One word more: You have seen fit to quote Burke and Milton, for the sake of a fling at the _clergy_ who venture to discuss the questions of the day. I do not know how far some of your associates will be disposed to thank you. Perhaps their being on your side gives them a capacity not possessed by the others, and exempts them from the application of your rebuke. I have an impression that the culture and habits of thinking of the members of the clerical profession do not particularly unfit them for taking just and sound views on the questions that agitate the public mind, and that their position--cutting them off from all offices and emoluments that are the objects of ambition to party politicians--gives them some special advantages for doing so. For myself, having all my life been devoted to study and thought on the great principles of social and moral order, I feel myself as well qualified, at least, to offer an opinion, as though I had been devoted to the mechanical application of the principles of physical science. C. S. HENRY. BUCKLE, DRAPER, AND THE LAW OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT. _FIRST PAPER._ So parallel are the lines of thought in Mr. Buckle's 'History of Civilization' and Professor Draper's 'Intellectual Development of Europe,' while they continue within the same limits in discussing the law of individual and social progress; and so exactly does the latter work resume the consideration of this law at the point where the English writer abandoned its further analysis, to commence to apply that which he had made to the history of various nations, that one might almost suppose the two authors had undertaken the task conjointly, and divided the work between them. It was the purpose of Mr. Buckle, in his introduction, to ascertain the sources of social, and, incidentally, of individual development--the fundamental causes of human progression; and subsequently to verify the principles established, by tracing, in general outlines, the rise and advance of leading nations under their impulse. The basis upon which he started in his examination was this: 'That when we perform an action, we perform it in consequence of some motive or motives; that those motives are the results of some antecedents; and that, therefore, if we were acquainted with the whole of the antecedents, and with all the laws of their movements, we could with unerring certainty predict the whole of their immediate results.'