and 1995, with its incalculable waste of
blood and treasure, its dreadful conflicts of armies and more dreadful
massacres by passionate mobs, its kaleidoscopic changes of government and
incessant effacement and redrawing of boundaries of states, its
interminable tale of political assassinations and proscriptions--all the
horrors incident to intestinal wars of a naturally lawless race--had so
exhausted and dispirited the surviving protagonists of legitimate
government that they could make no further head against the inevitable,
and were glad indeed and most fortunate to accept life on any terms that
they could obtain.

But the purpose of this sketch is not bald narration of historic fact, but
examination of antecedent germinal conditions; not to recount calamitous
events familiar to students of that faulty civilization, but to trace, as
well as the meager record will permit, the genesis and development of the
causes that brought them about. Historians in our time have left little
undone in the matter of narration of political and military phenomena. In
Golpek's "Decline and Fall of the American Republics," in Soseby's
"History of Political Fallacies," in Holobom's "Monarchical Renasence,"
and notably in Gunkux's immortal work, "The Rise, Progress, Failure and
Extinction of The Connected States of America" the fruits of research have
been garnered, a considerable harvest. The events are set forth with such
conscientiousness and particularity as to have exhausted the possibilities
of narration. It remains only to expound causes and point the awful moral.

To a delinquent observation it may seem needless to point out the inherent
defects of a system of government which the logic of events has swept like
political rubbish from the face of the earth, but we must not forget that
ages before the inception of the American republics and that of France and
Ireland this form of government had been discredited by emphatic failures
among the most enlightened and powerful nations of antiquity: the Greeks,
the Romans, and long before them (as we now know) the Egyptians and the
Chinese. To the lesson of these failures the founders of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century republics were blind and deaf. Have we then reason
to believe that our posterity will be wiser because instructed by a
greater number of examples? And is the number of examples which they will
have in memory really greater? Already the instances of China, Egypt,
Greece