hysical and moral deterioration.
'The sons of little men', says Ossian. '_Oioi nun brotoi eisin_,' says
Homer: 'such men as live in these degenerate days.' 'All things,' says
Virgil, 'have a retrocessive tendency, and grow worse and worse by the
inevitable doom of fate.'[10.2] 'We live in the ninth age,' says
Juvenal, 'an age worse than the age of iron; nature has no
metal sufficiently pernicious to give a denomination to its
wickedness.'[10.3] 'Our fathers,' says Horace, 'worse than our
grandfathers, have given birth to us, their more vicious progeny,
who, in our turn, shall become the parents of a still viler
generation.'[10.4] You all know the fable of the buried Pict, who bit
off the end of a pickaxe, with which sacrilegious hands were breaking
open his grave, and called out with a voice like subterranean thunder,
_I perceive the degeneracy of your race by the smallness of your
little finger!_ videlicet, the pickaxe. This, to be sure, is a
fiction; but it shows the prevalent opinion, the feeling, the
conviction, of absolute, universal, irremediable deterioration."

"I should be sorry," said Mr Foster, "that such an opinion should
become universal, independently of my conviction of its fallacy. Its
general admission would tend, in a great measure, to produce the very
evils it appears to lament. What could be its effect, but to check the
ardour of investigation, to extinguish the zeal of philanthropy, to
freeze the current of enterprising hope, to bury in the torpor of
scepticism and in the stagnation of despair, every better faculty of
the human mind, which will necessarily become retrograde in ceasing to
be progressive?"

"I am inclined to think, on the contrary," said Mr Escot, "that the
deterioration of man is accelerated by his blindness--in many respects
wilful blindness--to the truth of the fact itself, and to the causes
which produce it; that there is no hope whatever of ameliorating his
condition but in a total and radical change of the whole scheme of
human life, and that the advocates of his indefinite perfectibility
are in reality the greatest enemies to the practical possibility of
their own system, by so strenuously labouring to impress on his
attention that he is going on in a good way, while he is really in a
deplorably bad one."

"I admit," said Mr Foster, "there are many things that may, and
therefore will, be changed for the better."

"Not on the present system," said Mr Escot, "in which every