atisfied that really to inform
the understanding corrects and enlarges the heart."

These were the concluding words of his last Letter. So say I now, and I
make them the preface to an argument which now sets the great apostle of
liberty right before the world. They serve, like a literary hyphen, to
connect the two ages--his own with this; and the two lives--the masked
with the open one; in both of which ages and lives he did good to
mankind, and that mightily.

WASHINGTON, D.C., _January 21, 1872_.

PART I.

INTRODUCTION.

The literary work which survives a century has uncommon merit. Time has
set the seal of approval upon it. It has passed its probation and
entered the ages. A century has just closed upon the work of Junius. The
causes which produced it, either in act or person, have long since
passed away. The foolish king, the corrupt minister, and the prostituted
legislature are forgotten, or only recalled to be despised; but the work
of Junius, startling in thought, daring in design, bristling with
satire, a consuming fire to those he attacked, remains to be admired for
its principles, and to be studied for its beauty and strength.

The times in which Junius wrote were big with events. The Seven Years'
War had just closed with shining victories to Prussia and England.
Frederic, with an unimpaired nation and a permanent peace, it left with
a good heart and much personal glory; but George III., with India and
America in his hands, with the plunder of a great conquest to distribute
to a greedy and licentious court, it left pious, but simple.

Great wars disturb the masses. They awaken them from the plodding, dull
routine of physical labor, and, thrusting great questions of conquest
and defense, of justice and honor, before them, agitate them into
thought. Conditions change; new ideas take the place of old ones, and a
revolution in thought and action follows. But a war of ideas, starting
from principles of peace, brings the enslaved again to the sword, and
this crisis is termed a revolution.

Junius wrote at the dawn of the age of revolutions. The war of ideas was
waged against priestcraft, and skepticism was the result. Voltaire had
struck fable from history with the pen of criticism, and a scientific
method here dawned upon history. Rousseau's democracy had entered the
hearts of the down-trodden in France, and, a wandering exile, he had
spread the contagion in England. George Berkeley, the Ir