not evidence of an intention of progress?
+
+Now, it is sometimes said that Providence, in the economy of this world,
+cares nothing for the individual, but works out its ideas and purposes
+through the races, and in certain periods, slowly bringing in, by great
+agencies and by processes destructive to individuals and to millions of
+helpless human beings, truths and principles; so laying stepping-stones
+onward to a great consummation.  I do not care to dwell upon this
+thought, but let us see if we can find any evidence in history of the
+presence in this world of an intention of progress.
+
+It is common to say that, if the world makes progress at all, it is by
+its great men, and when anything important for the race is to be done,
+a great man is raised up to do it.  Yet another way to look at it is,
+that the doing of something at the appointed time makes the man who does
+it great, or at least celebrated.  The man often appears to be only a
+favored instrument of communication.  As we glance back we recognize the
+truth that, at this and that period, the time had come for certain
+discoveries.  Intelligence seemed pressing in from the invisible.  Many
+minds were on the alert to apprehend it.  We believe, for instance, that
+if Gutenberg had not invented movable types, somebody else would have
+given them to the world about that time.  Ideas, at certain times, throng
+for admission into the world; and we are all familiar with the fact that
+the same important idea (never before revealed in all the ages) occurs to
+separate and widely distinct minds at about the same time.  The invention
+of the electric telegraph seemed to burst upon the world simultaneously
+from many quarters--not perfect, perhaps, but the time for the idea had
+come--and happy was it for the man who entertained it.  We have agreed to
+call Columbus the discoverer of America, but I suppose there is no doubt
+that America had been visited by European, and probably Asiatic, people
+ages before Columbus; that four or five centuries before him people from
+northern Europe had settlements here; he was fortunate, however, in
+"discovering" it in the fullness of time, when the world, in its
+progress, was ready for it.  If the Greeks had had gunpowder, electro-
+magnetism, the printing press, history would need to be rewritten.
+Why the inquisitive Greek mind did not find out these things is a mystery
+upon any other theory than the one we are considering.
+
+And it is as mysterious that China, having gunpowder and the art of
+printing, is not today like Germany.
+
+There seems to me to be a progress, or an intention of progress, in the
+world, independent of individual men.  Things get on by all sorts of
+instruments, and sometimes by very poor ones.  There are times when new
+thoughts or applications of known principles seem to throng from the
+invisible for expression through human media, and there is hardly ever an
+important invention set free in the world that men do not appear to be
+ready cordially to receive it.  Often we should be justified in saying
+that there was a widespread expectation of it.  Almost all the great
+inventions and the ingenious application of principles have many
+claimants for the honor of priority.
+
+On any other theory than this, that there is present in the world an
+intention of progress which outlasts individuals, and even races,
+I cannot account for the fact that, while civilizations decay and pass
+away, and human systems go to pieces, ideas remain and accumulate.
+We, the latest age, are the inheritors of all the foregoing ages.
+I do not believe that anything of importance has been lost to the world.
+The Jewish civilization was torn up root and branch, but whatever was
+valuable in the Jewish polity is ours now.  We may say the same of the
+civilizations of Athens and of Rome; though the entire organization of
+the ancient world, to use Mr. Froude's figure, collapsed into a heap of
+incoherent sand, the ideas remained, and Greek art and Roman law are part
+of the world's solid possessions.
+
+Even those who question the value to the individual of what we call
+progress, admit, I suppose, the increase of knowledge in the world from
+age to age, and not only its increase, but its diffusion.  The
+intelligent schoolboy today knows more than the ancient sages knew--more
+about the visible heavens, more of the secrets of the earth, more of the
+human body.  The rudiments of his education, the common experiences of
+his everyday life, were, at the best, the guesses and speculations of a
+remote age.  There is certainly an accumulation of facts, ideas,
+knowledge.  Whether this makes men better, wiser, happier, is indeed
+disputed.
+
+In order to maintain the notion of a general and intended progress, it is
+not necessary to show that no preceding age has excelled ours in some
+special, development.  Phidias has had no rival in sculpture, we may
+admit.  It is possible that glass was once made as flexible as leather,
+and that copper could be hardened like steel.  But I do not take much
+stock in the "lost arts," the wondering theme of the lyceums.  The
+knowledge of the natural world, and of materials, was never, I believe,
+so extensive and exact as it is today.  It is possible that there are
+tricks of chemistry, ingenious processes, secrets of color, of which we
+are ignorant; but I do not believe there was ever an ancient alchemist
+who could not be taught something in a modern laboratory.  The vast
+engineering works of the ancient Egyptians, the remains of their temples
+and pyramids, excite our wonder; but I have no doubt that President
+Grant, if he becomes the tyrant they say he is becoming, and commands the
+labor of forty millions of slaves--a large proportion of them office--
+holders--could build a Karnak, or erect a string of pyramids across New
+Jersey.
+
+Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of subjects upon which the believer
+in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world
+calls this progress--he calls it only change.  I suppose he means by this
+two things: that these great movements of our modern life are not any
+evidence of a permanent advance, and that our whole structure may tumble
+into a heap of incoherent sand, as systems of society have done before;
+and, again, that it is questionable if, in what we call a stride in
+civilization, the individual citizen is becoming any purer or more just,
+or if his intelligence is directed towards learning and doing what is
+right, or only to the means of more extended pleasures.
+
+It is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon the first of these points--the
+permanence of our advance, if it is an advance.  But we may be encouraged
+by one thing that distinguishes this period--say from the middle of the
+eighteenth century--from any that has preceded it.  I mean the
+introduction of machinery, applied to the multiplication of man's power
+in a hundred directions--to manufacturing, to locomotion, to the
+diffusion of thought and of knowledge.  I need not dwell upon this
+familiar topic.  Since this period began there has been, so far as I
+know, no retrograde movement anywhere, but, besides the material, an
+intellectual and spiritual kindling the world over, for which history has
+no sort of parallel.  Truth is always the same, and will make its way,
+but this subject might be illustrated by a study of the relation of
+Christianity and of the brotherhood of men to machinery.  The theme would
+demand an essay by itself.  I leave it with the one remark, that this
+great change now being wrought in the world by the multiplicity of
+machinery is not more a material than it is an intellectual one, and that
+we have no instance in history of a catastrophe widespread enough and
+adequate to sweep away its results.  That is to say, none of the
+catastrophes, not even the corruptions, which brought to ruin the ancient
+civilizations, would work anything like the same disaster in an age which
+has the use of machinery that this age has.
+
+For instance: Gibbon selects the period between the accession of Trajan
+and the death of Marcus Aurelius as the time in which the human race
+enjoyed more general happiness than they had ever known before, or had
+since known.  Yet, says Mr. Froude, in the midst of this prosperity the
+heart of the empire was dying out of it; luxury and selfishness were
+eating away the principle that held society together, and the ancient
+world was on the point of collapsing into a heap of incoherent sand.
+Now, it is impossible to conceive that the catastrophe which did happen
+to that civilization could have happened if the world had then possessed
+the steam-engine, the printing-press, and the electric telegraph.  The
+Roman power might have gone down, and the face of the world been recast;
+but such universal chaos and such a relapse for the individual people
+would seem impossible.
+
+If we turn from these general considerations to the evidences that this
+is an "era of progress" in the condition of individual men, we are met by
+more specific denials.  Granted, it is said, all your facilities for
+travel and communication, for cheap and easy 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 lives in a higher plane of thought and of enjoyment,
+the more his communications are extended with his fellows and the wider
+his sympathies are.  I count it a great thing for the English peasant,
+a solid addition to his life, that he is every day being put into more
+intimate relations with every other man on the globe.
+
+I know it is said that these are only vague and sentimental notions of
+progress--notions of a "salvation by machinery."  Let us pass to
+something that may be less vague, even if it be more sentimental.  For a
+hundred years we have reckoned it progress, that the people were taking
+part in government.  We have had a good deal of faith in the proposition
+put forth at Philadelphia a century ago, that men are, in effect, equal
+in political rights.  Out of this simple proposition springs logically
+the extension of suffrage, and a universal education, in order that this
+important function of a government by the people may be exercised
+intelligently.
+
+Now we are told by the most accomplished English essayists that this is a
+mistake, that it is change, but no progress.  Indeed, there are
+philosophers in America who think so.  At least I infer so from the fact
+that Mr. Froude fathers one of his definitions of our condition upon an
+American.  When a block of printer's type is by accident broken up and
+disintegrated, it falls into what is called "pi."  The "pi," a mere
+chaos, is afterwards sorted and distributed, preparatory to being built
+up into fresh combinations.  "A distinguished American friend," says Mr.
+Froude, "describes Democracy as making pi."  It is so witty a sarcasm
+that I almost think Mr. Froude manufactured it himself.  Well, we have
+been making this "pi" for a hundred years; it seems to be a national dish
+in considerable favor with the rest of the world--even such ancient
+nations as China and Japan want a piece of it.
+
+Now, of course, no form of human government is perfect, or anything like
+it, but I should be willing to submit the question to an English traveler
+even, whether, on the whole, the people of the United States do not have
+as fair a chance in life and feel as little the oppression of government
+as any other in the world; whether anywhere the burdens are more lifted
+off men's shoulders.
+
+This infidelity to popular government and unbelief in any good results to
+come from it are not, unfortunately, confined to the English essayists.
+I am not sure but the notion is growing in what is called the
+intellectual class, that it is a mistake to intrust the government to the
+ignorant many, and that it can only be lodged safely in the hands of the
+wise few.  We hear the corruptions of the times attributed to universal
+suffrage.  Yet these corruptions certainly are not peculiar to the United
+States: It is also said here, as it is in England, that our diffused and
+somewhat superficial education is merely unfitting the mass of men, who
+must be laborers, for any useful occupation.
+
+This argument, reduced to plain terms, is simply this: that the mass of
+mankind are unfit to decide properly their own political and social
+condition; and that for the mass of mankind any but a very limited mental
+development is to be deprecated.  It would be enough to say of this, that
+class government and popular ignorance have been tried for so many ages,
+and always with disaster and failure in the end, that I should think
+philanthropical historians would be tired of recommending them.  But
+there is more to be said.
+
+I feel that as a resident on earth, part owner of it for a time,
+unavoidably a member of society, I have a right to a voice in determining
+what my condition and what my chance in life shall be.  I may be
+ignorant, I should be a very poor ruler of other people, but I am better
+capable of deciding some things that touch me nearly than another is.
+By what logic can I say that I should have a part in the conduct of this
+world and that my neighbor should not?  Who is to decide what degree of
+intelligence shall fit a man for a share in the government?  How are we
+to select the few capable men that are to rule all the rest?  As a matter
+of fact, men have been rulers who had neither the average intelligence
+nor virtue of the people they governed.  And, as a matter of historical
+experience, a class in power has always sought its own benefit rather
+than that of the whole people.  Lunacy, extraordinary stupidity, and
+crime aside, a man is the best guardian of his own liberty and rights.
+
+The English critics, who say we have taken the government from the
+capable few and given it to the people, speak of universal suffrage as a
+quack panacea of this "era of progress."  But it is not the manufactured
+panacea of any theorist or philosopher whatever.  It is the natural
+result of a diffused knowledge of human rights and of increasing
+intelligence.  It is nothing against it that Napoleon III. used a mockery
+of it to govern France.  It is not a device of the closet, but a method
+of government, which has naturally suggested itself to men as they have
+grown into a feeling of self-reliance and a consciousness that they have
+some right in the decision of their own destiny in the world.  It is true
+that suffrage peculiarly fits a people virtuous and intelligent.  But
+there has not yet been invented any government in which a people would
+thrive who were ignorant and vicious.
+
+Our foreign critics seem to regard our "American system," by the way, as
+a sort of invention or patent right, upon which we are experimenting;
+forgetting that it is as legitimate a growth out of our circumstances as
+the English system is out of its antecedents.  Our system is not the
+product of theorists or closet philosophers; but it was ordained in
+substance and inevitable from the day the first "town meeting" assembled
+in New England, and it was not in the power of Hamilton or any one else
+to make it otherwise.
+
+So you must have education, now you have the ballot, say the critics of
+this era of progress; and this is another of your cheap inventions.
+Not that we undervalue book knowledge.  Oh, no!  but it really seems to
+us that a good trade, with the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments
+back of it, would be the best thing for most of you.  You must work for a
+living anyway; and why, now, should you unsettle your minds?
+
+This is such an astounding view of human life and destiny that I do not
+know what to say to it.  Did it occur to Mr. Froude to ask the man
+whether he would be contented with a good trade and the Ten Commandments?
+Perhaps the man would like eleven commandments?  And, if he gets hold of
+the eleventh, he may want to know something more about his fellow-men,
+a little geography maybe, and some of Mr. Froude's history, and thus he
+may be led off into literature, and the Lord knows where.
+
+The inference is that education--book fashion--will unfit the man for
+useful work.  Mr. Froude here again stops at a half-truth.  As a general
+thing, intelligence is useful in any position a man occupies.  But it is
+true that there is a superficial and misdirected sort of education,
+so called, which makes the man who receives it despise labor; and it is
+also true that in the present educational revival there has been a
+neglect of training in the direction of skilled labor, and we all suffer
+more or less from cheap and dishonest work.  But the way out of this,
+again, is forward, and not backward.  It is a good sign, and not a stigma
+upon this era of progress, that people desire education.  But this
+education must be of the whole man; he must be taught to work as well as
+to read, and he is, indeed, poorly educated if he is not fitted to do his
+work in the world.  We certainly shall not have better workmen by having
+ignorant workmen.  I need not say that the real education is that which
+will best fit a man for performing well his duties in life.  If Mr.
+Froude, instead of his plaint over the scarcity of good mechanics, and of
+the Ten Commandments in England, had recommended the establishment of
+industrial schools, he would have spoken more to the purpose.
+
+I should say that the fashionable skepticism of today, here and in
+England, is in regard to universal suffrage and the capacity of the
+people to govern themselves.  The whole system is the sharp invention of
+Thomas Jefferson and others, by which crafty demagogues can rule.
+Instead of being, as we have patriotically supposed, a real progress in
+human development, it is only a fetich, which is becoming rapidly a
+failure.  Now, there is a great deal of truth in the assertion that,
+whatever the form of government, the ablest men, or the strongest, or the
+most cunning in the nation, will rule.  And yet it is true that in a
+popular government, like this, the humblest citizen, if he is wronged or
+oppressed, has in his hands a readier instrument of redress than he has
+ever had in any form of government.  And it must not be forgotten that
+the ballot in the hands of all is perhaps the only safeguard against the
+tyranny of wealth in the hands of the few.  It is true that bad men can
+band together and be destructive; but so they can in any government.
+Revolution by ballot is much safer than revolution by violence; and,
+granting that human nature is selfish, when the whole people are the
+government selfishness is on the side of the government.  Can you mention
+any class in this country whose interest it is to overturn the
+government?  And, then, as to the wisdom of the popular decisions by the
+ballot in this country.  Look carefully at all the Presidential elections
+from Washington's down, and say, in the light of history, if the popular
+decision has not, every time, been the best for the country.  It may not
+have seemed so to some of us at the time, but I think it is true, and a
+very significant fact.
+
+Of course, in this affirmation of belief that one hundred years of
+popular government in this country is a real progress for humanity, and
+not merely a change from the rule of the fit to the rule of the cunning,
+we cannot forget that men are pretty much everywhere the same, and that
+we have abundant reason for national humility.  We are pretty well aware
+that ours is not an ideal state of society, and should be so, even if the
+English who pass by did not revile us, wagging their heads.  We might
+differ with them about the causes of our disorders.  Doubtless, extended
+suffrage has produced certain results.  It seems, strangely enough, to
+have escaped the observation of our English friends that to suffrage was
+due the late horse disease.  No one can discover any other cause for it.
+But there is a cause for the various phenomena of this period of shoddy,
+of inflated speculation, of disturbance of all values, social, moral,
+political, and material, quite sufficient in the light of history to
+account for them.  It is not suffrage; it is an irredeemable paper
+currency.  It has borne its usual fruit with us, and neither foreign nor
+home critics can shift the responsibility of it upon our system of
+government.  Yes, it is true, we have contrived to fill the world with
+our scandals of late.  I might refer to a loose commercial and political
+morality; to betrayals of popular trust in politics; to corruptions in
+legislatures and in corporations; to an abuse of power in the public
+press, which has hardly yet got itself adjusted to its sudden accession
+of enormous influence.  We complain of its injustice to individuals
+sometimes.  We might imagine that something like this would occur.
+
+A newspaper one day says: "We are exceedingly pained to hear that the
+Hon. Mr. Blank, who is running for Congress in the First District, has
+permitted his aged grandmother to go to the town poorhouse.  What renders
+this conduct inexplicable is the fact that Mr. Blank is a man of large
+fortune."
+
+The next day the newspaper says: "The Hon. Mr. Blank has not seen fit to
+deny the damaging accusation in regard to the treatment of his
+grandmother."
+
+The next day the newspaper says: "Mr. Blank is still silent.  He is
+probably aware that he cannot afford to rest under this grave charge."
+
+The next day the newspaper asks: "Where's Blank?  Has he fled?"
+
+At last, goaded by these remarks, and most unfortunately for himself,
+Mr. Blank writes to the newspaper and most indignantly denies the charge;
+he never sent his grandmother to the poorhouse.
+
+Thereupon the newspaper says: "Of course a rich man who would put his own
+grandmother in the poorhouse would deny it.  Our informant was a
+gentleman of character.  Mr. Blank rests the matter on his unsupported
+word.  It is a question of veracity."
+
+Or, perhaps, Mr. Blank, more unfortunately for himself, begins by making
+an affidavit, wherein he swears that he never sent his grandmother to the
+poorhouse, and that, in point of fact, he has not any grandmother
+whatever.
+
+The newspaper then, in language that is now classical, "goes for" Mr.
+Blank.  It says: "Mr. Blank resorts to the common device of the rogue--
+the affidavit.  If he had been conscious of rectitude, would he not have
+relied upon his simple denial?"
+
+Now, if an extreme case like this could occur, it would be bad enough.
+But, in our free society, the remedy would be at hand.  The constituents
+of Mr. Blank would elect him in triumph.  The newspaper would lose public
+confidence and support and learn to use its position more justly.  What I
+mean to indicate by such an extreme instance as this is, that in our very
+license of individual freedom there is finally a correcting power.
+
+We might pursue this general subject of progress by a comparison of the
+society of this country now with that of fifty years ago.  I have no
+doubt that in every essential this is better than that, in manners, in
+morality, in charity and toleration, in education and religion.  I know
+the standard of morality is higher.  I know the churches are purer.
+Not fifty years ago, in a New England town, a distinguished doctor of
+divinity, the pastor of a leading church, was part owner in a distillery.
+He was a great light in his denomination, but he was an extravagant
+liver, and, being unable to pay his debts, he was arrested and put into
+jail, with the liberty of the "limits."  In order not to interrupt his
+ministerial work, the jail limits were made to include his house and his
+church, so that he could still go in and out before his people.  I do not
+think that could occur anywhere in the United States today.
+
+I will close these fragmentary suggestions by saying that I, for one,
+should like to see this country a century from now.  Those who live then
+will doubtless say of this period that it was crude, and rather
+disorderly, and fermenting with a great many new projects; but I have
+great faith that they will also say that the present extending notion,
+that the best government is for the people, by the people, was in the
+line of sound progress.  I should expect to find faith in humanity
+greater and not less than it is now, and I should not expect to find that
+Mr. Froude's mournful expectation had been realized, and that the belief
+in a life beyond the grave had been withdrawn.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Thoughts on Mr. Froude's Progress
+by Charles Dudley Warner
+