252 H. W. SCOTT. ground. Hard work it is, and slow to get them out. Our fathers took up the ideas and sought to establish them in England, in Holland, in France. But king and priest and aristocrat turned our fathers out of doors, and they fled here. It seemed a hard fate, but it was the best thing for them, for their ideas, for mankind; for what has been done here for man, as man, in two hundred years, may not be accomplished in Europe in a thousand. And what has been done has been reacting for more than a century on institutions there, and will grow with cumulative force as America increases in power. Let us not be insensible to these processes, because they seem long. They are, in fact, very short. The greatest empire the world has known lasted two thousand years. Yet the day will come when this duration will seem a short space in the history of mankind. To an extent, each nation and each group within it, has its own development, and each contributes something from its own nature or peculiarities to the general stock. We must not, because of our personal tastes, or our preju- dices perhaps, set ourselves to oppose the action of our time. This action goes on without regard to us ; it will run over us if we resist it, and probably it is right. From this point of view, we may as well, therefore, allow the destinies of this planet to work themselves out without our particular concern. Man insensibly changes his esti- mate of the relative importance of things as he passes through the successive stages of his life. In the inex- perience of his youth he imagines that very much is under his control ; in the experience of his maturer years, he finds that very little is actually so. But we gain nothing by exclaiming against the irresistible order. All of the ages of the world are leaves of the selfsame book, and the true men of progress are those who profess as their start- ing point a profound respect for the past. All that we
