ocesses, secrets of color, of which we
are ignorant; but I do not believe there was ever an ancient alchemist
who could not be taught something in a modern laboratory. The vast
engineering works of the ancient Egyptians, the remains of their temples
and pyramids, excite our wonder; but I have no doubt that President
Grant, if he becomes the tyrant they say he is becoming, and commands the
labor of forty millions of slaves--a large proportion of them office
--holders--could build a Karnak, or erect a string of pyramids across New
Jersey.

Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of subjects upon which the believer
in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world
calls this progress--he calls it only change. I suppose he means by this
two things: that these great movements of our modern life are not any
evidence of a permanent advance, and that our whole structure may tumble
into a heap of incoherent sand, as systems of society have done before;
and, again, that it is questionable if, in what we call a stride in
civilization, the individual citizen is becoming any purer or more just,
or if his intelligence is directed towards learning and doing what is
right, or only to the means of more extended pleasures.

It is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon the first of these points--the
permanence of our advance, if it is an advance. But we may be encouraged
by one thing that distinguishes this period--say from the middle of the
eighteenth century--from any that has preceded it. I mean the
introduction of machinery, applied to the multiplication of man's power
in a hundred directions--to manufacturing, to locomotion, to the
diffusion of thought and of knowledge. I need not dwell upon this
familiar topic. Since this period began there has been, so far as I know,
no retrograde movement anywhere, but, besides the material, an
intellectual and spiritual kindling the world over, for which history has
no sort of parallel. Truth is always the same, and will make its way, but
this subject might be illustrated by a study of the relation of
Christianity and of the brotherhood of men to machinery. The theme would
demand an essay by itself. I leave it with the one remark, that this
great change now being wrought in the world by the multiplicity of
machinery is not more a material than it is an intellectual one, and that
we have no instance in history of a catastrophe widespread enough and
adequate to sweep away its results.