There is etymological uncertainty about the phrase.  But there is no doubt about its meaning; no doubt that it represents a good, comfortable gait, at which nobody goes nowadays.

A hundred years ago it was the fashion:  in the days when railroads were not, nor telegraphs; when citizens journeyed in stages, putting up prayers in church if their journey were to be so long as from Massachusetts into Connecticut; when evil news travelled slowly by letter, and good news was carried about by men on horses; when maidens spun and wove for long, quiet, silent years at their wedding trousseaux, and mothers spun and wove all which sons and husbands wore; when newspapers were small and infrequent, dingy-typed and wholesomely stupid, so that no man could or would learn from them more about other men’s opinions, affairs, or occupations than it concerned his practical convenience to know; when even wars were waged at slow pace,-armies sailing great distances by chance winds, or plodding on foot for thousands of miles, and fighting doggedly hand to hand at sight; when fortunes also were slowly made by simple, honest growths,-no men excepting freebooters and pirates becoming rich in a day.

It would seem treason or idiocy to sigh for these old days,-treason to ideas of progress, stupid idiocy unaware that it is well off.  Is not to-day brilliant, marvellous, beautiful?  Has not living become subject to a magician’s “presto”?  Are we not decked in the whole of color, feasted on all that shape and sound and flavor can give?  Are we not wiser each moment than we were the moment before?  Do not the blind see, the deaf hear, and the crippled dance?  Has not Nature surrendered to us?  Art and science, are they not our slaves,-coining money and running mills?  Have we not built and multiplied religions, till each man, even the most irreligious, can have his own?  Is not what is called the “movement of the age” going on at the highest rate of speed and of sound?  Shall we complain that we are maddened by the racket, out of breath with the spinning and whirling, and dying of the strain of it all?  What is a man, more or less?  What are one hundred and twenty millions of men, more or less?  What is quiet in comparison with riches? or digestion and long life in comparison with knowledge?  When we are added up in the universal reckoning of races, there will be small mention of individuals.  Let us be disinterested.  Let us sacrifice ourselves, and, above all, our children, to raise the general average of human invention and attainment to the highest possible mark.  To be sure, we are working in the dark.  We do not know, not even if we are Huxley do we know, at what point in the grand, universal scale we shall ultimately come in.  We know, or think we know, about how far below us stand the gorilla and the seal.  We patronize them kindly for learning to turn hand-organs or eat from porringers.  Let us hope that, if we have brethren of higher races on other planets, they will be as generously appreciative of our little all when we have done it; but, meanwhile, let us never be deterred from our utmost endeavor by any base and envious misgivings that possibly we may not be the last and highest work of the Creator, and in a fair way to reach very soon the final climax of all which created intelligences can be or become.  Let us make the best of dyspepsia, paralysis, insanity, and the death of our children.  Perhaps we can do as much in forty years, working night and day, as we could in seventy, working only by day; and the five out of twelve children that live to grow up can perpetuate the names and the methods of their fathers.  It is a comfort to believe, as we are told, that the world can never lose an iota that it has gained; that progress is the great law of the universe.  It is consoling to verify this truth by looking backward, and seeing how each age has made use of the wrecks of the preceding one as material for new structures on different plans.  What are we that we should mention our preference for being put to some other use, more immediately remunerative to ourselves!

We must be all wrong if we are not in sympathy with the age in which we live.  We might as well be dead as not keep up with it.  But which of us does not sometimes wish in his heart of hearts, that he had been born long enough ago to have been boon companion of his great-grandfather, and have gone respectably and in due season to his grave at a good jog trot?