That every revolution, it matters not how great the need of the change produced by it, is as such an enormous evil, a serious, and sometimes, fatal disease of the body politic, is self-evident. The injury to morals which the spectacle of victorious wrong almost always produces can be healed, as a rule, only in the following generation. Where law has been once trampled on, the “right of the stronger” will prevail; and the stronger is, to some extent, the most unscrupulous and reckless in the choice of the means to be employed. Hence, the well-known fact, that in revolutionary times the worst so frequently remain the victors. The counter-revolution which is wont to follow on the heels of revolution, and with a corresponding violence, is a compensation only to the most shortsighted. It allows the disease, the familiarizing of the people with the infringement of law, to continue, until the hitherto sound parts are attacked. Hence, a people should, if they would have it go well with them, in the changes in the form of things which they make, take as their model Time, whose reforms are the surest and most irresistible, but, at the same time, as Bacon says, so gradual that they cannot be seen or observed at any one moment. It is true, that, as all that is great is difficult, so also is the carrying out of uninterrupted reform. Its carrying out, indeed, supposes two things: a constitution so wisely planned as to keep the doors open both to the disappearing institutions of the past and to the coming institutions of the future; and, among all classes of the people, a moral control of themselves, so absolute that, no matter what the inconvenience, or how great the sacrifice, legal ways shall alone be used. In this manner, two of the greatest and apparently most contradictory wants of every legal or moral person, the want of uninterrupted continuity and that of free development, may be satisfied. Section XXV. The Idealistic Method. (Continued.)