The only progress which we can care for is the progress which we ourselves bring about, or can believe that we bring about, in ourselves or our fellows or in the world immediately around us. So long as what is so named is something devised and executed by a power not our own--not the same as our own--it may call out from us gratitude and reverence, but the spectacle of the reality of such Progress cannot exercise the attractive force nor, so far as it is realized, beget that creative joy which accompanies even humble acts in which we set an ideal of our own before ourselves, and see it through our efforts emerge into actual existence. A practical ideal must be through and through of our own making. It must be devised by us and set to ourselves for our pursuit, and its coming to be, or be real, must be our doing. The very idea of it must be our own, not given or prescribed, still less imposed, and the process towards it must be our doing too. That there should, on their view of it, ever be protest and rebellion against its tyrannous demands appears to me reasonable and right, and those who make it to be guarding the immediate jewel of man's nature. We should, we might say, if this were the whole truth about the universe, acknowledge ourselves as its sons bound to gratitude and obedience because of the fatherly care for us, but it would be an essential complement to our family loyalty that we should insist upon and make good our claims to be grown-up sons and fellow citizens, declining to pronounce it wholly good, if those claims were denied to us. Now all these conditions seem to make straight against the possibility of regarding Progress, in the view of it we have hitherto taken, as an ideal of our action.