aculty
in this speciality, we shall be a power with which it is dangerous to
trifle--a power with which others will not care to come in collision in
any other form than that of an overwhelming combination, which, thank
God! has become in these days one of the impossibilities of political
manoeuvring. Nor will they be anxious, on any slight provocation, to
again arouse that inventive faculty which furnishes us with material of
war far in advance of the rest of the world. We have within ourselves
every element of strength, every quality necessary to inspire and compel
respect from all nations. In our own God-given faculties lie both the
'_Procul, procul, este profani!_' and the 'Tread not on me, or I bite,'
which in all ages have constituted so-called national honor and pride,
and which will be to us the broad aegis of protection when the
storm-cloud of war darkens the horizon of the world. If this fail, the
fault will be our own; we shall be unworthy custodians of the treasure;
our downfall will be merited as it is sudden and sure, and few will be
found to mourn over us.

As the effervescence of new wine brings all impurities to the surface,
casting off those noxious superfluities whose presence is pollution to
the liquid and disease and death to the partaker, so the present war is
but the effervescence of our as yet new and unpurified political system,
whereby all errors and impurities are thrown to the surface of society,
ready to be skimmed off by the hand of the people, who are themselves
the vintners and the rectifiers. No system of government is without
radical defects, and it was not to be expected that our own would be
free from error, founded as it is upon a principle new to the world, or
only known as having totally failed in the past through the clumsiness
of its originators and subsequent custodians--a system which had little
aid from the experiences of the past, and must necessarily grope in the
darkness which surrounds all new experiments of this kind, lighted only
by the few, meagre, _a priori_ truths of deductive reasoning. Our
ancestors, hampered as they were by the lack of this great experience of
social life, legislated for the men and circumstances of their time; and
though they had ever an eye to the future, yet, conscious of the
fallibility of human wisdom and foresight, they themselves did not
expect their work to stand unchanged for all time. New circumstances
would arise--the people themselves wo