We see most men like tee-totums spinning to the left and leading a dismal life. How shall we get their motive power to spin them to the right, and make them happy? The practical question is: how to use the power of sunlight to turn our mills. How can we hold up a prism to the times that shall disintegrate these rays of complex force, and then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers of good and make them turn the wheels of society? The elements are before us, ceaselessly in motion. πάντα ῥεῖ. The most adamantine institutions are cloud palaces. There is no stability anywhere; and if you have a steady eye you will see that the whole fabric is in a flux. Nor are the changes arbitrary. The formations and re-formations are governed by laws as certain as those of astronomy. Study the changes and you will find the laws. Subserve the laws and you can affect the formations. Julius Cæsar did no more. The strands of prejudice and passion that bind people together pulsate with life. All these fellow-citizens are human beings, and there is no one of them whom we cannot understand, reach, influence. The ordinary modes of intercourse are at hand. Chief among them you find the great machinery of government. It dwarfs every other agency, whether for good or ill. In America this machinery was designed to be at the service of anybody. It is an advertising agency for ideas, and it is very much more than this; since the fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge. You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it. And on the other hand, no amount of verbal proof will justify a new thought until it has been put in practice. Alas for ink and paper! There is in all speech and writing a conventional presumption that human beings shall be logical, or fixed quantities, or at least coherent creatures. For the purposes of an essay or a speech, you prove your case, and carry weight accordingly. If you are very cogent and conclusive, why, you win. Hurrah! the world is saved. But in real life there are no fixed quantities; all the terms are variables.