March 9.
Since Tennyson expressed a classical idea in poetical form it has been a popular and even hack-noyed phrase with moralists—"that men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things." What is here stated in relation to individual life is no less true in the scale of national being. "Civilization does get forrard, sometimes upon a powder cart," is after all only another way of patting the old tag, Experientia docer. Indeed it may safely be said that the experience which teaches nations to their good is often as much more bitter in essence than that of the individual as its sco} is wider. Through the troublous and narrow gateway of adversity many a nation has entered into a broad domain of liberty, progress and peace. The life of a race has to pass through its refining period of discipline, and finds it not less painful than that which the youth must undergo in preparation for the responsibilities of manhood. As mankind moves forward to the great goal of final fitness the impact! of nation upon nation operates by friction to remove those racial excrescences which serve to impede the progress of the whole. And though to limited observation and local views the process may seem needlessly painful and frequently unjust, the wider outlook and the final consideration lead at least towards the conviction that the end is "somehow good." Given the long enough view, it is the history of the world's bitterness that serves
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.