Most people suppose that it is difficult to write history in advance. There is no greater delusion. Facts—even when we can get at them and are sure of them, which seldom happens—are great obstructions to a narrative. They involve sudden leaps into unforeseen depths of human action, perplexing struggles through very dynastic uncertainties, or ascents to unexpected developments of character, trying to one’s judgment and patience, and often hurtful to one’s pride of opinion. Our preconceptions, unverified by a set of obstinate facts, are distressed by the unsatisfactory contradictions. We halt dissatisfied on a dusty road, which the tramp of events has worn smooth, and left nothing to novelty or an industrious fancy. Besides, the great majority of readers are partisans, and have a right to be disappointed at and to blame those unreasoning conclusions, which slide inevitably out of realities. They confront sternly those facts, which affront them, by insisting on happening in a way or order different from their expectations or wishes. Hitherto, we have been obliged to conform to the hard conditions thus inherent in actual chronicles, and have been forced to submit our readers to these annoying certainties. We can, however, now dismiss these tantalizing fixities of events, which have run before us, and left us the wearisome business of catching up to them; and leaving them to overtake us, if they can, to write up a future history of events, which ought to happen, and which will greatly disappoint the sanguine expectations of Americans if they do not. The excuse for failure will be lessened by the outlined path which we here stretch downward into the wooded future. We take it for granted, then, that all our future Presidents will be the very best and most competent men in the nation, spontaneously acclamated to the office, and not wrung out by industrious party conventions for political ends. Uncommitted to committees or political sponsors, and unweighted by onerous gratitude to ex-working party canvassers, they will naturally hereafter pensively appoint to Cabinet places and diplomatic posts statesmen of pre-eminent ability, patriotism, and integrity, who will as modestly wait to be invited in, as the same class now, when in, stand as if hopelessly deaf, to be distinctly invited out. That they will reluctantly, if at all, subject weak citizens to the pains and penalties of executing and garroting the laws, or the slow and unpractised, to the heavy tasks of carrying the public burdens.