ever a fighter. His political opponents said of him that his foot was always in the stirrup. His mind rested not by inactivity, but by "stretching itself out in another direction." He threw himself into new and important movements for humanity with tremendous zeal and force.
Lord Macaulay pithily expresses a law of human progress: "The point which yesterday was invisible is our goal to-day, and will be our starting post to-morrow." Maurice Maeterlinck says: "If at the moment you think or say something that is too beautiful to be true in you—if you have but endeavored to think or to say it to-day, on the morrow it will be true. We must try to be more beautiful than ourselves; we shall never distance our soul."
In the problem of growth do not neglect Emerson's principle of compensation. As men injure or help others, so they injure or help themselves. Punishment is the inseparable attendant of crime. Requital is swift, sure, and exact. Vice makes spiritual blindness. The real drama of life is within. Some one has said that punishment for misdeeds is not something which happens to a man, but something which happens in a man. Balzac describes a magic skin, endowed with power to measure the term of life of its possessor, which shrank with his every expressed wish. Personal worth grows or shrinks with the daily life and thought. Every one can will his own growth in strength and symmetry or can become dwarfed and degenerate. Wrong takes away from the sum of worth; virtue makes increase from the source of all good. Emerson says that even a man's defects may be turned to good. For
