the
commonwealth. If a proposed remedy is obvious and easily intelligible,
it is condemned in the naming, for it is morally certain to have been
tried a thousand times in the history of the world, and had it been
effective men ere now would have forgotten, from mere disuse, how to
produce the evil it cured.

There are clear and simple remedies for nothing. In medicine there
has been discovered but a single specific; in politics not one.
The interests, moral and natural, of a community in our highly
differentiated civilization are so complex, intricate, delicate and
interdependent, that you can not touch one without affecting all. It
is a familiar truth that no law was ever passed that did not have
unforeseen results; but of these results, by far the greater number are
never recognized as of its creation. The best that can be said of any
"measure" is, that the sum of its perceptible benefits seems so to
exceed the sum of its perceptible evils as to constitute a balance of
advantage. Yet the magnificent innocence of the statesman or philosopher
to whose understanding "the whole matter lies in a nutshell"--who thinks
he can formulate a practical political or social policy within the four
corners of an epigram--who fears nothing because he knows nothing--is
constantly to the fore with a simple specific for ills whose causes are
complex, constant and inscrutable. To the understanding of this creature
a difficulty well ignored is half overcome; so he buttons up his eyes
and assails the problems of life with the divine confidence of a blind
pig traversing a labyrinth.

The glories of England are our glories. She can achieve nothing that our
fathers did not help to make possible to her. The learning, the power,
the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a century,
but of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work of the
preceding. For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that "revered
pile," the civilization of England. And shall we now try to belittle the
mighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the top
courses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land? The
American eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage in
England's glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesser
glory of his own country.

The English are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as the
virtues are solely the product of education--a rogue being only a dunc