Yet with these examples, good Americans, with confident smiles, for three years have been laughing at the Democratic administration on account of their Mexican policy. "Conquer Mexico," the wiseacres say. Yes, conquer Mexico the way England has tried and failed to conquer Ireland! The political value of history lies in its disclosures of the defects that have brought on decay, and the stumbling blocks that make trouble. In reading history we must keep our eyes on the present. It is unreasonable to believe that our government is an infallible one, or that our national existence, maintained with the most stable governmental authority, combined with the widest possible latitude for the liberty of men, is any more infallible than the many other systems that have met with disaster in the past. The reading of history is valuable, in that it enables us to have those visions of the future that will be fruitful in that they are moulded by our experiences in the past. Such visions, inculcating power of judgment, are never more requisite than in these days in which the blind pacifist, the quack reformer, the misguided theorist, and the wide-promising demagogue are abroad in the land. We must study our lessons of the past that we may spurn those governmental cure-alls evolved, according to Alexander Hamilton, "in the reveries of those political doctors, whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction." American history properly forms the most fruitful subject of study for Americans, and yet one must have a wide background to obtain the proper crop. One must soon be led to the investigation of our legislative, executive and judicial functions as they developed through the evolution of constitutional government in England. The democratic models traced to the Grecian states, the seeds of "sans-culotte" philosophy that Jefferson and Tom Paine brought from France, the thought of political scientists such as Plato, Machiavel, Locke, and Montesquieu open fields in which every reader may learn lessons that will guide his judgment in the ever-important problems of the day.