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 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 your 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. 66 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 mediaval 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. forget the good that lies under-that Providence is working out its purposes by the agency of unclean things. Miss Barrett,* too, can ask with a sneer, anent our "resonant steam eagles," "If we work our souls as nobly as our iron ?" 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. * 1 * * 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 the cuttings, and nature will soon make them beautiful enough. The road-bridges above them may always be rendered sightly obIt requires a strong moral sense to look at jects, if not in building, by planting them the new things acting before us, surrounded out, and covering them with ivy and other as they are by iniquities, and yet to discern climbers. The stations, we agree, should clearly the good that is in them. We see not be architectural. In great towns they Hudsons, and Capel Courts, and Stock Ex- should be simply business-like; in short, changes, with all manner of unclean things floating on the surface of railways, and we VOL. XIX. NO. I. 2 *Now Mrs. Browning. plain buildings, emblematic of speed and movement. The other stations should be all rural, and the station-keepers should be encouraged to plant them with roses and honeysuckles, and every variety of plant that helps to make English cottages beautiful. Miserable have been the railway attempts at architecture; and to our taste the Great Western station at Paddington, with its no pretension and evident utility, all coming by accident, is infinitely preferable to either the would-be Gothic of Bristol or the monstrous abortion of Euston square, where the original stone gateway, leading to nowhere, christened the Debtors' Door (because it was built of borrowed capital at interest), now stands at the corner of a court-yard, opening into a huge hall of stucco mock granite, with a ceiling of carved cross-beams. An oval or circular erection, we forget which, something like the Trafalgar washing-basins, but without water, stands in the centre, to put the money changers in. These abortions have altogether cost the railway proprietors upward of £110,000, so that about fifteen pounds per diem must be taken out of the pockets of travellers to pay for them. cessant nuisance of dust and mud, at very slow paces. This work, and an infinitely increased amount, is now performed by steam, at an infinite reduction of cost; we mean actual cost, not charges to passengers, but, practical daily cost saying nothing of invested capital. The mud and dust, and above all, the enormous cruelty to animals, have been abolished, while the speed has been doubled and trebled. The goods and passengers carried, mean -- freely translated -- increased civilization to the world. The cruelty abolished, means refinement of the English nation, a result no Christian can contemplate without satisfaction. Were there no other results, these alone should close the lips of the vituperators of railways. But the objectors will reply. -Think of the iniquities and immoralities which they have caused. Not so, we reply. There were Law's Mississippi scheme and hundreds of other schemes long before the advent of railways. God has made nothing in vain, and even iniquities and immoralities have a part to play in creation. Even Hudsons have their utilities; and those equally culpable, his co-diThese things are not progress, but obsta- rectors and co-shareholders, whose cupidity cles to progress-waste of the means which was the true origin of his malpractices. If should help on progress. But, were the a railway be required, it is quite clear that it planning of railway erections left to the taste must take some time to make, say three to of a Ruskin, measureless is the silent instruc- four years, and during that time the money tion they might be the means of conveying laid out can yield no interest. When done, to the general community. Thoroughly to if it pays more than an average rate of profit, appreciate a wide field of utility herein of it cannot last, because competition will be at true utility the railways running through work, anxious to get a share in the surplus the heart of Ireland should be traversed, profit. If honest men propose to make a where squalid huts, ruder than any Indian railway - to go without interest while makwigwam, require that the owners of propertying, and to obtain a moderate interest when should be shamed into a perception of the made, without the power of selling shares decencies of civilized life, and a taste for in- and realizing their capital meanwhile - the expensive rural beauty. But the vitupera- public will have nothing to say to it. But let tors of railways should, in truth, regard them the projector propose an impracticable ten per as great undertakings, of a class analogous cent., the shares are taken up immediately, to that of cutting roads through a new coun- and the railway is commenced; the Hudson try. Contrivance is at work chiefly how to tribe are such juggling projectors, and pay get a result of transit, and it is for future themselves for their trouble, leaving their times to convert mechanical structures and gulls to suffer, where they can. Shares and contrivances into pleasure-giving artistry. money change hands in a gambling process, Happy are the proprietors whose arrange- where every one expects to get profit withments in buildings have been of the most out work done, and the public gets the railtemporary kind. way. It is sought to exact high prices, to pay for the interest upon wasted capital, but this is not practicable. The shares fall to the value which represents the real and not the wasted capital, and they pay an average interest on the former only. This only is the witchcraft which the Hudson tribe use, taking care to buy their shares very cheap, Thirty years back, it used to cost more money to transfer a load of goods from the backbone of England to any seaport, than from that seaport to India. And all the transit, both of goods and passengers, was performed by horses, with an amount of cruelty few people are aware of, and with an in or get them for nothing, and to sell them at an increased price. "Had you seen but this road And bless General Wade." What England was, Europe still is. There were roads, but only for the wealthy few till the late advent of some few railways. But the wealthy few do not destroy national antipathies. It is the traveling of the many that must accomplish such a result. By the advent and extension of railways, the whole of Europe, the whole of the world, will assimilate to the condition of England, with the variation of climate. Little have they yet done, for they are but in their infancy. They have been sought for by individuals as a money-getting speculation, not by communities as civilizers. When they shall really be developed, it will be within the reach of the poorest of mankind to travel, and look on other lands. | The Celts are not an ocean-roving people. The Gallic cock is an emblem of Gallic In tracing the progress of mankind we ran inefficiency on the wide waters of ocean. over his four chief physical wants, regarding This grand evil the want of constant him as a stationary being. But he requires friendly intercourse between the nations of more than this - the power of locomotion is the earth, has kept up wars sometimes by a necessity to him. In many cases it hap- contrivance of the rulers, sometimes by mupens that a man is born in a climate uncon- tual antipathies. This great evil will be utgenial to him. If he stays in it, he dies, or terly removed and rooted out by railways. suffers incessant illness, that makes him a There was a time when every English shire pain to himself and others. He therefore and county had terms of vituperation to berequires the facility of getting away to a stow on its neighbors when Scotland, congenial climate, and of occasionally return-Ireland, and Wales were at war with Enging to his friends. As interchange increases land, till conquered. It was making roads between nations, more of this will exist; for through the Highlands that rooted out the human affections are not to be checked by rebellions. peculiarities of race, and thus, probably, it was designed by nature from the beginning. With limited means of transit, therefore, much misery must ensue. With cheap transit this misery will cease. Many a Spaniard and Italian, in natural qualities, is born in England and Germany; many a German and Englishman in Spain and Italy. Misfitted to their climates, they are useless to themselves and the world; fitted to their climates, they become producers after their several fashions. All such interchanges tend to draw close the bonds between nations, and ultimately to merge them into a cosmopolitan world, wherein war shall cease. Wars between nations are, we believe, a result of their not knowing each other, or, at least, of not knowing each other intimately enough. At present, the uses of railways are but partially developed. England, by virtue of its huge water-roads over the ocean, has become civilized faster than other nations. Men of all European nations have visted the "workshop of the world," where their ancestors came for war purposes, and left their race behind them to mingle with the natives of the soil. And the English race essentially a mixed race, wherein the blood of Celts, Phoenicians, Picts, Scots, Romans, Danes, Saxons, Normans and Dutchmen and probably the best of each- was united to produce the universal man. They went forth into all lands - to America, to India, to Africa-leaving permanent colonies in all where the climate was favorable, and constantly renewing colonists where the climate was unfavorable. This mingling of races was the result of the ocean-road and shipping, combined with the plentiful blood of the fair-haired ocean rovers so largely inIreland lacked this blood, and her population has remained stationary. France the same. Spain and Italy the same. fused in the race. - Little do artists dream of the high purposes to be wrought out by the agency of railways, unless, indeed, they deem that high art and nature's bounties and wonders should be reserved wholly for the few, while the many toil to give them leisure. Would ye build temples - oh, ye men of art! - temples to God? Would ye build these temples only for the rich? No; the true artist builds for mankind. Where, then, would ye place your temples? In the squalid haunts where men congregate, in the cities that have grown up in the days of barbarism? No, no; the high places of the land, the wild heaths and pine-groves made by God, ere man was where the lark sings - and not the dens where the mouse cheeps and the rat burrows-are the true sites for your temples, where the hand of the spoiler shall not come to build them round with dens of iniquity, where a corrupt priesthood panders And how shall the people to human vices. go to worship at God's altars thus placed in the pure and holy air, how-but by the railways ye run down and scorn? Again, artists, would ye build temples to the drama, to the muses where would ye place them, save on the railway line? The days have gone by when it was a need for men to build close cities; and the time is coming when, as of old, the tree will again shadow the dwelling. Time and space have been vanquished, and the residences of regenerate man have yet to be constructed. Turn whither we will do what we will in art, artistry, mechanism, agriculture, exercise, health, knowledge, or, if it must be, war in all things, henceforth, the iron way is the way of our worldly salvation, of our mental progress, of our soul's rescue from degradation. Look on us, ye men of high aspirations, as your veritable brethren, -we, the hewers of wood and drawers of water; the mountain-borers, the valley-fillers, the hill-upheavers, the modern centaurs; begetters of the fire-steeds of the land and the coursers of the ocean; holding the physical world in our hands at the command of God, who has bidden us to make the rough places smooth, that his people may dwell together in unity. Work ye, then, at your god-like art; let the temple rise, the sculpture grow, the picture start into life; let the poet sing and the sage speak, the prophet inspire men with his own spirit; but with all that forget not that it was the hard hands of your despised brethren, the physical workers, with sweating brows and burning hearts, that first won for ye this world from the wilderness, and gave ye the vantage ground to stand on. Rough nurses have we been to nourish the germ of baby art; but lo! it lives, moves, and has being. We reverence ye for your beauty. Scorn ye not our strength that has shielded that beauty from harm. Look ye "Into the future, far as human eye can see, See the vision of the world, and all the wonder that will be." "Out of the strong comes forth sweetness, out of the eater comes forth meat." terial after material presenting themselves, as men became fitted for and needed them. The question next follows, of his mental progress. We hold that race is self-developing on earth, as in all other organized creations or germs, just as certain plants thrive in certain latitudes and elevations, and others do not; and as plants removed by man to congenial regions thrive while others die, as the hot-house plant of one country becomes the open air plant of another: and thus, do what we will, the race of Englishmen will remain Englishmen, unless transported to other circumstances, which will not permit the peculiarly English qualities to develop themselves. They are "racy of the soil." And were the whole race swept away tomorrow, and this island of long memories peopled with weaklings, not long would it so remain. The best blood of the North would again descend, as in the olden timethe children of the pine"-and the world's battle would begin anew. Backward would roll the Celt, onward would press the Norseman; sharp keels would cut and cover the northern seas; and in a few hundred years, again would England be peopled by Englishmen-"racy of the soil," rough and rude; with "blood fetched from fathers of war-proof;" with "horse to ride and weapon to wear;" but the coal still to dig and the iron to smelt; and the long course of interrupted industry to work into order and method. The hard, large hand would grow to its fitting work, and the artist's fingers would pine; the Celt would be a savage, and the Saxon a boor. Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder; and the wars ended, Celt and Saxon intermixed, and substantial dwellings erected to make an artificial climate, English refinement becomes possible. Who shall now tell us of what blood were Shakspeare, and Bacon, and Milton-not what names their fathers and mothers were known by, but whence and how came that rare combination of brains and nerves, strong hearts and intellectual heads, that made them the world's We have endeavored to trace the pro- wonder? Was it the red-haired Dane, of gress of man from the savage state through the large features and ogre mouth, his physical gradations, the result of his "That toss'd the sprawling infant on his spear;" reason and his circumstances, till we have shown what we believe to be practicable in or the fierce Celt, who made human sacriperfecting the supply of his four cardinal fices in his Druid temple; or the swart wants-food, fuel, clothing, and lodging. Phoenician, bastard brother to the moneyWe have endeavored to show that nature loving Jew; or the blue-eyed Saxon or provided all these things from the begin- Norwegian, loving the ale-cup; or ning. Circumstance after circumstance, ma-hard, crafty Norman baron, with the church the |