ty. All men plume themselves on the improvement of
society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains
on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is
civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something
is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a
contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the
naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an
undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of
the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal
strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad
axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck
the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his
grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has
a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by
the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the
information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star
in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as
little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in
his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his
wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may
be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have
not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in
establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was
a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard
of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular
equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the
last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the
nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's
heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race
progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but
they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be cal