accomplish for the advancing intellect remains to be seen. Our ancestors loved to dwell upon the past, now we all look toward the future.
The sea of ice, over which our forefathers glided so serenely in their trustful reliance, is breaking up. One after another traditions evaporate; in their application to proximate events they fail us, history ceases to repeat itself as in times past. Old things are passing away, all things are becoming new; new philosophies, new religions, new sciences; the industrial spirit springs up and overturns time-honored customs; theories of government must be reconstructed. Thus, says experience, republicanism, as a form of government, can exist only in small states; but steam and electricity step in and annihilate time and space. The Roman republic, from a lack of cohesive energy, from failure of central vital power sufficient to send the blood of the nation from the heart to the extremities, died a natural death. The American republic, covering nearly twice the territory of republican Rome in her palmiest days, is endowed with a different species of organism; in its physiological system is found a new series of veins and arteries—the railway, the telegraph, and the daily press,—through which pulsates the life's blood of the nation, millions inhaling and exhaling intelligence as one man. By means of these inventions all the world, once every day, are brought together. By telegraphic wires and railroad iron men are now bound as in times past they were bound by war, despotism, and superstition. The remotest corners of the largest republics of to-day, are brought into closer communication than were the adjoining states of the smallest confederations of antiquity. A united Germany, from its past history held to be an impossibility, is, with the present facilities of communication, an accomplished fact. England could as easily have possessed colonies in the moon, as have held her present possessions, three hundred years ago. Practically, San Francisco is nearer Washington
