ve laws. And thus, too, these events give us the true measure of
the intellectual and moral culture of the times, the extent to which
just ideas prevailed therein upon all the duties and functions of
private and public life. Tried by the standard of absolute truth and
right, grievously would they all fall short,--and we, too, with them.
Judged by the human standard of progressive development and gradual
growth,--the only standard to which the man of the beam can venture,
unrebuked, to bring the man with the mote,--we shall find much in them
all to sadden us, and much, also, in which we can all sincerely rejoice.

In judging, therefore, the political acts of our ancestors, we have a
right to bring them to the standard of the political science of their
age, but we have no right to bring them to the higher standard of our
own. Montesquieu could give them but an imperfect clue to the labyrinth
in which they found themselves involved; and yet no one had seen farther
into the mysteries of social and political organization than
Montesquieu. Hume had scattered brilliant rays on dark places, and
started ideas which, once at work in the mind, would never rest till
they had evolved momentous truths and overthrown long-standing errors.
But no one had yet seen, with Adam Smith, that labor was the original
source of every form of wealth,--that the farmer, the merchant, the
manufacturer, were all equally the instruments of national
prosperity,--or demonstrated as unanswerably as he did that nations grow
rich and powerful by giving as they receive, and that the good of one is
the good of all. The world had not yet seen that fierce conflict between
antagonistic principles which she was soon to see in the French
Revolution; nor had political science yet recorded those daring
experiments in remoulding society, those constitutions framed in
closets, discussed in clubs, accepted and overthrown with equal
demonstrations of popular zeal, and which, expressing in their terrible
energy the universal dissatisfaction with past and present, the
universal grasping at a brighter future, have met and answered so many
grave questions,--questions neither propounded nor solved in any of the
two hundred constitutions which Aristotle studied in order to prepare
himself for the composition of his "Politics." The world had not yet
seen a powerful nation tottering on the brink of anarchy, with all the
elements of prosperity in her bosom,--nor a bankrupt state