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.
Education of the modern sort unsettles the peasant, renders him unfit for labor, and gives us a half-educated idler in place of a conscientious workman.
Education must go forward; the man must not be half but wholly educated. It is only half-knowledge like half-training in a trade that is dangerous.
Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of subjects upon which the believer in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world calls this progress—he calls it only change.
There are some select souls who sit apart in calm endurance, waiting to be translated out of a world they are almost tired of patronizing, to whom the whole thing seems, doubtless, like a cheap performance. They sit on the fence of criticism, and cannot for the life of them see what the vulgar crowd make such a toil and sweat about.
ENGLAND
Both parties, however, like parties elsewhere, propose and oppose measures and movements, and accept or reject policies, simply to get office or keep office.
In the judgment of many good observers, a dissolution of the empire, so far as the Western colonies are concerned, is inevitable, unless Great Britain, adopting the plan urged by Franklin, becomes an imperial federation, with parliaments distinct and independent, the crown the only bond of union—the crown, and not the English parliament, being the titular and actual sovereign. Sovereign power over America in the parliament Franklin never would admit.
It is safe, we think, to say that if the British Empire is to be dissolved, disintegration cannot be permitted to begin at home. Ireland has always been a thorn in the side of England. And the policy towards it could not have been much worse, either to impress it with a respect for authority or to win it by conciliation; it has been a strange mixture of untimely concession and untimely cruelty. The problem, in fact, has physical and race elements that make it almost insolvable. A water-logged country, of which nothing can surely be predicted but the uncertainty of its harvests, inhabited by a people of most peculiar mental constitution, alien in race, temperament, and religion, having scarcely one point of sympathy with the English.
NOVEL AND SCHOOL
Note the seeming anomaly of a scientific age peculiarly credulous; the ease with which any charlatan finds followers; the common readiness to fall in with any theory of progress which appeals to the sympathies, and to accept the wildest notions of social reorganization. We should be obliged to note also, among scientific men themselves, a disposition to come to conclusions on inadequate evidence—a disposition usually due to one-sided education which lacks metaphysical training and the philosophic habit.
Often children have only one book even of this sort, at which they are kept until they learn it through by heart, and they have been heard to "read" it with the book bottom side up or shut! All these books cultivate inattention and intellectual vacancy. They are—the best of them—only reading exercises; and reading is not perceived to have any sort of value. The child is not taught to think, and not a step is taken in informing him of his relation to the world about him. His education is not begun.
The lower-grade books are commonly inane (I will not say childish, for that is a libel on the open minds of children) beyond description.
The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the silk-weavers of Lyons, they are made for the central establishment on individual looms at home.
An honest acceptance of the law of gravitation would banish many popular delusions; a comprehension that something cannot be made out of nothing would dispose of others; and the application of the ordinary principles of evidence, such as men require to establish a title to property, would end most of the remaining.
When the trash does not sell, the trash will not be produced, and those who are only capable of supplying the present demand will perhaps find a more useful occupation. It will be again evident that literature is not a trade, but an art requiring peculiar powers and patient training. When people know how to read, authors will need to know how to write.
FOR WHOM SHAKESPEARE WROTE
Any parish which let a thief escape was fined
Beer making
Capable of weeping like children, and of dying like men
Complaint then, as now, that in many trades men scamped their work
Courageous gentlemen wore in their ears rings of gold and stones
Credulity and superstition of the age
Devil's liquor, I mean starch
Down a peg
Dramas which they considered as crude as they were coarse
Eve will be Eve, though Adam would say nay
Italy generally a curious custom of using a little fork for meat
Landlord let no one depart dissatisfied with his bill
Mistake ribaldry and loquacity for wit and wisdom
Pillows were thought meet only for sick women
Portuguese receipts
Prepare bills of fare (a trick lately taken up)
Sir Francis Bacon
So much cost upon the body, so little upon souls
Stagecoach
Teeth black—a defect the English seem subject to
ON HORSEBACK
Anxious to reach it, we were glad to leave it
Establishment had the air of taking care of itself
Fond of lawsuits seems a characteristic of an isolated people
It is not much use to try to run a jail without liquor
Man's success in court depended upon the length of his purse
Married? No, she hoped not
Monument of procrastination
Not much inclination to change his clothes or his cabin
One has to dodge this sort of question
Ornamentation is apt to precede comfort in our civilization
What a price to pay for mere life!