Before he had finished speaking, Leacraft had left his chair, and was walking to and fro near the speaker--and then he advanced to the edge of the few steps that led from the piazza to the open swards beneath them, which were fringed by an emergent crown of trees growing thickly in some lower crease or hollow of the ground, beyond which again the eye fell to the foot swells, and the undulations of land far off, in the flats, just beginning to twinkle with lights. Leacraft spoke slowly, his eyes still fixed upon the distance, as if in revery, but his measured words came clearly to his two friends, carried by a voice which, always melodious and cultured, now gained a sort of passionate yearning, and then again was approved as disinterestedly clean and judicial: “All this is an episode. Nothing more. The future of the races of the world means the widening scope of the Republican idea. There can be no other. Education forbids its extinction. Yes, and Authority endorses it. This sudden foolishness in Australia will only invoke a perilous reaction. There can be to-day in governmental systems only varied applications of the one thought; the rule of the people through an appeal to the people’s choice of rulers. It is fundamentally common sense in an era of enlightenment, to begin with; but since the United States have eclipsed all nations, and raised the standards of individual action beyond all previous estimates, this conclusion has coercively been accepted, that through the influences propagated under this popular freedom of control, the finest, the richest, the sweetest, the most magnanimous types of character are also engendered and completed. A kind of psychological logic is involved. A vast psychic power of selection sets in, and irrevocably the most noble, the most disenthralled natures slowly appear. In comparison with their best results, the representatives of other cultures appear dwindling and abortive. And why? Because in the least limited field of opportunity the unrestrained power of nature to make character must of necessity evolve consummate and supreme examples. Nothing is more demonstrable. It must be conceded, I grant, that at first the crop of temperaments is marked more by rash hardihood, strident vulgarities, and climbing audacity, but these very qualities, which in the naming seem so distasteful, mature naturally, in later generations, into devoted courage, æsthetic spontaneity; juices of the fruit when green form the basis of its later richness.