ted plodders, fixed in the ruts of a bygone
age, suffering all its energy and life to rust away, day by day, in
inaction. Such we find to be the case with those nations of the Old
World which are still ruled by the effete systems of a feudal age. The
governmental policy and the intellectual status of the masses mutually
react upon each other, effectually neutralizing all progress, whether
moral or physical.

For these reasons that nicely graduated mean between political
recklessness and national old fogyism, which alone guarantees an
enduring progress, is the object of search to all disinterested
political reformers. For only by following such a golden mean, in which
political reform shall keep even pace with intellectual and moral
advancement, can physical and mental progress be made mutually to
sustain each other in the onward march. Yet this mean is extremely
difficult to find, for though we be guided by all the experience of the
past, and earnestly and sincerely endeavor to profit by the failures as
well as the successes of those who have gone before us, the paths of
experiment are so infinite and the combinations of method so boundless,
that the wisest may easily be led astray. Hence the failures of the
republics of the past, however pure the motives and lofty the aims of
their founders, may be attributed to a leaning to one side or the other
of this strait and narrow way, which lies so closely concealed amid the
myriad ramifications of the paths of method. The slightest divergence,
if it be not corrected, like the infinitesimal divergence of two
straight lines, goes on increasing to all time, till that which was at
first imperceptible, becomes at last a boundless ocean of intervening
space, which no human effort can bridge.

To say that we, as a nation, are following closely this golden mean,
that our wisdom has enabled us to discover that which for so many ages
has remained hidden from men, were simply egotistical bombast; for it
were to assert that with us human nature had lost its fallibility and
human judgment become unerring. Yet we may safely assert that no system
exists at the present day which so clearly tends toward the attainment
of such a mean, and which contains within itself so many elements of
reform, as our own. For ours is a system of extreme elasticity, a sort
of compensation balance, constructed with a view to the changing climate
of the political world, and capable of accommodating itself to th