s not back again to the point of starting. And why should it
not be slow, this progress, when an Egypt could lie four thousand years
in one type of civilization, when an India could believe itself millions
of ages old? Slowly the locomotive gets under way. Long are the first
intervals of its piston, long the wheezing sounds of its first breaths.
But puff, puff, they come, and ever a little faster. Do we not 'make
history rapidly in these days,' since England and France have entered on
their modern career? What place has the nineteenth century in the long
list of ages?

Everywhere the action of capital, the ringing of the plane, now and
then, as in those times, the sound of arms, but all tending to far other
ends than the welfare of a reigning family, or to satisfy the revengeful
whim of a royal mistress, or the bigotry of a monarch. Public opinion
has its say now in all things. Even the rascality of which the
conservative complains is individual rascality for private aims,
tempered by public opinion, and no longer the sublimely organized
rascality of all power and government. Do these things prove nothing? Do
they not show that WORK--good, hard, steady, unflinching
work--is enlarging man's destiny, and freeing itself step by step from
the primeval curse?

It is only during the present century and within the memory of man that
in France and Russia the welfare of the people has become the steady
object of diplomacy, and this because any other object would now be
ruinous. But it is chiefly in America that the most wonderful advance
has been made, and it is here, and at the present moment, that the most
tremendous struggle has arisen between the adherents of the old faith
and the new. In the South, the old feudal baron under a new name, in the
North the man of labor and of science, fight again the battle of might
and right--the one strong in ignorance, the other stronger in knowledge.
Who can doubt what the end thereof shall be? Amid storms and darkness,
through death and hell-carnivals, the great truth has ever held its way
onwards, slowly, for its heritage is eternal Time, but oh! how surely.
And yet there be those who doubt the end and the issue! Doubt--oh, never
doubt! For this faith all martyrs have died, in this battle all men
have, knowingly or unknowingly, lived--they who fought against it fought
for it--for of a verity there was never yet on earth one active deed
done which tended not towards the great advance, an