r since
has been a mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent
to-day.

England was the leader in this material progress, of which the
particulars are familiar and need not be enumerated here. The discovery
of the power of steam and the potentialities of coal revolutionised the
conditions of life. Men who were born at the beginning of the
century had seen, before they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid
development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by
gas, the opening of the first railway.

It was just before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate space as
it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY (1829).
There we see the effect of the new force on his imagination. "Steam," he
says, "will govern the world next,... and shake it too before its empire
is established." The biographer of Nelson devotes a whole conversation
to the subject of "steam and war." But the theme of the book is the
question of moral and social progress, on which the author inclines
to the view that "the world will continue to improve, even as it has
hitherto been continually improving; and that the progress of knowledge
and the diffusion of Christianity will bring about at last, when men
become Christian in reality as well as in name, something like that
Utopian state of which philosophers have loved to dream." This admission
of Progress, cautious though it was, circumscribed by reserves and
compromised by hesitations, coming from such a conservative pillar of
Church and State as Southey, is a notable sign of the times, when we
remember that the idea was still associated then with revolution and
heresy.

It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian
mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject.
Hamilton's PROGRESS OF SOCIETY is now utterly forgotten, but it must
have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of
Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held. "The belief of
the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden age
in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained by an
enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our nature and
enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason, and is the
most important subject, merely human, that can engage the mind of
man." [Footnote: P. 13. The book was