Yet so clearly and beautifully as social progress is defined for us in history--so indisputably distinct as are the outlines in which it rises before us, there are no lack of men to believe that humanity was never so agonized as at present, never so wicked. 'Our cities are more badly governed than were ever cities before,'--'look at the Lobby'--everything is bad. Ah, it moves slowly, no doubt, this progress--and yet it does move. Across rumors and lies and discouraging truths it ever moves,--moves with the worlds through seas of light, but, unlike the worlds, goes not back again to the point of starting. And why should it not be slow, this progress, when an Egypt could lie four thousand years in one type of civilization, when an India could believe itself millions of ages old? Slowly the locomotive gets under way. Long are the first intervals of its piston, long the wheezing sounds of its first breaths. But puff, puff, they come, and ever a little faster. Do we not 'make history rapidly in these days,' since England and France have entered on their modern career? What place has the nineteenth century in the long list of ages? Everywhere the action of capital, the ringing of the plane, now and then, as in those times, the sound of arms, but all tending to far other ends than the welfare of a reigning family, or to satisfy the revengeful whim of a royal mistress, or the bigotry of a monarch. Public opinion has its say now in all things. Even the rascality of which the conservative complains is individual rascality for private aims, tempered by public opinion, and no longer the sublimely organized rascality of all power and government. Do these things prove nothing? Do they not show that WORK--good, hard, steady, unflinching work--is enlarging man's destiny, and freeing itself step by step from the primeval curse?