For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co.

Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

་་

From Blackwood's Magazine.
CIVILIZATION.

applying natural forces, it would not be miraculous in the special sense of the 'Tis very commonly said (perhaps no term. A genuine miracle must be an act assertion is less likely to be disputed) that or process transcending and independent the age of miracles is past; yet the state- of all natural law —an impossibility in ment will hardly bear analysis, unless the fact. For instance, there never was a word "miracle" is used only in a secon- time when the Irishman's aspiration to dary and special sense. Dr. Johnson de- be in, two places at once, "like a bird," fines it as 66 a wonder, an event contrary could be fulfilled, for that would violate. to the laws of nature;" but Professor what we must recognize as a law which no Skeat, a later and stricter etymologist, sane person would spend a single hour in only gives "a wonder, a prodigy;" and studying to evade, that no single body on turning to find his interpretation of can simultaneously occupy more than one "prodigy," lo! he can only explain it as ubi. There are doubtless laws in nature, a portent, a wonder." Now, if a miracle of which we know nothing, and therefore is nothing more than something astonish- have not yet recognized; feats performed ing, something to excite wonder, surely by means of these laws may seem to us the age of miracles is in full swing; sur-miracles, but we have no right to call them prises lie in wait for us round the corner supernatural because we cannot trace the of each new almanac. On the other hand, action of the law. if we adopt Dr. Johnson's alternative in- There is no irreverence to Scripture terpretation, the proposition is as unstable involved in this assertion. We see through as ever, for the doctor himself would as a glass darkly; we know in part. The suredly have considered that to travel lawgiver reveals himself to us by the from London to Edinburgh in eight hours action of his own laws, by us imperfectly would be "contrary to the laws of nature." | understood; that action has in past times During the whole history of the world, up to his time, the fastest locomotion on land had been by means of horses yoked to wheeled vehicles; imagination failed to surmise anything beyond what could be accomplished by the fleetest animals harnessed to the most perfect chariot. Sir Walter Scott was not deficient in imagination, but one has only to turn to the opening paragraphs of the "Heart of Mid-Lothian to recognize the author's conviction that travelling had been brought to perfection. When he wrote "Perhaps, the echoes of Ben Nevis may soon be awakened by the bugle, not of a warlike chieftain, but of the guard of a mailcoach," be evidently thought he was trespassing beyond the verge of probability; yet in a few months from now these echoes will resound to the clatter and roar of express trains, devouring the ground at the rate of fifty miles an hour. Could Sir Walter see this, what could he do but exclaim with one of his own creatures, 'Prodigious?" To him it would appear a miracle.

66

But, considered as a mere achievement of human ingenuity and perseverance

transcended or evaded the observation of those who witnessed certain events which we class as miracles, just as the possibil ity of travelling sixty miles an hour transcended the imagination of Sir Walter Scott, and just as the nature of the elec tric current has hitherto evaded definition by men of science; each of these phenomena are miracles in the sense that they justly excite our wonder, but not in the sense that they are supernatural. The firmer a man's faith in the unseen, the firmer must be his conviction that although there are many things superhuman, there is nothing supernatural. It is a redundant adjective; everything that exists is natural, for nature is omnipresent, and by its laws everything that is unnatural ceases to exist. The most striking miracle that can take place - the restoration of the dead to life is not one whit more miraculous or beyond our powers than the origin of life itself or the circulation of the blood. So long, therefore, as there remain unfathomed mysteries such as these, so long the age of miracles endures.

Looking back along the road travelled. by human beings in what we conceitedly

.

call the March of Civilization, what a blun- | in the earlier stages of the system. The dering, crooked track it is! how much offspring of an alliance carefully selected shorter the journey might have been made! to produce a race of coal heavers might How deeply the ground is trampled where conceive an invincible desire to become a frequent conflicts have taken place! how court florist, or one destined to excel as a many mighty barriers thrown across it by musician be possessed with an unreasonlawgivers, ecclesiastics, warriors, may able impulse to be a member of Parlia still be traced by their crumbling ruins. ment; but firm and scientific administra"That which we call progress," observes tion might be relied on to eradicate these Mr. Leslie Stephen, "is for the most part eccentricities in time. Some people may a process of finding the right path by tum- be disposed to think the present governbling into every ditch on each side of the ment have allowed a great opportunity to way. Can it be claimed that our course go past when they constituted a ministry even now is less staggering and blindfold of agriculture by act of Parliament, inthan heretofore? Consider, for instance, stead of setting up a ministry of matrithe precautions taken for the physical mony. However, this is a hazardous development of the human race. It is subject; it is rather of what civilization possible that in after ages our posterity has done for us than of what it might have will look back with amazement to the nine-done, or may do, that it is intended to treat teenth century, when people in the van of in this paper. civilization freely devoted mind and means To resume the metaphor of a march (for to developing the most capable strains of which I am in no degree responsible)— domestic animals, and were content to one looking back over the line of it may leave the perpetuation of their own spe- descry in the distance certain races that cies to utterly random haphazard. The seem hardly yet to have started, and he is mighty Clydesdale dray-horse, the racer perhaps puzzled to account for their lag. with lungs and legs enabling him to out-gardness. Arithmetic is the simplest of strip the hurricane, and the shaggy little the three R's, as well as the most indis. Shetland, are members of identically the same species; in the two first, qualities latent in the original animal have been developed by thoughtful selection of parents, and in the last have had to manifest themselves only in the degree permitted by an inclement climate and scanty food. Were the same discretion and control ex-tralians have advanced a little further, and ercised in the preliminaries of human by means of counting their fingers and matrimony, instead of leaving them all to toes, and (in the higher standards) other the guidance of a proverbially blind little people's fingers and toes, may be considgod or the calculations of mercenary pru- ered quite ready reckoners. One of these, dence, what physical and intellectual mir- wishing to express "fifteen," would say, acles might not follow! Each succeeding "Marh-jin-belli-belli-gudjir-jina-bang-ga generation might excel the last in symme- - that is, "a hand on either side and half try, beauty of countenance, the use of all the feet."* The Tonga Islanders are a the senses duly balanced by intellectual long way further on, for they not only can qualities. Gentlemen there might then count up to one hundred thousand, but have given proof of a highly developed sense of humor. They got bored by the French explorer Labillardière, who "pressed them further and obtained nu merals up to one thousand billions, which were duly printed, but proved on later ex* Primitive Culture, by Professor E. Tylor, vol. i« chap. vii.

be

not classified as such on account of their balance at the banker's or the superficial trick of caste, but because they would be gentle in the strict sense i.e., men of birth - till in time a mongrel would be as out of place in human society as it is now in a pack of fox-hound. Disappointment, of course, might be expected

pensable in anything like business, yet there are primitive races whose language fails to define any proportion beyond duality. Some of the Australasian tribes reckon up to two and no further - every. thing beyond that being comprised in a word meaning "plenty." The west Aus

66

amination to be partly nonsense words | king's sign-manual commanded obeisance and partly indelicate expressions; so that the supposed series of high numerals forms at once a little vocabulary of Tonga indecency, and a warning as to the probable results of taking down unchecked answers from question-worried savages." Think what a vast interval of education a mind in this primitive state has to traverse before it can apprehend the bare ex istence of the legion numerals handled by mathematicians, let alone handling them himself. Talk of miracles! Herein is one far worthier of wonder than the Indian juggler's magic mango, that the dwarfish intellect whose reckoning power fails to apprehend definitely more than we two "— everything over that being an unnumbered crowd - can be trained to grasp even the elementary measurements of science, such as that of the velocity of light, and, thus trained, comprehend the magnitude involved in the fact that the rays which left the star Aldebaran Beta fifty thousand years ago are only just reaching the earth now, though they have been travelling hither through the intervening space at the rate of one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second ever since. To cause the warm blood to course again through dead veins, or to change water into wine, are more sudden, but scarcely more wonder-stirring feats than wakening the dormant faculties of the mind or turning ignorance into knowledge.

Ages ago a Phoenician merchant, ingenious beyond his fellows, and overwhelmed by the increasing multitude and complexity of his transactions, devised a series of symbols by means of which, scratched on tablets of baked clay, he was enabled to exchange information with traders at a distance. "Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth!" What a blaze of illumination may be traced to that uncertain spark! A faculty took its birth therefrom, second only in importance to articulate speech. Hitherto intercourse in absence had been as impossible as it is now for a man to be simultaneously in more than one place. Henceforth distance in space and time were alike set at naught; the wall of Pyramus was penetrated; the

in the uttermost parts of his realm; lovers' flames were fanned even when their whispers were hushed by distance; and, marvel of marvels, men being dead yet spoke in their own words to countless unborn generations. A man must be in love—a woman must be a mother- - before either can realize the full value of letters. There are some who never find themselves in either of these conditions to whom perhaps correspondence has been so watered down by frequency and by the added importunity of telegrams that they have come to look on the post-bag as an irksome incident, like shaving. And all of us (lovers and mothers excepted, bien entendu) have suffered indolence to interfere with intercourse by letter. Lord Byron wrote letters not amiss, yet even he willingly shirked putting pen to paper. "No letters today," he notes in his journal; "so much the better no answers." We are prone to assume that the age of correspondence, like that of miracles, has passed away; if that is so, it has happened through our own neglect. Letters are but written conversation; bright, natural conversation is the outward and visible sign of friend. ship; and bright, natural letters are as delightful and as highly valued as ever— only we are too lazy to write them. Yet what loads of leisure some people have! How few of the young men (young women must be credited with plenty of industry in correspondence) who loll away rainy hours in country houses over the pages of sporting and society papers ever think of taking up a pen to exchange thoughts with distant friends! Let us pry into the correspondence of a member of this enviable class, taking care to fix on one who is heart-whole, untrammelled by engagement with any fair-for, of course, the mind of the enamoured male is abnormally active, and drives the quill far and fast.

It is perhaps the afternoon of Sunday, often a period of self-reproach by reason of the seductions of luncheon all too generous. The golden youth rises from before the fire, yawns, stretches himself, and asking his host what time the post goes out, straddles off to the smoking-room, observing that he has a lot of letters to write.