I am going to suggest that the orator then enjoyed a privilege which can be compared to the lawyer’s “right of assumption.” This is the right to assume that precedents are valid, that forms will persist, and that in general one may build today on what was created yesterday. What mankind has sanctified with usage has a presumption in its favor. Such presumption, it was felt, instead of being an obstacle to progress, furnishes the ground for progress. More simply, yesterday’s achievements are also contributions to progress. It is he who insists upon beginning every day _de novo_ who denies the reality of progress. Accordingly, consider the American orator in the intellectual climate of this time. He was comfortably circumstanced with reference to things he could “know” and presume everyone else to know in the same way. Freedom and morality were constants; the Constitution was the codification of all that was politically feasible; Christianity of all that was morally authorized. Rome stood as an exemplum of what may happen to nations; the American and French Revolutions had taught rulers their necessary limitations. Civilization has thought over its thousands of years of history and has made some generalizations which are the premises of other arguments but which are not issues themselves. When one asserts that the Romans had a “high standard of moral virtue which made them the easy masters of their race,” one is affirming a doctrine of causality in a sweeping way. If one had to stop and “prove” that moral virtue makes one master, one obviously would have to start farther down the ladder of assumption. But these things were not in the area of argument because progress was positive and that meant that some things have to be assimilated as truths. Men were not condemned to repeat history, because they remembered its lessons. To the extent that the mind had made its summations, it was free to go forward, and forward meant in the direction of more inclusive conceptions. The orator who pauses along the way to argue a point which no one challenges only demeans the occasion. Therefore the orator of the period we have defined did not feel that he had to argue the significance of everything to which he attached significance. Some things were fixed by universal enlightened consensus; and they could be used as steps for getting at matters which were less settled and hence were proper subjects for deliberation. Deliberation is good only because it decreases the number of things it is necessary to deliberate about.