'We must, therefore, no longer regard nations or groups of men as offering a permanent picture. Human affairs must be looked upon as in continuous movement, not wandering in an arbitrary manner here and there, but proceeding in a perfectly definite course. Whatever may be the present state, it is altogether transient. All systems of civil life are therefore necessarily ephemeral. Time brings new conditions; the manner of thought is modified; with thought, action. Institutions of all kinds must hence participate in this fleeting nature; and, though they may have allied themselves to political power, and gathered therefrom the means of coercion, their permanency is but little improved thereby; for, sooner or later, the population on whom they have been imposed, following the external variations, spontaneously outgrows them, and their ruin, though it may have been delayed, is none the less certain. For the permanency of any such system it is essentially necessary that it should include with its own organization a law of change, and not of change only, but change in the right direction--the direction in which the society interested is about to pass. It is in an oversight of this last essential condition that we find an explanation of the failure of so many such institutions. Too commonly do we believe that the affairs of men are determined by a spontaneous action or free will; we keep that overpowering influence which really controls them in the background. In individual life we also accept a like deception, living in the belief that everything we do is determined by the volition of ourselves or of those around us; nor is it until the close of our days that we discern how great is the illusion, and that we have been swimming, playing, and struggling in a stream which, in spite of all our voluntary motions, has silently and resistlessly borne us to a predetermined shore.' These lines were written before the commencement of our civil war. The following sentence, taken from the postscript to the preface, gives them, at this time, additional significance: 'When a nation has reached one of the epochs of its life, and is preparing itself for another period of progress under new conditions; it is well for every thoughtful man interested in its prosperity to turn his eyes from the contentions of the present to the accomplished facts of the past, and to seek for a solution of existing difficulties in the record of what other people in former times have done.'