ontinual
progress, and both can support their creeds with abundance of pertinent
example. Both seem to admit a law of recurrence, but the former make it
act in a circle, the latter in a spiral. There is, no doubt, one
constant element in the reckoning, namely, human nature, and perhaps
another in human nature itself,--the tendency to reaction from all
extremes; but the way in which these shall operate, and the force they
shall exert, are dependent on a multitude of new and impredicable
circumstances. Coincidences there certainly are, but our records are
hardly yet long enough to furnish the basis for secure induction. Such
parallelisms are merely curious, and entertain the fancy rather than
supply precedent for the judgment. When Tacitus tells us that
gladiators have not so much stomach for fighting as soldiers, we
remember our own roughs and shoulder-hitters at the beginning of the
war, and are inclined to think that Macer and Billy Wilson illustrated
a general truth. But, unfortunately, Octavius found prize-fighters of
another metal, not to speak of Spartacus. Perhaps the objections to our
making use of colored soldiers (_hic niger est, hunc tu, Romane,
caveto_) will seem as absurd one of these days as the outcry that Caesar
was degrading the service by enlisting Gauls; but we will not hazard a
prophecy. In the alarm of the Pannonian revolt, his nephew recruited
the army of Italy by a conscription of slaves, who thereby became free,
and this measure seems to have been acquiesced in by the unwarlike
citizens, who preferred that the experiment of death should be made _in
corpore vili_ rather than in their own persons.

If the analogies between past and present were as precise as they are
sometimes represented to be, if Time really dotes and repeats his old
stories, then ought students of history to be the best statesmen. Yet,
with Guizot for an adviser, Louis Philippe, himself the eyewitness of
two revolutions, became the easy victim of a third. Reasoning from what
has been to what will be is apt to be paralogistic at the best. Much
influence must still be left to chance, much accounted for by what
pagans called Fate, and we Providence. We can only say, _Victrix
causa diis placuit_, and Cato must make the best of it. What is
called poetical justice, that is, an exact subservience of human
fortunes to moral laws, so that the actual becomes the liege vassal of
the ideal, is so seldom seen in the events of real life that e