ire in their effects.

[Sidenote: Secular variations of nations.]

[Sidenote: Their institutions must correspondingly change.]

We must therefore no longer regard nations or groups of men as offering
a permanent picture. Human affairs must be looked upon as in continuous
movement, not wandering in an arbitrary manner here and there, but
proceeding in a perfectly definite course. Whatever may be the present
state, it is altogether transient. All systems of civil life are
therefore necessarily ephemeral. Time brings new external conditions;
the manner of thought is modified; with thought, action. Institutions of
all kinds must hence participate in this fleeting nature, and, though
they may have allied themselves to political power, and gathered
therefrom the means of coercion, their permanency is but little improved
thereby; for, sooner or later, the population on whom they have been
imposed, following the external variations, spontaneously outgrows them,
and their ruin, though it may have been delayed, is none the less
certain. For the permanency of any such system it is essentially
necessary that it should include within its own organization a law of
change, and not of change only, but change in the right direction--the
direction in which the society interested is about to pass. It is in an
oversight of this last essential condition that we find an explanation
of the failure of so many such institutions. Too commonly do we believe
that the affairs of men are determined by a spontaneous action or free
will; we keep that overpowering influence which really controls them in
the background. In individual life we also accept a like deception,
living in the belief that every thing we do is determined by the
volition of ourselves or of those around us; nor is it until the close
of our days that we discern how great is the illusion, and that we have
been swimming--playing and struggling--in a stream which, in spite of
all our voluntary motions, has silently and resistlessly borne us to a
predetermined shore.

In the foregoing pages I have been tracing analogies between the life of
individuals and that of nations. There is yet one point more.

[Sidenote: The death of nations.]

Nations, like individuals, die. Their birth presents an ethnical
element; their death, which is the most solemn event that we can
contemplate, may arise from interior or from external causes. Empires
are only sand-hills in the hour-glass of Time; th