In short, there is an insoluble contradiction between progress, as our age understands the word,—between the “American” progress, as many Europeans call it,—and art. This contradiction has as yet attracted but little notice, in the still great confusion in which we live, in the initial tumult of this new civilisation which is invading the earth. It will be noticed, however, more and more strongly, as generation succeeds generation, and in many families the primary hunger for wealth is satiated and gives way to the desire to “translate quantity into quality”: as American love for the historical beauties of the Old World increases, and Europe takes further lessons in the multiplication of her wealth. There is no escape or salvation for our civilisation from the discontent and unrest which will arise from this contradiction. It is a torment which will grow with the growth of wealth and culture; which nations and classes will feel more acutely the richer and the more cultivated they become; from which perhaps, one day, America will suffer more severely than many European nations; which will oppress the upper classes much more heavily than the people. The latter, indeed, will not feel it at all, and will alone be able to live in modern civilisation, as contented as man ever can be in this world. History often has strange surprises in store. The civilisation of machinery tended at its birth to appear as a death-blow to the working classes, a godsend to the upper classes. For years and years, socialism, generalising from the initial rubs, predicted and pretended to prove that the great mechanical industry must enrich a small oligarchy inordinately, and reduce to the blackest wretchedness the great mass of the population; that a new feudalism of capitalists, fiercer than the barons of the Middle Ages, would seize all the good things of the world. A century passes, and we find this civilisation giving complete satisfaction only to the workmen, because it can content the workmen only from the double point of view of quantity and quality. It gives them an abundance which only a small fraction of the people enjoyed up to a century ago; and, at the same time, bestows on them a luxury which fully satisfies their yet simple and unsophisticated æsthetic sense. We may smile when we see in a workman’s home mirrors and clocks which are the rudest imitations of masterpieces of the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles, hideous reproductions from a German factory; and coarse carpets which are poor European copies of beautiful Turkish and Persian models, the result of the substitution of the iron teeth of a machine for the industrious fingers of the human hand, and of decadent aniline dyes for the brilliant and unfading vegetable colours. The workman, however, does not know the matchless models of which these objects are the ugly copies, and, inasmuch as every æsthetic verdict arises out of a comparison, these reproductions