"But ye said, Nay, but we will flee upon horses; therefore shall ye flee: and, We will ride upon the swift; therefore shall they that pursue you be swift."[45] 3. And has not gloom been the normal characteristic of many a long period of human history? It is with the life of nations as with the life of men. With nations, too, there is "a perpetual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all strength into dust." Humanity advances, but it advances over the ruins of peoples and the wrecks of institutions. Truth forces its way into acceptance, but its progress is "from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake." All who have generalised on the course of history have been forced to recognise its agonies and disappointments. There, says Byron, "There is the moral of all human tales; 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past; First Freedom, and then Glory--when that fails, Wealth, Vice, Corruption--Barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page: 'tis better written here Where gorgeous tyranny hath thus amassed All treasures, all delights that eye or ear, Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask." Mr. J. R. Lowell, looking at the question from another side, sings:-- "Careless seems the Great Avenger; History's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt all systems and the Word; Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the throne-- Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own." Mr. W. H. Lecky, again, considering the facts of national story from the point of view of heredity, and the permanent consequences of wrong-doing, sings:-- "The voice of the afflicted is rising to the sun, The thousands who have perished for the selfishness of one; The judgment-seat polluted, the altar overthrown, The sighing of the exile, the tortured captive's groan, The many crushed and plundered to gratify the few, The hounds of hate pursuing the noble and the true." Or, if we desire a prose authority, can we deny this painful estimate of Mr. Ruskin?--"Truly it seems to me as I gather in my mind the evidence of insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope in which the nations of the world have lived since first they could bear record of themselves, it seems to me, I say, as if the race itself were still half serpent, not extricated yet from its clay; a lacertine brood of bitterness, the glory of it emaciate with cruel hunger and blotted with venomous stain, and the track of it on the leaf a glittering slime, and in the sand a useless furrow."[46]