The Prince George's enquirer and southern Maryland advertiser. (Upper Marlborough, Md.) 1882-1925, 1900-07-06

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tuition he cannot expel it. But he may
check the progress of the evil if he can
recognize the symptoms in time. lie
can save life at the cost of an unsound
! limb. He can tell us how to preserve
our health when we have it; he can
warn us of the conditions under which
particular disorders will have us at
disadvantage. And so with nations;
amidst the endless variety of circum-
stances there are constant phenomena
which give notice of approaching dan
ger; there are courses Of action which
have uniformly produced the same re-
suits; and the wise politicians are those
who have learnt from experience the
real tendencies of things, unmisled by
superficial differences, who can shun
the rocks where others have been
wrecked, or from foresight of what is
coming can bc cool when the peril is
upon them.
For these reasons, the fall of the Ro
man republic is exceptionally instruc-
tive to US. A constitutional govern
ment, the most enduring and the most
powerful that ever existed, was put on
its trial and found wanting. We see
it in its growth; we see the causes
which undermined it's strength. We
see attempts to check the growing mis-
chief fail, and we see why they failed.
And we see, finally, when nothing
seemed so likely as complete dissolu-
ton, the whole system changed by a
violent operation, and the dying pa
tient's life protracted for further cen
turies of power and usefulness.
Again, irrespective of the direct
teaching which We may gather from
them, particular cpochs in history have
the charm for us which dramas have
periods when the great actors on the
stage of life stand before us with the
dstinctness with which they appear in
the creations of poet. There have
not been many such periods; for to see
the past, it is not enough for us to he
able to look at it through the eyes Of
contemporaries; these contemporaries
themselves must have been parties to
the scenes which they describe. They
must have had full opportunities of
knowledge. They must have had, in
addition, the rare literary powers which
can convey to others through the me-
dum of languages an exact picture Of
their own minds; and such happy COM
binations occur but occasionally in
thousands of years. Generation after
generation passes by, and is crumbled
into sand as rocks are crumbled by the
sea. Each brought with it its heroes
and its villains, it's triumphs and its
sorrows; but the history is formless
legend, incredible and unintelligible;
the figures of the actors are indistinct
as the rude ballad or ruder inscription,
which may he the only authentic rec
ord of them. We do not see the men
and women, we see only the outlines
of them which have been woven into
tradition as they appeared to the loves
or hatieds Of passionate admirers or
enemies. Of such times we know moth
ing, save the broad results as they are
measured from century to century,
with here and there some indestructi-
bic pebble, some law, some fragment of
remarkable poetry which has resisted
decomposition. These periods are the
proper sabjcct of the philosophic his
toran. and to him we leave them But
there are others, few, at which in
tellcctual activity was as great as it
is now, with its written records surviv-
ing, in which the passions, the opin-
ions, the ambitions of the age, are all
before us, where the actors in the great
drama speak their own thoughts in
their own words, where we hear their
enemies denouncc them and their
friends praise them; where we are our
nj IL Il I-,f l,n ,,,l
fears of the hour, to feel the conhc-
ing emotions and to sympathize in the
struggles which again seem to live;
and here philosophy is at fault. Phil
osophy, when we are face to face with
real men, is as powerless as over the
Had or King Lear. The overmaster-
ing human interests transccnds eXpla-
nation. We do not sit in judgement
on the right or wrong; we do not seek
out causes to account for what takes
place, feeling too concious of the in
adequacy of our analysis. We see hu-
man being possessed of different im-
pulses, and working out a prcor,lained
result, rs the subtle forces drive each
along the paths marked out for him;
and history b comes the more impress
sive to us when it least Immediately in
structs.
With such vividness, with such trans
parent clearness the age stands before
us of Cato and Pompcy, of Cicero
and Julius Caesar; the more distinctly
because it was an age in so many ways
the counterpart of our own, the bios
soming period of the old civilization,
when the intellect was trained to the
highest point which it could reach, and
on the great subjects of human inter
est, on morals and politics, on poetry
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