progress which is somewhat common among intellectual men, and is not
confined to England. It is not exactly an acceptance of Rousseau's notion
that civilization is a mistake, and that it would be better for us all to
return to a state of nature--though in John Ruskin's case it nearly
amounts to this; but it is a hostility in its last analysis to what we
understand by the education of the people, and to the government of the
people by themselves. If Mr. Froude's essay is anything but an exhibition
of the scholarly weapons of criticism, it is the expression of a profound
disbelief in the intellectual education of the masses of the people. Mr.
Ruskin goes further. He makes his open proclamation against any
emancipation from hand-toil. Steam is the devil himself let loose from
the pit, and all labor-saving machinery is his own invention. Mr. Ruskin
is the bull that stands upon the track and threatens with annihilation
the on-coming locomotive; and I think that any spectator who sees his
menacing attitude and hears his roaring cannot but have fears for the
locomotive.

There are two sorts of infidelity concerning humanity, and I do not know
which is the more withering in its effects. One is that which regards
this world as only a waste and a desert, across the sands of which we are
merely fugitives, fleeing from the wrath to come. The other is that doubt
of any divine intention in development, in history, which we call
progress from age to age.

In the eyes of this latter infidelity history is not a procession or a
progression, but only a series of disconnected pictures, each little era
rounded with its own growth, fruitage, and decay, a series of incidents
or experiments, without even the string of a far-reaching purpose to
connect them. There is no intention of progress in it all. The race is
barbarous, and then it changes to civilized; in the one case the strong