d be constantly looking backward with tender regret.
But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily
be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of
the state in which we actually are. That impatience, while it stimulates
us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their
happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful in us to be
constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving.
But, in truth, there is constant improvement precisely because there is
constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present,
we should cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the
future. And it is natural that, being dissatisfied with the present, we
should form a too favourable estimate of the past.

In truth we are under a deception similar to that which misleads the
traveller in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and
bare: but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of
refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward and find nothing but sand
where an hour before they had seen a lake. They turn their eyes and see
a lake where, an hour before, they were toiling through sand. A similar
illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress
from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and
civilisation. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall
find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It
is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times
when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would
be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers
breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a
modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege
reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the
purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of
our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than
they now die on the coast of Guiana. We too shall, in our turn, be
outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth
century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably
paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may
receive ten shillings a day; that labouring men may be as little used to
dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread