ic stage' too soon; they have
been put to learn while yet only too apt to unlearn. Such cases do not
vitiate, they confirm, the principle--that a nation which has just
gained variability without losing legality has a singular likelihood to
be a prevalent nation.

No nation admits of an abstract definition; all nations are beings of
many qualities and many sides; no historical event exactly illustrates
any one principle; every cause is intertwined and surrounded with a
hundred others. The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it
casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were
best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen. To make
a single nation illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and
you must omit much. But, not forgetting this caution, did not Rome--the
prevalent nation in the ancient world--gain her predominance by the
principle on which I have dwelt? In the thick crust of her legality
there was hidden a little seed of adaptiveness. Even in her law itself
no one can fail to see that, binding as was the habit of obedience,
coercive as use and wont at first seem, a hidden impulse of extrication
DID manage, in some queer way, to change the substance while conforming
to the accidents--to do what was wanted for the new time while seeming
to do only what was directed by the old time. And the moral of their
whole history is the same each Roman generation, so far as we know,
differs a little-and in the best times often but a VERY little--from
its predecessors. And therefore the history is so continuous as it
goes, though its two ends are so unlike. The history of many nations is
like the stage of the English drama: one scene is succeeded on a sudden
by a scene quite different,--a cottage by a palace, and a windmill by a
fortress. But the history of Rome changes as a good diorama changes;
while you look, you hardly see it alter; each moment is hardly
different from the last moment; yet at the close the metamorphosis is
complete, and scarcely anything is as it began. Just so in the history
of the great prevailing city: you begin with a town and you end with an
empire, and this by unmarked stages?--So shrouded, so shielded, in the
coarse fibre of other qualities--was the delicate principle of
progress, that it never failed, and it was never broken.

One standing instance, no doubt, shows that the union of
progressiveness and legality does not secure supremacy in war. Th