worthies at all in England before the steam-engine and political
economy were discovered? Do their conceptions of past society and
the past generations retain anything of that great thought which is
common to all the Aryan races--that is, to all races who have left
aught behind them better than mere mounds of earth--to Hindoo and
Persian, Greek and Roman, Teuton and Scandinavian, that men are the
sons of the heroes, who were the sons of God? Or do they believe
that for civilised people of the nineteenth century it is as well to
say as little as possible about ancestors who possessed our vices
without our amenities, our ignorance without our science; who were
bred, no matter how, like flies by summer heat, out of that
everlasting midden which men call the world, to buzz and sting their
foolish day, and leave behind them a fresh race which knows them not,
and could win no honour by owning them, and which owes them no more
than if it had been produced, as midden-flies were said to be of old,
by some spontaneous generation?

It is not probable that this writer will be likely to undervalue
political economy, or the steam-engine, or any other solid and
practical good which God has unveiled to this generation. All that
he does demand (for he has a right to demand it) is that rational men
should believe that our forefathers were at least as good as we are;
that whatsoever their measure of light was, they acted up to what
they knew as faithfully as we do; and that, on the whole, it was not
their fault if they did not know more. Even now the real discoveries
of the age are made, as of old, by a very few men; and, when made,
have to struggle, as of old, against all manner of superstitions,
lazinesses, scepticisms. Is the history of the Minie rifle one so
very complimentary to our age's quickness of perception that we can
afford to throw many stones at the prejudices of our ancestors? The