and to predict
what he expects. His predictions are the mirrors which photograph his
own moods of mind, rather than views through a telescope directed to the
distant cloud-capped mountains of futurity.

But it is confidently asserted that the science of party politics is
simply the exercise of the gift of prophetic vision on the theater of
civil life; and that a sagacious politician is, within his own sphere, a
prophet. He applies the conditions of the past, so far as he knows them,
to the calculation of the future. His success proves his sagacity, not
his supernatural inspiration. Why should religious predictions be
attributed to a different power?

For the very simple and satisfactory reason, that the great majority of
the calculations of party politicians are failures, while the
predictions of the Bible are verified by the event. Name a dozen leaders
of American politics during the last half century, and you name half a
score of disappointed presidential candidates, whose unfinished
monuments prevent the kindly green sward of oblivion from vailing their
disappointments, and check the prayer of the passing pilgrim that they
may rest in peace; while of the last half dozen who have occupied the
presidential chair, and guided the destinies of the most progressive
half of the world, not a single man had been suggested by the political
leaders even ten years before his election. No wonder politicians become
shy of prediction.

But it is alleged, that while on a field so contracted as to become the
arena of mere personal partialities it is confessedly difficult to
predict the future, on the wider field of the world's great interests,
the well-known uniformity of human passions and interests render their
results calculable to the sagacious statesman.

Thus Draper argues, that nations, like the individuals composing them,
have fixed periods of growth, manhood, decay, decrepitude, and
death--more or less rapid, according to the stock and situation. Those
who accept that dogma argue that all that is necessary in order to
predict the fate of a nation is a correct calculation of its present
age; whether of childhood, manhood, or senility.

It is wonderful how rashly men will risk their reputation for common
sense on the sound of a plausible analogy, which, even were it valid,
would not justify the inference drawn from it. For, suppose that there
were as fixed laws of national as of individual life, can any man
predict the