human affairs, but that any or all philosophers can, from the heterogeneous mass of human history, lay bare the chain of causation from age to age and demonstrate an upward movement, is so far merely an aspiration. One form of government follows another; republics succeed monarchies and monarchies succeed republics; nations rise and fall, civilizations wax and wane, and along the whole course from the earliest dawn of recorded history to the present, the individual man has shown the same or equivalent characteristics and powers, the ancient as competent physically, intellectually, and morally as the modern; as great in his capacities and achievements in all departments of human endeavor, language, sculpture, painting, poetry, oratory, devotion of self to altruistic aims or to war, in all as forceful if not superior to the man of to-day. And where is the fitness of human institutions and the measure of progress to be found anyway, except in the individual? In him is the fruition, sum, and substance of it all. In him cultivated, competent, fraternal, industrious in all works helpful, is the acme of all schemes of salvation.
So, the question now, after all the centuries of toil, turmoil, anguish, and destruction, is, What form of government or society is best suited to and most promotive of general individual improvement and excellence? And as the individual can advance only by the volitional exercise of all his faculties in normal proportion, the answer is self-evident, that it must be one in which the freedom of the individual is limited only by the equal freedom of others. That is, a government wherein justice is established upon the predicate of equal natural rights—in a word, the right of progression; but that such a government is deducible from the lessons of history, is one of perpetual doubt and debate, for the reason that the data are too voluminous, too uncertain, too much omitted, for
