To the student to whom all battles of the past are not like the dishes of certain Southern hotels,—all served in the same gravy, possessing the same agrarian, muttony flavor,—and to whom Zoroaster and Spurgeon are not merely clergymen, differing only in dress and language, it must appear plain enough that as there are now on earth races physically differing from one another almost as much as from other mammalia, just so in the course of ages have been developed in the same single descent even greater mental and moral differences. In fact, when we remember that the same lust, avarice, ambition and warfare have mingled with our blood at all times, it becomes wonderful when we reflect how marvelously the mind has been molded to such myriad varieties. It has in full consciousness of its power sacrificed all earthly happiness, toiled and died for rulers, for ideas of which it had no idea, for vague war-cries—it has existed only for sensuality, or beauty, or food—for religion or for ostentation, according to different climate or age or soil—it has groveled for ages in misery or roamed free and proud—and between the degraded slave and the proud free-man there is, as I think, a very terrible difference indeed. But, quitting the vast variety of mental developments, faiths, and feelings, let us cast a glance on the general change which history has witnessed in man's physical condition.

First let us premise with certain general laws, that intelligence, physical well-being and freedom have a decided affinity, and are most copiously unfolded in manufacturing countries. That as labor is developed and elaborated, it becomes allied to science and art, and, in a word, 'respectable.' That as these advance it becomes constantly more evident that he who strives to accomplish his labor in the most perfect manner is continually becoming a man of science and an artist, and rising to a well deserved intellectual equality with the 'higher classes.' That, in fine, the tendency of industry—which in this age is only a synonym for the action of capital—is towards Republicanism.

I have already remarked to the effect that so far as the welfare of man in the future is concerned, it is to be regretted that hero-worship should still influence men so largely. When Mr. Smith runs over his scanty historical knowledge, things do not seem so bad on the whole with anybody. Mark Antony and Coriolanus and Francis the First, the plumed barons of the feudal days, and their embroidered and belaced ladies, with the whole merrie companie of pages, fools, troubadours and heralds, seem on the whole to have had fine times of it. 'Bloweth seed and groweth mead'—assuredly the sun shone then as now, people wassailed or wailed—oh, 'twas pretty much the same in all ages. But when we come to the most unmistakable facts, all this sheen of gilded armor and egret-plumes, of gemmed goblet and altar-lace, lute, mandolin, and lay, is cloth of gold over the ghastly, shrunken limbs of a leper. Pass over the glory of knight and dame and see how it was then with the multitude—with the millions. Almost at the first glance, in fact, your knight and dame turn out unwashed, scantily linened, living amid scents and sounds which no modern private soldier would endure. The venison pasty of high festival becomes the daily pork and mustard of home life, with such an array of scrofula and cutaneous disorders as are horrible to think on. The household books of expenditure of the noblest families in England in the fourteenth century scarcely show as much linen used annually among a hundred people as would serve now for one mechanic. People of the highest rank slept naked to save night-clothes. If in Flanders or in Italy we find during their high prosperity some exceptions to this knightly and chivalric piggishness and penury, it is none the less true that they outbalanced it by sundry and peculiar vices. And yet, bad as life then was, it is impossible for us to guess at, or realize, all its foulness. We know it mostly from poets, and the poet and historian, like the artist, have in every age lived quite out of the actual, and with all the tact of repulsion avoided common facts.

But it is with the multitude that truth and common sense and humanity have to deal. And here, whether in Greece or in England, in Italy or in France, lies in the past an abyss of horror whose greatest wonder is, that we, who are only some three centuries distant, know so little of it. There is a favorite compensative theory that man is miraculously self-adaptive to all circumstances, and that deprived of modern comforts and luxuries he would only become more vigorous and independent—that in fact he was on the whole considerably happier under a feudal baron than he has been since. I will believe in this when I find that a man who has exchanged a stinging gout for a mere rheumatism finds himself entirely free from pain. No, the serfs of the Middle Ages were in no sense happy. Stifled moans of misery, a sense of their unutterable agonies, steal up from proverb and by-corners of history—we feel that they were more miserable than jail prisoners at the present day—for then, as now, man groaned at being an inferior, and he had much more than that to groan over in those days of strifes and dirt. And yet every one of those serfs was God's child, as well as the baron who enslaved him. To himself he was a world with an eternity, and of as much importance as all other men. Through what strange heresies and insurrections, based either on innate passion or religious conviction, do we not find Republicanism bursting out in every age, from remote Etruscan rebellions down to Peasants' wars, Anabaptist uprisings, and Jack Cade out-flamings. It was always there, that sense of political equality and right—it always goaded and tormented man, in the silent darkness of ignorance as in the broad light of learning.

So long as European society consisted in a great measure of war tempered by agriculture, there could be but little progress towards a better state of things. But the germ of industry sprouted and grew, though slowly. Merchants bought social privileges for money; even law was grudgingly sold them, and they continued to buy. Against the old idealism, against bugbears and mythology, fairy tales and astrology, dreams, spells, charms, muttered exorcisms, commandments to obey master, ship and serfdom, de jure divino, clouds, mists, and lies infinite; slowly rose that stupendous power of truth and of Nature which had hitherto in humanity only visited the world in broken gleams. We may assume different eras for this dividing point between immutability and progress, between slavery and freedom. In religion, Christianity appears as first offering future happiness for the people and for all. The revival of letters and the Reformation were glorious storms, battering down thousands of old barriers. But in a temporal and worldly point of view the name of Bacon, perhaps, since a name is still necessary, best distinguishes between the old and the new. From him—or his age—dates that grappling with facts, that classifying of all knowledge so soon as obtained, that Wissenschaft or Science which never goes backward; in fine, that information which by its dissemination continually equalizes men and renders rank futile. With science, labor and the laboring man began at once to rise. Comfort and cleanliness and health for the many took the place of ancient deprivation and dirt—whether of body or of soul. Humanity began to improve—for, with all the legends of the bravery of the Middle Ages, it is apparent enough that their heroes or soldiers were not so strong or large as the men of the present day. And through all, amid struggles and strivings and subtle drawbacks and deceits, worked and won its way the great power of Republicanism or of Progress, destroying, one by one, illusions, and building up in their stead fair and enduring realities.

It is but a few decades since the greater portion of all intellectual or inventive effort was devoted to setting off rank, to exalting the exalted, and, by contrast, still further degrading the lowly. What were the glorious works of those mediæval artists in stone and canvas, in orfevery and silver, in marble and bronze, nielloed salvers, golden chasing, laces as from fairy-land, canopies, garments and gems? All beautiful patents of rank, marks to honor wealthy rank—nothing more, save that and the imperishable proof of genius, which is ever lovely, as a slave or free. But where goes the inventive talent now? Beaumarchais worked for a year to make a watch which only 'the king' could buy. Had he lived to-day he would have striven to invent some improvement which should be found in every man's watch. It 'pays better,' in a word, to invent for the poor many than for the rich few—and invention has found this out. Something which must be had in every cottage,—soap for the million, medicine for the masses, cheap churns, cheap clocks, always something of which one can sell many and much,—such are the objects which claim the labor of genius now. Fools grieve that Art is dead; 'lives at best only in imitation;' and that we have chanced on a godless, humdrum, steam and leather age—one of prose and dust, facts and factories. Sometimes come gasping efforts—sickly self-persuasions that all is not so bad as it seems. Mr. Slasher of the Sunday paper is quite certain that the Creek Indian Girl statue is far superior to anything antique, while Crasher, just back from Europe, shakes his head, and assures the younger hadjis—expectant that the old masters are old humbugs, and that it is generally understood to be so now in France—you can get better pictures at half price any day in the shops. It will not do. The art of small details, the art of pieces and bits, went out with the last architecture. It went over to the people, and from them a higher Art will yet bloom again in a beauty, a freshness, and grandeur never before dreamed of. It will live again in Nature. For it is towards Nature that progress tends—towards real beauty, and not towards the false 'ideal.'

Yet so clearly and beautifully as social progress is defined for us in history—so indisputably distinct as are the outlines in which it rises before us, there are no lack of men to believe that humanity was never so agonized as at present, never so wicked. 'Our cities are more badly governed than were ever cities before,'—'look at the Lobby'—everything is bad. Ah, it moves slowly, no doubt, this progress—and yet it does move. Across rumors and lies and discouraging truths it ever moves,—moves with the worlds through seas of light, but, unlike the worlds, goes not back again to the point of starting. And why should it not be slow, this progress, when an Egypt could lie four thousand years in one type of civilization, when an India could believe itself millions of ages old? Slowly the locomotive gets under way. Long are the first intervals of its piston, long the wheezing sounds of its first breaths. But puff, puff, they come, and ever a little faster. Do we not 'make history rapidly in these days,' since England and France have entered on their modern career? What place has the nineteenth century in the long list of ages?

Everywhere the action of capital, the ringing of the plane, now and then, as in those times, the sound of arms, but all tending to far other ends than the welfare of a reigning family, or to satisfy the revengeful whim of a royal mistress, or the bigotry of a monarch. Public opinion has its say now in all things. Even the rascality of which the conservative complains is individual rascality for private aims, tempered by public opinion, and no longer the sublimely organized rascality of all power and government. Do these things prove nothing? Do they not show that Work—good, hard, steady, unflinching work—is enlarging man's destiny, and freeing itself step by step from the primeval curse?

It is only during the present century and within the memory of man that in France and Russia the welfare of the people has become the steady object of diplomacy, and this because any other object would now be ruinous. But it is chiefly in America that the most wonderful advance has been made, and it is here, and at the present moment, that the most tremendous struggle has arisen between the adherents of the old faith and the new. In the South, the old feudal baron under a new name, in the North the man of labor and of science, fight again the battle of might and right—the one strong in ignorance, the other stronger in knowledge. Who can doubt what the end thereof shall be? Amid storms and darkness, through death and hell-carnivals, the great truth has ever held its way onwards, slowly, for its heritage is eternal Time, but oh! how surely. And yet there be those who doubt the end and the issue! Doubt—oh, never doubt! For this faith all martyrs have died, in this battle all men have, knowingly or unknowingly, lived—they who fought against it fought for it—for of a verity there was never yet on earth one active deed done which tended not towards the great advance, and to bring on the great jubilee of Freedom.