better confidence, to be more impatient and eager, and all had been
well: _not_ to do--a virtue of omission.

This is not a matter of art-criticism. It is an ethical question
hitherto unstudied. The makers of laws have not always been obliged to
face it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present, and in
part for that future whereof the present needs to be assured--that is,
the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of person or
property. Some such hold upon the time to come we are obliged to claim,
and to claim it for our own sakes--because of the reflex effect upon our
own affairs, and not for the pleasure of fettering the time to come.
Every maker of a will does at least this.

Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate? Not they. They found
the present all too narrow for the imposition of their will. It did not
satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the dead, nor to efface
the records of a past that offended them. It did not satisfy them to
bind the present to obedience by imperative menace and instant
compulsion. When they had burnt libraries and thrown down monuments and
pursued the rebels of the past into the other world, and had seen to it
that none living should evade them, then they outraged the future.

Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the
effectual and final success of their measures--would their writ run in
time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed their
subjects?--whatever questions may have peered in upon those rigid
counsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the world, they
silenced by legislation and yet more legislation. They wrote in statute
books; they would have written their will across the skies. Their hearts
would have burnt for lack of records more inveterate, and of testimonials