position and power, has followed close upon the moral abrogation of some one of those safeguards which the wisdom of our fathers threw around our political system. On the other hand, advancement which does not keep pace with the expansion of thought, the intellectual development, and consequent capacity of the people for self-government, not only offers no encouragement to effort, but actually discourages all striving, and blunts the appetites of the searchers for truth. It fossilizes the people, retards the march of intellect by its reactionary force, and rolls backward the wheels of all progress, till the nation becomes a community of dull, contented plodders, fixed in the ruts of a bygone age, suffering all its energy and life to rust away, day by day, in inaction. Such we find to be the case with those nations of the Old World which are still ruled by the effete systems of a feudal age. The governmental policy and the intellectual status of the masses mutually react upon each other, effectually neutralizing all progress, whether moral or physical. For these reasons that nicely graduated mean between political recklessness and national old fogyism, which alone guarantees an enduring progress, is the object of search to all disinterested political reformers. For only by following such a golden mean, in which political reform shall keep even pace with intellectual and moral advancement, can physical and mental progress be made mutually to sustain each other in the onward march. Yet this mean is extremely difficult to find, for though we be guided by all the experience of the past, and earnestly and sincerely endeavor to profit by the failures as well as the successes of those who have gone before us, the paths of experiment are so infinite and the combinations of method so boundless, that the wisest may easily be led astray. Hence the failures of the republics of the past, however pure the motives and lofty the aims of their founders, may be attributed to a leaning to one side or the other of this strait and narrow way, which lies so closely concealed amid the myriad ramifications of the paths of method. The slightest divergence, if it be not corrected, like the infinitesimal divergence of two straight lines, goes on increasing to all time, till that which was at first imperceptible, becomes at last a boundless ocean of intervening space, which no human effort can bridge.