merely because they may have surpassed us; to call Watt a fool, because mechanical powers may be discovered which may supersede the use of steam; to deride the efforts which have been made in our time to improve the discipline of prisons, and to enlighten the minds of the poor, because future philanthropists may devise better places of confinement than Mr. Bentham’s Panopticon, and better places of education than Mr. Lancaster’s Schools.  As we would have our descendants judge us, so ought we to judge our fathers.  In order to form a correct estimate of their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their situation, to put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which they, however eager in the pursuit of truth, could not have, and which we, however negligent we may have been, could not help having.  It was not merely difficult, but absolutely impossible, for the best and greatest of men, two hundred years ago, to be what a very commonplace person in our days may easily be, and indeed must necessarily be.  But it is too much that the benefactors of mankind, after having been reviled by the dunces of their own generation for going too far, should be reviled by the dunces of the next generation for not going far enough.

The truth lies between two absurd extremes.  On one side is the bigot who pleads the wisdom of our ancestors as a reason for not doing what they in our place would be the first to do; who opposes the Reform Bill because Lord Somers did not see the necessity of Parliamentary Reform; who would have opposed the Revolution because Ridley and Cranmer professed boundless submission to the royal prerogative; and who would have opposed the Reformation because the Fitzwalters and Mareschals, whose seals are set to the Great Charter, were devoted adherents to the Church of Rome.  On the other side is the sciolist who speaks with scorn of the Great Charter because it did not reform the Church of the Reformation, because it did not limit the prerogative; and of the Revolution, because it did not purify the House of Commons.  The former of these errors we have often combated, and shall always be ready to combat.  The latter, though rapidly spreading, has not, we think, yet come under our notice.  The former error bears directly on practical questions, and obstructs useful reforms.  It may, therefore, seem to be, and probably is, the more mischievous of the two.  But the latter is equally absurd; it is at least equally symptomatic of a shallow understanding and an unamiable temper:  and, if it should ever become general, it will, we are satisfied, produce very prejudicial effects.  Its tendency is to deprive the benefactors of mankind of their honest fame, and to put the best and the worst men of past times on the same level.  The author of a great reformation is almost always unpopular in his own age.  He generally passes his life in disquiet and danger.  It is therefore for the interest of the human race that the memory of such