moral. Undoubtedly it might be pressed into the service of the persons who agree with the Yankee who believed "in humbug generally," because it was a thing which he perceived "to have a solid vally." But, in truth, it is merely one corollary from the very obvious and salutary truth that in this world happiness and success are not strictly proportioned to virtue. It would be a bad thing, we all know, if the devil had all the good music; and it would be equally undesirable that he should have all the fools or even all the knaves on his side. The majority would be too overpowering. Luckily there are, if not knaves, at least humbugs on all sides; and though they do not mean it, good may even in this sense come out of evil. The world would be much simpler if the goats and sheep could be kept in two separate herds. As matters are, it is a comfort to reflect that the goats may be pressed into a service to which in the abstract they have an aversion. If it is safe to assume that the world improves on the whole, we may believe that truth will gradually work itself free of error, and the solid work supplant the shams. But it is a complicated and slow process; and there is no test of universal application which will enable us to say, in regard to any given works, this is entirely sound and enduring, and that hopelessly rotten and temporary.
AN UNCONSIDERED VIEW OF THE FUTURE OF EUROPE.
There is one aspect of the present condition of Europe which subjects the amiable delusions of thirty years since to perhaps the most dramatic form of exposure which they could have received. The doctrine that "the individual withers and the race is more and more," had, a generation ago, a political as well as a social application. There was probably no article of the orthodox Liberal creed more firmly held by Liberals than the belief that the influence of individual will, the importance of individual lives, would steadily diminish with the progress of the democratic principle. Just now, when Europe has been in a ferment at the idea that one man is bent upon plunging her into war, and has recovered her composure on learning that another man is disposed to preserve the peace, the doctrine to which we have referred may be said, perhaps, to have reached the nadir of its discredit. Its utter refutation by facts is somewhat singular, considering that the democratic principle, on the progress of which its realization was said to depend, has undoubtedly progressed. The "year of revolutions" was but a year, but we cannot deny that everything is changed in Europe since those eventful days when crowns were tumbling to the ground everywhere, like so many apples in a gale of wind. The Constitutions of 1848 did not all of them wear very well, it is true; but the influence which begot them left its mark, and that a deepening and widening mark, upon European politics. No absolutist government of the present day is as despotic as it was before 1848; some which were absolutist then are today more or less constitutional in character. In none is it possible to say that the people count for as little as they used to do in the government of their country. Yet, in spite of all this, events have tended to concentrate power in fewer hands, until at last it has been possible to say that the fate of Europe rests at the arbitrament of two men, and that of the two the one whose power is less absolute in theory is perhaps the most powerful in fact. But whatever the nature of these two individual forces, whether original or delegated, there can be little doubt of their magnitude even apart from each other, or of the overwhelming force which they could exercise in combination.
To say, however, that the fate of Europe depends on a single will, or upon the will of two or three men, is to say that it depends upon one or two or three lives. And it is this reflection which is perhaps the most humbling to democratic pride in the matter. For if to the lives of those who concentrate the material power over Europe in their hands be added the life of the most powerful spiritual chief, we cannot but feel how precarious are the conditions on which all our attempts to forecast the European future must be made. Prince Bismarck, the czar, the pope — how much depends on the duration of two of these lives; how much might be changed by the termination of the third! And is there even the average security for the longduration of any of the three? Last week Pius IX. entered upon his eighty-fourth year. Prince Bismarck’s is neither in point of age nor in point of health a life to which one could confidently add another decade. He is an overworked super-sensitive man of upwards of sixty, bearing a greater
