ound
the present all too narrow for the imposition of their will. It did not
satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the dead, nor to efface
the records of a past that offended them. It did not satisfy them to
bind the present to obedience by imperative menace and instant
compulsion. When they had burnt libraries and thrown down monuments and
pursued the rebels of the past into the other world, and had seen to it
that none living should evade them, then they outraged the future.

Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the
effectual and final success of their measures--would their writ run in
time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed their
subjects?--whatever questions may have peered in upon those rigid
counsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the world, they
silenced by legislation and yet more legislation. They wrote in statute
books; they would have written their will across the skies. Their hearts
would have burnt for lack of records more inveterate, and of testimonials
that mankind should lack courage to question, if in truth they did ever
doubt lest posterity might try their lock. Perhaps they did never so
much as foresee the race of the unnumbered and emancipated for whom their
prohibitions and penalties are no more than documents of history.

If the tyrannous day of our fathers had but possessed the means of these
our more diffident times! They, who would have written their present and
actual will upon the skies, might certainly have written it in petroleum
and wax upon the stone. Fate did them wrong in withholding from their
hands this means of finality and violence. Into our hands it has been
given at a time when the student of the race thought, perhaps, that we
had been proved in the school of forbearance. Something, indeed, we may
have learnt therein, but not enough, as we now find.

We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge and the
probable wisdom of our successors. A certain reverend official document,
not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately recommended to the
veneration of the present times "those past ages with their store of
experience." Doubtless, as the posterity of their predecessors our
predecessors had experience, but, as our ancestors, none--none.
Therefore, if they were a little reverend our own posterity is right
reverend. It is a flippant and novelty-loving humour that so flatters