The Protest in The Nineteenth Century

Abstract

THE present age is eminently a sensational one. Everybody deals in superlatives and universals. Morning and evening the newspaper bills vie with each other in appealing to that particular form of curiosity which feeds upon alarms. Our civilization is declared to be altogether wrong. Dr. Pangloss's doctrine is reversed—nothing that is right. We are incessantly invited to take stock of our arrangements political and social, and treated to denouncements of almost every detail of them. We are too serious, too frivolous, a prey to panics, stolidly blind to dangers, distrustful, credulous. To crown all, what was fondly supposed to be one of the greatest of modern improvements is roundly declared to be a sham; to be worse—a lure to destruction, mental and physical. Loud were the pæans sung some forty years ago over the then new system of competitive examinations which so vexed the soul of the author of “Gryll Grange.” Now we are assured that the whole examinational system is utterly stupid, and, in effect, that it were better at once ended than in any way mended.