ns and the
prospect of late lettuce and peas, we were gaining by the fire as much
as we were losing by the frost. And the Mistress fell to chanting the
comforts of modern civilization.

THE FIRE-TENDER said he should like to know, by the way, if our
civilization differed essentially from any other in anything but its
comforts.

HERBERT. We are no nearer religious unity.

THE PARSON. We have as much war as ever.

MANDEVILLE. There was never such a social turmoil.

THE YOUNG LADY. The artistic part of our nature does not appear to have
grown.

THE FIRE-TENDER. We are quarreling as to whether we are in fact
radically different from the brutes.

HERBERT. Scarcely two people think alike about the proper kind of human
government.

THE PARSON. Our poetry is made out of words, for the most part, and not
drawn from the living sources.

OUR NEXT DOOR. And Mr. Cumming is uncorking his seventh phial. I never
felt before what barbarians we are.

THE MISTRESS. Yet you won't deny that the life of the average man is
safer and every way more comfortable than it was even a century ago.

THE FIRE-TENDER. But what I want to know is, whether what we call
our civilization has done any thing more for mankind at large than to
increase the ease and pleasure of living? Science has multiplied wealth,
and facilitated intercourse, and the result is refinement of manners and
a diffusion of education and information. Are men and women essentially
changed, however? I suppose the Parson would say we have lost faith, for
one thing.

MANDEVILLE. And superstition; and gained toleration.

HERBERT. The question is, whether toleration is anything but
indifference.

THE PARSON. Everything is tolerated now but Christian orthodoxy.

THE FIRE-TENDER. It's easy enough to make a brilliant catalogue of
external achievements, but I take it that real progress ought to be in
man himself. It is not a question of what a man enjoys, but what he can
produce. The best sculpture was executed two thousand years ago.
The best paintings are several centuries old. We study the finest
architecture in its ruins. The standards of poetry are Shakespeare,
Homer, Isaiah, and David. The latest of the arts, music, culminated in
composition, though not in execution, a century ago.

THE MISTRESS. Yet culture in music certainly distinguishes the
civilization of this age. It has taken eighteen hundred years for
the principles of the Christian religion to begin to be p