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 everything 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,[260] 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 traveler tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad ax, 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[261] watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun.  A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] 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[263] 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 notebooks 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 intrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.  For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk.  No greater men are now than ever were.  A singular equality may be observed between great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch’s[264] heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago.  Not in time is the race progressive.  Phocion,[265] Socrates, Anaxagoras,[266] Diogenes,[267] are great men, but they leave no class.  He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect.  The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.  The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good.  Hudson[268] and Bering[269] accomplished so much in their fishing boats, as to astonish Parry[270] and Franklin,[271] whose equipment exhausted the resources