pen possessed extraordinary facility.
Thus he was ever able to put his best foot foremost. Never in the larger
sense a leader of men as were Chatham and Fox, as were Washington, Clay
and Lincoln; nor of ideas as were Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin,
he had the subtle tenacity of Louis the Eleventh of France, the keen
foresight of Richelieu with a talent for the surprising which would have
raised him to eminence in journalism. In short he was an opportunist
void of conviction and indifferent to consistency.

The pen is mightier than the sword only when it has behind it a heart as
well as a brain. He who wields it must be brave, upright and steadfast.
We are giving our Chief Executive enormous powers. As a rule his wishes
prevail. His name becomes the symbol of party loyalty. Yet it is after
all a figure of speech not a personality that appeals to our sense of
duty without necessarily engaging our affection.

Historic Republicanism is likewise dead, as dead as historic Democracy,
only in both cases the labels surviving.

IV

We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the
past having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition
of the present is the divine right of parliaments and he might have
said of peoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to have
dripped from the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and given
sacredness to them also, and to their decrees.

That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems
plain enough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so
clear. With a kind of education--most men taught to read, very few to
think--the masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves.
They will continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling
contrasts of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in
a social and political structure claiming to rest upon the formula
"equality for all, special privilege for none."

The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism,
disappointed of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and
reproduce the man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another
abyss, and, after the ensuing "dark ages," like those that swallowed
Babylon and Tyre, Greece and Rome, emerge with a new civilization and
religion.

"Man never is, but always to be blessed." We know not whence we came,
or whither we go. Hope that springs eternal in the h