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have been made sufficiently clear by the evidence daily disclosed in 

 your papers." And in a private letter received after his return to 

 England, relative to views which I had expressed, he re-asserts this 

 doctrine, and says: "As you are probably aware, and as, in fact, I 

 said very emphatically when in America, I regard social progress as 

 mainly a question of character and not of knowledge or enlighten- 

 ment." 



In the light of all these somewhat conflicting opinions, if we were 

 to rest the case altogether upon authority, we should at least be 

 compelled to admit that the real moral progress of the Avorld has 

 been extremely slow, and that it is imperceptible even in the high- 

 est stages of enlightenment. Such, too, seems to be the lesson of 

 history and of observation. It is only when we contemplate long 

 periods of history and contrast the present or the recent past with 

 the remote past that an advance can be perceived in the moral con- 

 dition of mankind. Yet, when such an historic parallax is once 

 secured, the fact that moral progress actually has taken place is dis- 

 tinctly seen. To read the history of England and compare the acts 

 committed a few centuries ago by men of our own race, with what 

 any one can see would be done now under like circumstances, is 

 sufficient to demonstrate that improvement has been going on in 

 both individual and public morals. Making every possible allow- 

 ance for all that is bad in the present social system, no one could 

 probably be found candidly to maintain that it is inferior, from the 

 moral point of view, to that of the middle ages or even of the six- 

 teenth century. Modern kings, bad as they are, no longer put their 

 sons to death to prevent them from usurping their thrones, and the 

 sons of kings, however profligate they may be, do not seek to 

 dethrone their fathers. When Rome was at its zenith, it was no 

 more than every one expected that the great armies of Caesar and 

 Pompey, on their triumphal return from victorious fields, would 

 turn their arms upon each other for the mastery of the empire. 

 And I have heard those familiar with Roman history predict, at the 

 time when the vast armies of Grant and Sherman, far outnumbering 

 the Roman legions, were marching victoriously through different 

 parts of the South, that the last grand struggle of the war would be 

 between the Army of the Cumberland and that of the Potomac — 

 forgetting that since the age of the Caesars there had been moral 

 progress sufficient to render both the leaders and the soldiers incap- 

 able of such an act. 



