auding the actions and the actors as circumstances
seem to require, herein following the usual course, which implies that
men can control affairs, and that the agent is to be held responsible
for his deed. We have, however, only to consider the course of our own
lives to be satisfied to how limited an extent such is the case. We are,
as we often say, the creatures of circumstances. In that expression
there is a higher philosophy than might at first sight appear. Our
actions are not the pure and unmingled results of our desires; they are
the offspring of many various and mixed conditions. In that which seems
to be the most voluntary decision there enters much that is altogether
involuntary--more, perhaps, than we generally suppose. And, in like
manner, those who are imagined to have exercised an irresponsible and
spontaneous influence in determining public policy, and thereby fixing
the fate of nations, will be found, when we understand their position
more correctly, to have been the creatures of circumstances altogether
independent and irrespective of them--circumstances which they never
created, of whose influence they only availed themselves. They were
placed in a current which drifted them irresistibly along.

From this more accurate point of view we should therefore consider the
course of these events, recognizing the principle that the affairs of
men pass forward in a determinate way, expanding and unfolding
themselves. And hence we see that the things of which we have spoken as
though they were matters of choice were, in reality, forced upon their
apparent authors by the necessity of the times. But, in truth, they
should be considered as the presentations of a certain phase of life
which nations in their onward course sooner or later assume. In the
individual, how well we know that a sober moderation of action, an
appropriate gravity of demeanour, belong to the mature period of life; a
change from the wanton wilfulness of youth, which may be ushered in, or
its beginning marked, by many accidental incidents: in one perhaps by
domestic bereavements, in another by the loss of fortune, in a third by
ill health. We are correct enough in imputing to such trials the change
of character, but we never deceive ourselves by supposing that it would
have failed to take place had those incidents not occurred. There runs
an irresistible destiny in the midst of all these vicissitudes.

[Sidenote: Succession of affairs determined