ages before the inception of the American republics and that of France and
Ireland this form of government had been discredited by emphatic failures
among the most enlightened and powerful nations of antiquity: the Greeks,
the Romans, and long before them (as we now know) the Egyptians and the
Chinese. To the lesson of these failures the founders of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century republics were blind and deaf. Have we then reason
to believe that our posterity will be wiser because instructed by a
greater number of examples? And is the number of examples which they will
have in memory really greater? Already the instances of China, Egypt,
Greece and Rome are almost lost in the mists of antiquity; they are known,
except by infrequent report, to the archæologist only, and but dimly and
uncertainly to him. The brief and imperfect record of yesterdays which we
call History is like that traveling vine of India which, taking new root
as it advances, decays at one end while it grows at the other, and so is
constantly perishing and finally lost in all the spaces which it has
over-passed.

From the few and precious writings that have descended to us from the
early period of the American republic we get a clear if fragmentary view
of the disorders and lawlessness affecting that strange and unhappy
nation. Leaving the historically famous "labor troubles" for more extended
consideration, we may summarize here a few of the results of hardly more
than a century and a quarter of "self-government" as it existed on this
continent just previously to the awful end. At the beginning of the
"twentieth century" a careful study by trustworthy contemporary
statisticians of the public records and those apparently private ones
known as "newspapers" showed that in a population of about 80,000,000 the
annual number of homicides was not less than 10,000; and this continued
year after year to increase, not only absolutely, but proportionately,
until, in the words of Dumbleshaw, who is thought to have written his