e 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 i