You may imagine that when all our mischievous inventions have done their worst, and the wars they provoked by cowardice have been forgotten in dishonour, our greatest investigators will be remembered, as men who laid first the foundations of fruitful knowledge, and vindicated the majesty of inviolable law.
No, gentlemen; it will not be so.
In a little while, the discoveries of which we are now so proud will be familiar to all. The marvel of the future will not be that we should have discerned them, but that out predecessors were blind to them. We may be envied, but we shall not be praised, for having been allowed first to preceive and proclaim what could be concealed no longer. But the misuse we made of discoveries will be remembered against us, in eternal history; our ingenuity in the vindication of denial, of species, will be disregarded in the face of the fact that we destroyed, in civilized Europe, every rare bird or secluded flower; our chemistry of agriculture will be tainted with memories of irremediable famine; and our mechnical contrivance will only make the age of the mitrailleuse* more abhorred than of the guillotine.
...in spite of our almshouses, hospitals, and Sunday-schools; in spite of our missionary endeavours to preach abroad what we cannot get believed at home ... we shall be remembered as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth.
* mitrailleuse: a machine-gun with a number of barrels, able to discharge projectiles rapidly and simultaneously in large quantities, or singly in quick succession. First brought into service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. (Oxford English Dictionary)
Quotation from: The Eagle's Nest by John Ruskin. A series of lectures delivered under the title of 'The Relation of Natural Science to Art' at Oxford in the Lent term, 1872. Published in The Works of Ruskin ed E.T. Cook & Alexander Wedderburn, London, Allen 1903-12 in 39 vols.
