Lincoln, Horace Mann, Henry Ward Beecher, Channing, Emerson, and others. But a list of heroic Americans that has no place for Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, Henry George, Frances Willard, and others, is a mounment to the blindness of the nation that applauds or ratifies the selection.
It was only the opening of another chapter in the scroll of human evolution that was marked by the great movement toward democracy which fell in the closing years of the eighteenth century. And who shall dare to say that it was not as sacred an epoch, as divine an unfolding in the life of man as that which has determined our calendar? And who shall dare to withhold the same meed of heroism from the men who then declared that the axe was laid unto the root of the trees which we pretend to give to the heroic souls of that first quarter of the first century? The truth of the matter is, and the developments of the coming years will prove it, we cannot refuse to recognize the sanctity of one epoch of human history without sooner or later denying all sacredness to every other. The movement has already begun which is to end in the utter repudiation of all that Jesus of Nazareth stood for. Indeed, there are men today—and they belong without exception to the ranks of the pillars of church and state—who frankly say that
