Railroads?  Electric telegraphs?  All honour to them in their place:  but they are not progress; they are only the fruits of past progress.  No outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it merely spreads and makes popular the results of progress.  Progress is inward, of the soul.  And, therefore, improved constitutions, and improved book instruction—­now miscalled education—­are not progress:  they are at best only fruits and signs thereof.  For they are outward, material; and progress, I say, is inward.  The self-help and self-determination of the independent soul—­that is the root of progress; and the more human beings who have that, the more progress there is in the world.  Give me a man who, though he can neither read nor write, yet dares think for himself, and do the thing he believes:  that man will help forward the human race more than any thousand men who have read, or written either, a thousand books apiece, but have not dared to think for themselves.  And better for his race, and better, I believe, in the sight of God, the confusions and mistakes of that one sincere brave man, than the second-hand and cowardly correctness of all the thousand.

As for the “triumphs of science,” let us honour, with astonishment and awe, the genius of those who invented them; but let us remember that the things themselves are as a gun or a sword, with which we can kill our enemy, but with which also our enemy can kill us.  Like all outward and material things, they are equally fit for good and for evil.  In England here—­they have been as yet, as far as I can see, nothing but blessings:  but I have my very serious doubts whether they are likely to be blessings to the whole human race, for many an age to come.  I can conceive them—­may God avert the omen!—­the instruments of a more crushing executive centralisation, of a more utter oppression of the bodies and souls of men, than the world has yet seen.  I can conceive—­may God avert the omen!—­centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires—­a world-spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web; and smiting from thence everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with a swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II. were but clumsy and impotent.

All, all outward things, be sure of it, are good or evil, exactly as far as they are in the hands of good men or of bad.

Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, railroads and telegraphs, instead of inaugurating an era of progress, may possibly only retard it.  “Rester sur un grand succes,” which was Rossini’s advice to a young singer who had achieved a triumph, is a maxim which the world often follows, not only from prudence, but from necessity.  They have done so much that it seems neither prudent nor possible to do more.  They will rest and be thankful.

Thus, gunpowder and printing made rapid changes enough; but those changes had no farther development.  The new art of war, the new art of literature, remained stationary, or rather receded and degenerated, till the end of the eighteenth century.