Gold Hill daily news. [volume] (Gold Hill, N.T. [Nev.]) 1863-1882, 1866-10-01
THE GRAND


world and in the realms of thought and of
ethical and religious discussion. We will
endeavor to reproduce the prominent feae
lures of this picture. Men are living, and
beginning to be conscious that they are
living, in one Of those seed-times Of the
world which recur only after long cycles,
when the ground, long plowed and ma
nured, is, at last, to be turned to use /; a
seed-time of empires and creeds and dis
coveries and systems Of thought, which,
as they terminate and flourish, will, in
their beauty or their ugliness. make the
Old World, which looked so bare, no
longer recognizable in its rich variety of
crop and color and life. II the observer
be a politician, he fnds himself living in
an age which alike in the dramatic char
acter Of its events and the grandeur Of
some of its ideas has scarcely a parallel in
history. The old world and its aspira-
tons gave place, finally, to the new and its
hopes when Lee surrendered his sword,
and the defeat was as dramatic, as much
of a surprise, as near to a true battle Of
A~rmageddon, as any catastrophe Of his
tory has ever been. The principle of ma
tionalities, first a dream, then a thought,
then a hope. has risen, almost within
months, into a power able to shake down
States and remodel maps; has pulled an
old nation. as it were, by the hair, from
under the sea into the air and light, is, as
we write, driving whole kingdoms together
with a clash which reverberates through
the world. Young men read Of the rise Of
Holland to independence OF Spanish rule,
and think it was a grand time. Was it
grander in all true elements Of grandeur
than the rise Of Italy out from under the
Austrian wavess Ricasoli seems to US
as well worth watching as William the ST.
lent, Napoleon as Philip II. The French
Revolution was a great event-an event
which in this hour seems to choke up the
memories Of the old, but, save in misery,
how was it greater than the revolution in
Germany Crowns did not topple faster
in l790-9S than in 1866. Sadowa was
at least as striking an event as Waterloo.
The seven years war was a "great episode
in history" We have lived through its
counterpart compressed into seven days.
The rise Of revolutionary and Imperial
France to dictatorship was not more mar
velous, was not to the continent more full
Of hope or menace than the rise OF
Prussia.
The progress Of the world was not more
affected BY the struggle between Pope and
Emperor, democracy and feudalism, than
by the struggle just ended, when it
seemed hardly begun between Prussia and
A~ustria-light and obscurantism. We
have men, too, among it all-big, visible
figures. No age has perhaps ever been
richer in prominent individual personages
in whom the world could take a passion
ate interest, than that which has produced
Napoleon and Bismark, Lincoln and
Gladstone, Won Moltke and Garibaldi.
Men are never tired Of considering the
Reformation and the reaction which fol-
lowed it, but was It . greater time in which
more ideas were born, or in which system,
Of thought struggled more yisibly
towards the light; than this We read in
Mr.. Froude, not without emotion, the sue
cessive acts which struck down the mon
a~steries of England but in what do they
differ except in rapidity from the bills
which passed the Italian Parliament no,
many weeks since, and the recent decree
which breaks up the religious life" in
Venetia?
Realism is revived among US, and ID
modifying every branch Of progress, sweep
ing away, remorselessly, all the films
which stood between thought and fact.
Nothing in our day can compare with the
discovery of America; but still the scope
for adventure and travel, and even con-
quest, is nearly as wide as ever-their re.
suits as dramatic. Cochin China is turned
into q colony; Pekin entered by European
troops; a new civilization revealed in ia
pan /; the source of the Nile discovered
Australia crossed; the few closed places Of
the earth thrown open to energy and en-
terpriss. No mechanical invention cor
responds or can quite correspond in value
with the printing press, but we have jus,
solved the problem Of instant communica-
ton throughout the earth and now con-
tinenss are drawn within speaking dis
lance, which, three hundred years ago,
were still, as they were from the beginning
Of time, ignorant Of each others existence.
What shall we say of the exodus from
Europe to America going on every day
before our eyes, and Of the new life grow
ing up in the far Wests What Of COM
merce, science, art, which are in a state Of
almost morbid activity
TENNESSEE. - The Nashville Gazette
(rebeD thus ponders the different modes
of bringing that State once more under
rebel rule:
The people Of Tennessee have before
them three alternative courses, among
which they must choose one. First, they
may decide to take tho risk IN future cleo