As to what Mr. Pearson says about the work of the world which is best worth doing being now done, the facts do not bear him out. He thinks that the great poems have all been written, that the days of the drama and the epic are past. Yet one of the greatest plays that has ever been produced, always excepting the plays of Shakespeare, was produced in this century; and if the world had to wait nearly two thousand years after the vanishing of the Athenian dramatists before Shakespeare appeared, and two hundred years more before Goethe wrote his one great play, we can well afford to suspend judgment for a few hundred years at least, before asserting that no country and no language will again produce another great drama. So it is with the epic. We are too near Milton, who came three thousand years after Homer, to assert that the centuries to come will never more see an epic. One race may grow feeble and decrepit and be unable to do any more work; but another may take its place. After a time the Greek and Latin writers found that they had no more to say; and a critic belonging to either nationality might have shaken his head and said that all the great themes had been used up and all the great ideas expressed; nevertheless, Dante, Cervantes, Molière, Schiller, Chaucer, and Scott, then all lay in the future. Again, Mr. Pearson speaks of statecraft at the present day as offering fewer prizes, and prizes of less worth than formerly, and as giving no chance for the development of men like Augustus Cæsar, Richelieu, or Chatham. It is difficult to perceive how these men can be considered to belong to a different class from Bismarck, who is yet alive; nor do we see why any English-speaking people should regard a statesman like Chatham, or far greater that Chatham, as an impossibility nowadays or in the future. We Americans at least will with difficulty be persuaded that there has ever been a time when a nobler prize of achievement, suffering, and success was offered to any statesman than was offered both to Washington and to Lincoln. So, when Mr. Pearson speaks of the warfare of civilized countries offering less chance to the individual than the warfare of savage and barbarous times, and of its being far less possible now than in old days for a man to make his personal influence felt in warfare, we can only express our disagreement. No world-conqueror can arise save in or next to highly civilized States. There never has been a barbarian Alexander or Cæsar, Hannibal or Napoleon. Sitting Bull and Rain-in-the-Face compare but ill with Von Moltke; and no Norse king of all the heroic viking age even so much as began to exercise the influence upon the warfare of his generation that Frederick the Great exercised on his.