The latter years of the Kighteenth Century were lighted by the bonfires of accumulated, historical rubbish first kindled in the British colonies of North America, and carried in sparks across the Atlantic by the periwig of Lafayette to aot ablaze the tinder already prepared by J. Rousseau The husks of many tim were consumed in the European conflagration which followed; among them the mouldy. tr: of the Holy Roman Empire and the corpse of Royalty by right divine went up in joke, and the ghost of the latter walks abroad at ever rarer intervals.
But the ground thus cleared was sown with a fresh assortment of dogmas, which in their turn. sprouted, flourished, fruited The most note-it is possible en virtuous and happy by legislative enact: at the "gift of and it an. equivalent amount of administrative sagacity. The first half of the present century was pre-eminently an Age of Orators, most of whom rang.the changes on Jefferson's famous aphorism that "'all men were created freoand equal." Thia was the kernel whence developed a shell tersely described as "The right divine of mobs to govern wrong." Jefferson, with all his genius, was cramped by the philosophic ignorance of his genera. tion, even as the best of us are fettered by the limitations of the most modern knowledge. Darwinism has overflowed the artificial embankments between: which theologians and legislators sought to confine it, and the result has boon a disillusion of the popular mind in regard to many cherished fancies. We have awakened to the fact that there is no more ity in omagogues than in despots. A similar mental distress is now observable ina large
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.