almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he
wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the
sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows
as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is
without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory;
his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases
the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether
machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by
refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in
establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For
every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the
Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in
the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now
than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between
the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can
all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the
nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than
Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago.
Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates,
Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no
class. He who is really of their class will not be called
by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the
founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period
are only its costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of
the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and
Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats as to
astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the
resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass,