to-day has its crying abuses as well as
yesterday; yet it is hardly possible to survey the broad course of
our history during the past sixty years, and not to perceive, amid
all the cross-currents--false ambitions, false pretences,
mammon-worship, pitiless selfishness, sins of individuals, sins of
society, sins of the nation--an ever-widening and mastering stream of
beneficent energy, which has already wonderfully changed for the
better many of the conditions of existence, and which, since its flow
shows no signs of abating, we may hope to see spreading more widely,
and bearing down in its great flood the wrecks of many another
oppression and iniquity.

CHAPTER IX.

INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL PROGRESS.

[Illustration: Robert Southey.]

"Man doth not live by bread alone." The enormous material progress of
this country during the last sixty years--imperfectly indicated by
the fact that during the last forty years the taxable income of the
United Kingdom has been considerably more than doubled--would be but
a barren theme of rejoicing, if there were signs among us of
intellectual or spiritual degeneracy. The great periods of English
history have been always fruitful in great thinkers and great
writers, in religious and mental activity. Endeavouring to judge our
own period by this standard, and making a swift survey of its
achievements in literature, we do not find it apparently inferior to
the splendours of "great Elizabeth" or of the Augustan age of Anne.
Our fifth Queen-regnant, whose reign, longer than that of any of her
four predecessors, is also happier than that of the greatest among
them, can reckon among her subjects an even larger number of men
eminent in all departments of knowledge, though perhaps we cannot
boast one name quite equal to Newton in science, and though assuredly
neither this nor any modern nation has yet a second imaginative
writer whose throne may be set beside that of Shakespeare.

[Illustration: William Wordsworth.]

[Illustration: Alfred Tennyson. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_]

We excel in quantity, indeed; for while, owing to the spread of
education, the number of readers has been greatly increased, the
number of writers has risen proportionately; the activity of the
press has increased tenfold. Journalism has become a far more
formidable power in the land than in the earlier years when, as our
domestic annals plainly indicate, the _Times_ ruled as the Napoleon
of newspa