Their error lies in the fact that the
horrors of the French Revolution were the legitimate result of a policy
exactly analogous to what they are pursuing. It arose from _justice long
deferred; from wrongs endured for generations. It was the concentrated
wrath_ of the people who for many decades had been oppressed by Church,
by nobility, and by the crown. Though the motives are entirely
different, these writers, in striving to procrastinate the feud of
justice against entrenched power and established customs, are acting on
the lines of Louis XV., who, when told that a revolution would burst
forth in France, inquired, "How many years hence?" "Fifteen or twenty,
sire," was the reply. "Well, I shall be dead then; let my successor look
out for that." So in seeking to put off just and rightful demands, these
short-sighted philosophers lose sight of the fact that the longer
justice is exiled from the throne of power, the more terrible will be
the reckoning when it comes. Yet history teaches no lesson more
impressively, unless it be that a question involving justice once raised
will never be settled until right has been vindicated.

Those reformers, on the other hand, who have been popularly credited
with sounding a pessimistic note in all their writings, by virtue of
their fidelity to actual conditions and prevailing customs, are chiefly
optimists in the truest sense of the word. They are men and women who
believe profoundly in the triumph of right, liberty, and justice. Their
faces are set toward the morning. The glorious ideals that float before
and beyond the present have beamed upon their earnest gaze. They have
traced the ascent of humanity through the ages; they have noted the slow
march, the weary struggle from age to age of the old against the new, of
dawn against night, of progress against conservatism, but they have also
seen that the trend has been onward and upward, and what is far more
important, they have noted that the prophets, sages, and reformers,--in
a word, the advance guard, who have blazed the pathway and opened the
vista to broader and nobler conceptions of justice and liberty, have
been those who have assailed the popular conventionality of their times;
who have been denounced as enemies to social order, as dangerous
pessimists and wreckers of civilization. But they have also observed
that these honest and far-sighted spirits have set in motion the thought
that has borne humanity upward into a more radia