suggest. The popular leader of the hour sees some present difficulty or
present opportunity of distinction. He deals with each question as it
arises, leaving future consequences to those who are to come after him.
The situation changes from period to period, and tendencies are generated
with an accelerating force, which, when once established, can never be
reversed. When the control of reason is once removed, the catastrophe is
no longer distant, and then nations, like all organized creations, all
forms of life, from the meanest flower to the highest human institution,
pass through the inevitably recurring stages of growth and transformation
and decay. A commonwealth, says Cicero, ought to be immortal, and for ever
to renew its youth. Yet commonwealths have proved as unenduring as any
other natural object:

Everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
And this huge state presenteth nought but shows,
Whereon the stars in silent influence comment.

Nevertheless, "as the heavens are high above the earth, so is wisdom above
folly." Goethe compares life to a game at whist, where the cards are dealt
out by destiny, and the rules of the game are fixed: subject to these
conditions, the players are left to win or lose, according to their skill
or want of skill. The life of a nation, like the life of a man, may be
prolonged in honor into the fulness of its time, or it may perish
prematurely, for want of guidance, by violence or internal disorders. And
thus the history of national revolutions is to statesmanship what the
pathology of disease is to the art of medicine. The physician cannot
arrest the coming on of age. Where disease has laid hold upon the
constitution he cannot expel it. But he may check the progress of the evil
if he can recognize the symptoms in time. He can save life at the cost of