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 ideas upon his stock.

The most serious difficulty in the way of those who maintain that there
is an intention of progress in this world from century to century, from
age to age--a discernible growth, a universal development--is the fact
that all nations do not make progress at the same time or in the same
ratio; that nations reach a certain development, and then fall away and
even retrograde; that while one may be advancing into high civilization,
another is lapsing into deeper barbarism, and that nations appear to have
a limit of growth. If there were a law of progress, an intention of it in
all the world, ought not all peoples and tribes to advance pari passu, or
at least ought there not to be discernible a general movement, historical
and contemporary? There is no such general movement which can be
computed, the law of which can be discovered--therefore it does not
exist. In a kind of despair, we are apt to run over in our minds empires
and pre-eminent civilizations that have existed, and then to doubt
whether life in this world is intended to be anything more than a series
of experimen