as fast as their domestic servants become in- | dependent. Both parties will gain by this change; and the new generation will grow up to improved dwellings as their natural state of existence, far in advance of that of their fathers and mothers. Precisely as the Brougham carriage, with one horse and one man, has replaced the cumbrous old vehicle, with its two men and two horses, and made the rider more independent, so will the improved dwelling, with its diminished personal wants, take the place of the old inconvenient house.

But where are we to find sites for these improved dwellings and gardens for working men? will be asked by a host of objectors. Where do you find sites for your workhouses? will be our reply. Are they not all going out of town, under the new system? If you want garden land, go to the borders of the new working men's parks in Manchester, or of the new Victoria-park, Go to the railways, east, west, north, and south, and find sites along their borders. On this question we have yet much to say.

We have now run through the four minor questions relating to Physical Man and his progress-Food, Fuel, Clothing, and Lodging; clearly indicating the steps by which we think it probable that he will eradicate physical evil in conformity with the laws of nature, who has provided a constant succession of new circumstances in accordance with the growth of his knowledge and power, from the form of the ferocious wild animal up to the likeness of an angel. And herein a great work will have been achieved, though we shall be met at this point by numerous objectors, who hold so strongly to the progress of man's mind, that they forget his body is a basis-a temple, wherein his mind must dwell. Following up these objectors to the extreme, we should arrive at asceticism; we should pull down our baths and wash-houses, for they are but a portion of the labor bestowed upon our bodies. Fairly meeting these objectors, we should subject them to a test. We would say to each one -What is your own personal limit of comfort and convenience; what kind of house do you inhabit; what food do you eat; what kind of clothing do you wear; what do you possess of refinement or embellishment in works of art? Cease, then, your objections to physical ease and comfort, till every human being is at least as well provided as yourself with the things that God has given

od ends. If you deny this, you will

lie open to the reproach of seeking to keep others poor in order to appropriate to yourself. If you preach poverty, at least practice your preaching. We ourselves believe poverty to be an evil;-wealth, as the name imports, in its high sense of weal, to be a good. From poverty-in other words, from ignorance-spring countless evils; from wealth, rightly applied, innumerable goods.

One of our most earnest modern writers, the author of "Modern Painters," has written in his work some sentences capable of misapprehension on this point. We approach him with a reverential feeling, for his power and love of truth, and we would fain hope that we have misunderstood him. But we cannot let it pass unnoticed, for others may read it wrongly also, if we have so done; and it were pity that such a mind should fail to take hold of the mass, or be held as an ascetic teacher of bygone times,-a stern taskmaster of the present seeking to renew the temple-building of the past ages with the sweat of modern brows; leaving the laborer in his unwholesome hovel, while the priest inhabits a palace; teaching him to worship God in temples made with hands, while he himself has but a wretched hut to cover him. As in Egypt, the pyramid for the priest, the cavern for the worshiper. We stop to extract:—

"And yet people speak, in this working age, and land, and food, and raiment, were alone usewhen they speak from their hearts, as if houses, ful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration, were all profitless; so that men insolently call themselves utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and

the raiment than the body; who look to the earth

as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers

and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew, and the water they draw, are tains like the shadow of God, and than the great better than the pine-forests that cover the mounrivers that move like his eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that though God 'hath made everything beautiful in his time, also he hath set the world in their hearts, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."

"This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to

grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles for existence in their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the

suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the deliverance, the faith; but now, when they have learned to live under providence of laws, and with decency and justice of regard for each other, and when they have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem arising out of the rest,-evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also-a fear greater than of sword and sedition--that dependence on God may be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water sure; that gratitude to Him may cease, because his constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world, that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and love in dissimulation; that enervation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words, and foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colors its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which, so long as they are torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken, maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent, and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust. And though I believe we have salt enough of ardent and holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with anxiety, in all matter however trivial, in all directions however distant. And at this time, when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea; when their great sagene is drawing and twitching the ancient frame and strength of England together, contracting all its various life, its rocky arms, and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of manufacture; when there is not a monument throughout the cities of Europe, that speaks of old years and mighty people, but is being swept away to build cafés and gaming-houses; when the honor of God is thought to consist in the poverty of his temple and the column is shortened, and the pinnacle shattered, the color denied to the casement, and the marble to the altar-while exchequers are exhausted in luxury of boudoirs, and pride of reception-rooms; when we ravage without a pause all the loveliness of a creation which God in giving pronounced good, and destroy without a thought all those labors which men have given their lives, and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and have left for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their hearts' blood, for it is of their souls' travail; there is need, bitter need, to bring back, if we may, into men's minds, that to live is nothing, unless to live be to

know Him by whom we live, and that he is not to be known by marring his fair works, and blotting out the evidence of his influences upon his creatures, not amidst the hurry of crowds and crash of innovations, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences which he gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for glory and for beauty, he did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death generation after generation, that we, foul and sensual as we are, might give the carved, work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the hammer; he has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases; he brings not up his quails by the east wind, only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men; he has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven.

"All science, and all art, may be divided into that which is subservient to life, and which is the object of it. As subservient to life, or practical, their results are, in the common sense of the word, useful. As the object of life or theoretic, they are, in the common sense, useless; and yet the step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the chemist; and the step between practical and theoretic art, is that between the bricklayer and the architect, between the plumber and the artist; and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to greater, so that the socalled useless part of each profession, does by the authoritative and right instinct of mankind, assume the superior and more noble place, even though books be sometimes written, and that by writers of no ordinary mind, which assume that a chemist is rewarded for the years of toil which have traced the greater part of the combinations of matter to their ultimate atoms, by discovering a cheap way of refining sugar, and date the eminence of the philosopher, whose life has been spent in the investigation of the laws of light, from the time of his inventing an improvement in spectacles.

"But the common consent of men proves and accepts the proposition, that whatever part of any pursuit ministers to the bodily comforts, and admits of material uses, is ignoble, and whatsoever part is addressed to the mind only is noble; and that geology does better in re-clothing dry bones, and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven, than in teaching navigation; botany better in displaying structure than in expressing juices; surgery better in investigating organization, than in setting limbs ; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in the more exalted range of science adds something also to its practical applicabilities; that all the great phenomena of nature, the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us partly, as it reveals to farther vision the being and the glory of Him in whom

they rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind | influences and so much of material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desired by them with such single desires as the imperfection of their nature may admit; that the strong torrents which, in their own gladness, fill the hills with hollow thunder, and the vales with winding light, have yet their bounden charge of field to feed and barge to bear; that the fierce flames to which the Alp owes its upheaval and the volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and quickening spring, and that for our incitement-I say not our reward-for knowledge is its own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and stars their times."

This is speech as from the lips of a prophet, -grandly expressed and purposeful in its meaning. Yet, of a surety, has Ruskin lived in the halls of the high and powerful only to have gathered up this meaning at this age of the world. Of kindred feeling was Coleridge, thinking of the proud ones of the earth, when he penned the lines

"Oh, lady! nursed in pomp and pleasure, Where learned you that heroic measure?"

It is not so, John Ruskin; the workers of this world, this our English world, are not mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. The contracted utilitarian abuse of doctrine that followed on the announcement of the philosopher, passed away after but a short lapse of time, and was no more.

It is the

bodies of men, women, and children: while men ask for bread, and get stones to break in answer; while France, and Germany, and Italy, make revolutions, incited mainly thereto by the scarcity of food, let us not be accused of too much work; while eastward, and westward, barbarism still obtains, and men are as the "beasts that perish," let us not be turned aside from the work that is to work out their civilization. Pine forests, John Ruskin, are better than wood to burn, yet that, too, is a part appointed to them. Well singeth the Transatlantic Englishman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the pine, and thus translates his speech :

"The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods
Chaunts his hymn to hill and floods,
Whom the city's poisoning spleen
Made not pale, or fat, or lean;
Whom the rain and the wind purgeth,
Whom the dawn and day-star urgeth;
In whose cheeks the rose-leaf blusheth,
In whose feet the lion rusheth.
Iron arms and iron mould,

That know not fear, fatigue, or cold.

I give my rafters to his boat,
My billets to his boiler's throat.
And I will swim the ancient sea
To float my child to victory;
And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o'er the palm and vine.
Westward I ope the forest gates,
The train along the railway skates;
It leaves the land behind, like ages past,
The foreland flows to it in river fast;
Missouri I have made a mart,

I teach lowa Saxon art."

forest unharmed, "to cover the mountains like the shadows of God."

No! no! not in our day must the reproach be raised that we work too much, while Dorsetshire laborers starve, and hungry dogs in Skibbereen devour the unburied

Not even from the lips of Ruskin can we patiently listen to the vituperation of railways-the modern Acts of the Apostles of

Civilization. "Tearing up the surface of Europe as grape-shot do the sea!" Is this all that can be said of them?-this all that Ruskin can see with his prophet soul in

"The iron bands, the iron bands,

The proxies of men's clasping hands, That bind together distant lands,"

that make the rough places smooth, and bring the ends of the earth together? Does he, in truth, prefer to see the grape-shot ploughing up, not the sea, but Europe? Not So we. Let but enough shot be rolled into rails, and there shall be an end of war. Yet this he deems no desirable conclusion. He fears that we shall be plunged into inglorious sloth. That the builder of towns, the civil engineer, will be more mischievous than the thrower down thereof, the military engineer. Not so we, John Ruskin! We have seen shot fired in anger and men slain thereby, and we have witnessed the peaceful engineering works of these latter days, and out of our very hearts can we pronounce that the latter is the most exciting, the most satisfying. Our "rest shall not become the rest of stones," "grass" shall not "cover us" yet awhile, nor "lichens feed on us,' nor shall we be " ploughed down into dust." No, no! we will harness our fire-steeds and saddle and bridle them, and ride over the whole world's surface on the mission of "peace upon earth and good will toward men." Our work shall be incessant while there is a foe to struggle against, an ignorance to root out, a commerce to commence. Why should the artist look down with contempt on his working brother, that brother without whose help he had never become an artist? We," say the Saxon men, "have cut through the forest and let in sunlight upon you, that you may paint your pictures with light and shadow; we built your houses to shelter artist-work from the weather. We built the ships that bore ye to and from distant lands. We maintain rule and order, and furnish the means whereby ye build and endow church

es.

your

We have at times pulled down and destroyed churches in religious zeal, but we have also maintained peace, and preserved others. We work for Catholic, and Protestant, and Puseyite, and Dissenter; and while we uphold the remnants of the medieval time, we call on you to remember that such things are but histories, and that progress is forward, not backward. The past is lesser than the present, the future greater. Into that future, blinded it may be with the blaze,

struggling forward, dazzled and darkened by turns, but still struggling forward into that future and through it we plunge, and rush to win for humanity a fresh restingplace for centuries yet to come.'

The proposition that the "use and function of man is to be witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness," can only hold good of man as a civilized being, not of man in the savage or partly savage state: for there are savages of pseudo-civilization, as well as of the forest. And though there be men, and women too, who love the "Hybla heather more for its sweet hives than for its purple hues," who think "the meat is more than the life, the raiment than the body; who regard the earth as a stable and the fruit as fodder; who love the corn they grind and the fruit they crush better than the garden of the angels on the slopes of Eden,"-yet they also are men and women, and the Christian soul shall not cast them out of the tabernacle. Men with bodies and without minds, are the germ of men with minds. And shall we complain that men with bodies should seek bodily pleasure; shall we believe that those pleasures, as well as the higher pleasures, are not of God's ordinance? Why were the acts of preserving and continuing the species made sources of physical pleasure, save to increase man's existence and progress on earth? That which was given as a reward cannot be regarded as low or debasing. Were a human being without passions or appetites, he were scarcely a human being. Doubtless, "sight, thought, and admiration" are the highest of our attributes, and it is debasing in those capable of them, to be unduly swayed by sensual gratifications. But, with the huge mass of mankind, born without these high attributes, the case is different-denial of such coarser pleasures as they are fitted for would induce insanity in many cases, evil passions in most. Sight, thought, and admiration are the attributes of cultivated men; but woe for these men were the assumption acted on, that no other pleasures should be permitted. There are human beings whose nerves are as cables, or as tightened parchments on drum-heads, that yield no vibration without beating thereon; others there are, whose finely-strung fibres vibrate to every breath of air-quick to pleasure and as quick to pain. Men must live to eat who cannot live to think; the honey of Hybla may be sweet on their palates without offending those who have eyes only for the heather's purple hue; the spirit of the grape

may excite their blood without disturbing the sense of hearing in those who delight in harmony of "sweet noise," and Dutch form may satisfy their coarser sense of woman's beauty, and leave unsoiled the hallowed imaginations of those who dream only of the Madonna's purity. God meant all his creatures to be happy-and commerce itself would grow to be a crime-being mainly based on the supply of sensual necessities-were the position established, that the gratification of the senses is a degradation. No, no! beautiful senses, refined, not weakened by art, are the precursors of mental excellence, of divine spirit. The Persian worships the sun as the external symbol of all beauty of light and heat. It is a sensual worship, but it is "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." And after all, sight is but a slight removal from hearing and taste. The senses five are but varieties of one sense, touch-physical action on the various nerves by whose agency our bodies are so constituted as to form fitting abiding places for our minds. Take a fine human being of the highest physical attributes, and with a mind proportioned to them-then destroy in succession his various nerves of sight, of scent, of taste, of hearing, of touch—and the brain, the root of these nerves, the deposit, the storehouse of ideas, the fountain of thought, will dry up and wither; and mind will be no more. Take away sight, hearing, and touch, and even speech will gradually cease. Better, then, is it to have sensual appetites, indicating the possession of nerves that may be refined, than to be devoid of senses. Better is the Sybarite couch, than the gory bed of war. Better even the alderman's feast than the abhorred squalor of Skibbereen. Better the soulless orgie than the sea-fight. Better, far better, the reclining festival, the flowerwreathed wine-cup, the witching dancing girl of the Greek, or Roman, or modern Asiatic, than the ascetic sternness of the monk, the self-glorifying privation of the Simon Stylites. Better the epicurean, keeping his nerves in pleasurable sensation, when without injury to others, than the miserable stoic, gratifying his miserable vanity, without benefit to any one, and destroying his own frame by physical privation.

It requires a strong moral sense to look at the new things acting before us, surrounded as they are by iniquities, and yet to discern clearly the good that is in them. We see Hudsons, and Capel Courts, and Stock Exchanges, with all manner of unclean things floating on the surface of railways, and we VOL. XIX. NO. I.

We will endeavor to answer, to show that "the great sagene of the iron roads, is drawing the ancient power and strength of England together; its various life, its rocky arms and rural heart," for no "narrow finite calculating metropolis of manufactures," but for the highest work of the civilization of universal man; for his rescue from the thraldom of misery, and poverty, and ignorance, that man, universal man, may become the lord of all the earth, and not a miserable quarrelsome assemblage of clans, ravaging each other's possessions like ferocious beasts. We deliberately throw down our gauntlet to the vituperators of railways, and will deal with their charges in succession, if, indeed, upon searching, we can find any specific charges.

First-It is asserted that railways are ugly. We admit it—while they are new. But so are all new constructions; new buildings of stone or brick are garish and ugly; so are new earthen banks till nature has clad them in green. New sandstone cuttings, new chalk cuttings are ugly. But this is only till they are overgrown with trees, and plants, and lichens, and herbage, and evergreens; the railway ravine, with its sweeping curve, is beautiful as a natural ravine. The South Western Railway, in some portions, is especially beautiful. "The heath, the heath - the upland heath, With the pine ridge on the height; And all below the purple wreath, Gleaming in rich sunlight; And the sweeping curve of the glancing rail, In the line of the dell below,

-

Where the landships all, without oar or sail, Move onward in goodly row.

*

*

*

*

*

O'er the gladdened earth's surface are whirled, By the iron steeds' stride, o'er the forest so wide, From the wilderness winning a world."

Turf the railway embankments, and plant beautiful enough. The road-bridges above the cuttings, and nature will soon make them jects, if not in building, by planting them them may always be rendered sightly obout, and covering them with ivy and other climbers. The stations, we agree, should should be simply business-like; in short, not be architectural. In great towns they

2

* Now Mrs. Browning.