ertain 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 combinatio