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KING PELLINORE’S LITERARY MAGAZINE

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad,
so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on
the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side
as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it
is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it
is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every
thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires
new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between
the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a
watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and
the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a
spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to
sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and
you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal
strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage
with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the
same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the
use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so
much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but
he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A
Greenwich nautical 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?

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