We have already records of the immediate state of the minds and fortunes of men and of communities, and not a few speculations which stretch far forward into the future. Every year is the admission more extensively entered into that moral power is nobler than physical force; there is more earnestness in the conferences of nations, and less proneness to war. The highest creations of literature itself, however long ago produced, are now discovered to bear as close a relation to the future as the past. They are for all time, through all its changes. While pillars of light in the dim regions of antiquity, they pass over in the dawn, and are still before us, casting their shadows to our feet as guides into the dazzling future. Pre-eminent among them is the Book which never had any retrospective character in it. It never sanctioned physical force, pride of ancestry, of valour, of influence, or any other pride. It never sanctioned arbitrary division of ranks. It never lauded the virtues of feudalism in their disconnection with other virtues; it never spared the faults of feudalism, on the ground of their being the necessary product of feudal circumstances; neither does it now laud and tolerate the virtues and vices developed by democracy. This guide has never yet taken up its rest. It is in advance of all existing democracies, as it ever was of all despotisms. The fact is, that, while all manifestations of eminent intellectual and moral force have an imperishable quality, this supreme book has not only an immortal freshness, but bears no relation to time:--to it "one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." What are the prevalent virtues and faults which are to be looked for in the future,--or in those countries which represent somewhat of the future, as others afford a weakened image of the past? What allowance is the traveller in America to make? Almost precisely the reverse of what he would make in Russia.