THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD.1

1886.

As at noon every day the captain of a ship tries to learn his whereabouts of the sun, that he may know how much nearer he is to his destined port, and how far he may have been pushed away from his course by the last gale or drifted from it by unsuspected currents, so on board this ship of ours, The Earth, in which that abstract entity we call The World is a passenger, we strive to ascertain, from time to time, with such rude instruments as we possess, what progress we have made and in what direction. It is rather by a kind of deadreckoning than by taking the height of the Sun of Righteousness, which should be our seamark, that we accomplish this, for such celestial computations are gone somewhat out of fashion. It is only a few scholars and moralists in their silent and solitary observatories that any longer make account of them. We mostly put faith in our statisticians, and the longer they make their columns of figures, the bigger their sums of population, of exports and imports, and of the general output of fairy-gold,

1 This paper was written for an introduction to a work entitled The World's Progress (published by Messrs. Gately & O'Gorman, Boston), in which the advance in various departments of intellectual and material activity was described and illustrated.

the more stupidly are we content. Nor are we over-nice in considering the direction of our progress, if only we be satisfied that to-day we are no longer where we were yesterday. Yet the course of this moral thing we call the World is controlled by laws as certain and immutable and by influences as subtle as those which govern with such exquisite precision that of the physical thing we call The Earth, could we only find them out. It has ever

been the business of wise men to trace and to illustrate them, of prudent men to allow for and to seek an alliance with them, of good men to conform their lives with them.

Between those observations taken on shipboard and ours there is also this other difference, that those refer always to a fixed, external standard, while for these the standard is internal and fluctuating, so that the point toward which The World is making progress shall seem very different according to the temperament, the fortunes, nay, even the very mood or age of the observer. It may be remarked that Mr. Gladstone and Lord Tennyson are very far from being at one in their judgment of it. Old men in general love not change, and are suspicious of it; while young men are impatient of present conditions and of the slowness of movement to escape from them. Yet change is the very condition of our being and thriving, deliberation and choice that of all secure foothold on the shaky stepping-stones by which we cross the torrent of Circumstances. Is it in the power of any man, whatever his age, to arrive at that equilibrium of

temper and judgment without which no even probable estimate of where we are and whither we are tending is possible? Certainly no such trustworthy estimate can be deduced from our inward consciousness or from our outward environments; nor can we, with all our statistics, make ourselves independent of the inextinguishable lamps of heaven. We pile our figures one upon another, even as the builders of Babel their bricks, and the heaven we hope to attain is as far away as ever. It is moral forces that, more than all others, govern the direction and regulate the advance of our affairs, and these forces are as calculable as the Trade Winds or the Gulf Stream.

And yet, though this be so, one of the greatest lessons taught by History is the close relation between the moral and the physical well-being of man. The case of the Ascetics makes but a seeming exception to this law, for they voluntarily denied themselves that bodily comfort which is the chief object of human endeavor, and renunciation is the wholesomest regimen of the soul. If we cannot strike a precise balance and say that the World is better because it is richer now than it was three centuries, or even half a century, ago, we may at least comfort ourselves with the belief that this, if not demonstrably true, is more than probable, and that there is less curable unhappiness, less physical suffering, and, therefore less crime, than heretofore. Yet there is no gain without corresponding loss. If the sum of happiness be greater, yet the amount falling to each of us in

the division of it seems to be less. It is noteworthy that literature, as it becomes more modern, becomes also more melancholy, and that he who keeps most constantly to the minor key of hopelessness, or strikes the deepest note of despair, is surest of at least momentary acclaim. Nay, do not some sources of happiness flow less full or cease to flow as settlement and sanitation advance, even as the feeders of our streams are dried by the massacre of our forests? We cannot have a new boulevard in Florence unless at sacrifice of those ancient citywalls in which inspiring memories had for so many ages built their nests and reared their broods of song. Did not the plague, brooded and hatched in those smotherers of fresh air, the slits that thoroughfared the older town, give us the Decameron? And was the price too high? We cannot widen and ventilate the streets of Rome without grievous wrong to the city that we loved, and yet it is well to remember that this city too had built itself out of and upon the ruins of that nobler Rome which gave it all the wizard hold it had on our imagination. The Social Science Congress rejoices in changes that bring tears to the eyes of the painter and the poet. Alas! we cannot have a world made expressly for Mr. Ruskin, nor keep it if we could, more's the pity! Are we to confess, then, that the World grows less lovable as it grows more convenient and comfortable? that beauty flees before the step of the Social Reformer as the wild pensioners of Nature before the pioneers? that the lion will lie down with the lamb sooner than picturesqueness

with health and prosperity? Morally, no doubt, we are bound to consider the Greatest Good of the Greatest Number, but there is something in us, vagula, blandula, that refuses, and rightly refuses, to be Benthamized; that asks itself in a timid whisper, "Is it so certain, then, that the Greatest Good is also the Highest? and has it been to the Greatest or to the Smallest Number that man has been most indebted?" For myself, while I admit, because I cannot help it, certain great and manifest improvements in the general well-being, I cannot stifle a suspicion that the Modern Spirit, to whose tune we are marching so cheerily, may have borrowed of the Pied Piper of Hamelin the instrument whence he draws such bewitching music. Having made this confession, I shall do my best to write in a becoming spirit the Introduction that is asked of me, and to make my antiquated portico as little unharmonious as I can with the modern building to which it leads.

But, before we enter upon a consideration of the Progress of the World, we must take a glance at that of the Globe on whose surface what we call the World came into being, rests, and has grown to what we see. This Globe is not, as we are informed, a perfect sphere, but slightly flattened at the poles; and in like manner this World is by no means a perfect world, though it be not quite so easy, as in the other case, to say where or why it is

For it there is no moon-mirror in which to study its own profile. Perhaps it would be wise to ask ourselves now and then whether the fault