lifted the world out of its orbit
and assigned a new course to history. Here or nowhere we have the broken
chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten
law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason
cutting as clean as Atropos. The wisest philosopher of the old world
instructs us to take things as they are, and to adore God in the event:
"Il faut toujours etre content de l'ordre du passe, parce qu'il est
conforme a la volonte de Dieu absolue, qu'on connoit par l'evenement."
The contrary is the text of Emerson: "Institutions are not aboriginal,
though they existed before we were born. They are not superior to the
citizen. Every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular
case. We may make as good; we may make better." More to the present
point is the language of Seward: "The rights asserted by our forefathers
were not peculiar to themselves, they were the common rights of mankind.
The basis of the constitution was laid broader by far than the
superstructure which the conflicting interests and prejudices of the day
suffered to be erected. The constitution and laws of the federal
government did not practically extend those principles throughout the
new system of government; but they were plainly promulgated in the
declaration of independence. Their complete development and reduction to
practical operation constitute the progress which all liberal statesmen
desire to promote, and the end of that progress will be complete
political equality among ourselves, and the extension and perfection of
institutions similar to our own throughout the world." A passage which
Hamilton's editor selects as the keynote of his system expresses well
enough the spirit of the Revolution: "The sacred rights of mankind are
not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are
written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the
hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by
mortal power. I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated
sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced that the
whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can be wrested from no
part of them without the blackest and most aggravated guilt." Those were
the days when a philosopher divided governments into two kinds, the bad
and the good, that is, those which exist and those which do not exist;
and when Burke, in the fervour of ear