Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
At ten, a child; at twenty, wild;
At thirty, strong, if ever;
At forty, wise; at fifty, rich;
At sixty, good, or never.
But at what age has any nation of any period or place become
wise, rich, or even strong; to say nothing of good?
The Roman Catholic Church is older than any civilized government
on the globe. Lord Macaulay says:
It is the only institution left standing which carries the
mind back to the time when the smoke of sacrifice rose from
the Pantheon, and when tigers and camel leopards bounded in
the Flavian Amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but
of yesterday, compared with the line of the supreme
Pontiffs, traced back in unbroken series, from the Pope who
crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope who
crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond stretches the
august dynasty, until it fades into the twilight of fable!
She saw the commencement of all the governments on the
globe, and of all the ecclesiastical establishments now
existing; and there is no assurance that she is not destined
to see the end of them all!"
The world has an accepted chronology of six thousand years. Its
history and experience in government reach back forty centuries.
It would be an interesting inquiry with what results governments
have existed so long, especially in the later periods and among
the most enlightened of the nations. Charles the Fifth boasted
that his empire saw no setting sun. It included Spain and all her
vast American provinces, over large part of which to-day wave our
own Stars and Stripes. The national escutcheon bore two globes;
and the coin, the two Pillars of Hercules, the then acknowledged
boundary of the Eastern world, with the motto "More beyond."
Spain, under Philip Second, dictated law, learning, religion,
especially religion, to unknown millions, not alone in Europe,
but in North and South America, Africa and all the Indies. And
now in the remote south-western corner of Europe is all that
remains of this mighty power of the sixteenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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