re, by seeing the penalties which come from breaking them:
but as for laws which work of themselves, by an irresistible
movement,--how can we discover such in a past in which every law which we
know has been outraged again and again? Take one of the highest
instances--the progress of the human intellect--I do not mean just now
the spread of conscious science, but of that unconscious science which we
call common sense. What hope have we of laying down exact laws for its
growth, in a world wherein it has been ignored, insulted, crushed, a
thousand times, sometimes in whole nations and for whole generations, by
the stupidity, tyranny, greed, caprice of a single ruler; or if not so,
yet by the mere superstition, laziness, sensuality, anarchy of the mob?
How, again, are we to arrive at any exact laws of the increase of
population, in a race which has had, from the beginning, the abnormal and
truly monstrous habit of slaughtering each other, not for food--for in a
race of normal cannibals, the ratio of increase or decrease might easily
be calculated--but uselessly, from rage, hate, fanaticism, or even mere
wantonness? No man is less inclined than I to undervalue vital
statistics, and their already admirable results: but how can they help
us, and how can we help them, in looking at such a past as that of three-
fourths of the nations of the world? Look--as a single instance among
too many--at that most noble nation of Germany, swept and stunned, by
peasant wars, thirty years' wars, French wars, and after each hurricane,
blossoming up again into brave industry and brave thought, to be in its
turn cut off by a fresh storm ere it could bear full fruit: doing
nevertheless such work, against such fearful disadvantages, as nation
never did before; and proving thereby what she might have done for
humanity, had not she, the mother of all European life, been devoured,
generation after generation, by her own unnatural children. Nevertheless,
she is their mother still; and her history, as I believe, the
root-history of Europe: but it is hard to read--the sibylline leaves are
so fantastically torn, the characters so blotted out by tears and blood.

And if such be the history of not one nation only, but of the average,
how, I ask, are we to make calculations about such a species as man? Many
modern men of science wish to draw the normal laws of human life from the
average of humanity: I question whether they can do so; because I do not