The sins of the age are still much the same sins that the Laureate roughly arraigned when the Crimean war broke our long peace; denouncing the race for riches which turned men into "pickpockets, each hand lusting for all that is not its own;" denouncing the cruel selfishness of rich and poor as the vilest kind of civil war, being "underhand, not openly bearing the sword." We had made the blessings of peace a curse, he told us, in those days, "when only the ledger lived, and when only not all men lied; when the poor were hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like swine; when chalk and alum and plaster were sold to the poor for bread, and the spirit of murder worked in the very means of life." Yet those very days saw the uprising of a whole generation of noble servants of humanity, resolute to tight and overcome the rampant evils that surrounded them. And though we would avoid the error of praising our own epoch as though it alone were humane, as though we only, "the latest seed of Time, have loved the people well," and shown our love by deeds; though we would not deny that 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.]