nterai-je," says Littre, "d'appeler l'attention sur la
guerre, dont l'opinion publique ne tolere plus les antiques barbaries;
sur la magistrature, qui repudie avec horreur les tortures et la
question; sur la tolerance, qui a banni les persecutions religieuses;
sur l'equite, qui soumet tout le monde aux charges communes; sur le
sentiment de solidarite qui du sort des classes pauvres fait le plus
pressant et le plus noble probleme du temps present. Pour moi, je ne
sais caracteriser ce spectacle si hautement moral qu'en disant que
l'humanite, amelioree, accepte de plus en plus le devoir et la tache
d'etendre le domaine de la justice et de la bonte."

Yet this partial and comparative satisfaction that we find in the
present, and our larger hopes for the future, are quite compatible with
gratitude to all who in the past have rendered such improvement possible
for us, and the higher improvement that we hope for possible to those
who will come after us. I cannot think that the present age may be
accused with justice of exceptional ignorance or scorn of its
predecessors. We have been told that we scorn our forefathers because
old buildings are removed to suit modern conveniences, because the
walls of old York have been pierced for the railway, and a tower of
Conway Castle has been undermined that the Holyhead mail may pass. But
the truth is, that whilst we care a little for our predecessors, they
cared still less for theirs. The mediaeval builders not only used as
quarries any Roman remains that happened to come in their way, but they
spoiled the work of their own fathers and grandfathers by intruding
their new fashions on buildings originally designed in a different style
of art. When an architect in the present day has to restore some
venerable church, he endeavors to do so in harmony with the design of
the first builder; but such humility as this was utterly foreign to the
mediaeval mind, which often destroyed the most lovely and necessary
details to replace them with erections in the fashion of the day, but
artistically unsuitable. The same disdain for the labors of other ages
has prevailed until within the memory of living men, and our age is
really the first that has made any attempt to conform itself, in these
things, to the intentions of the dead. I may also observe, that although
history is less relied upon as a guide to the future than it was
formerly, it is more carefully and thoroughly investigated from an
intellect