rent of national life, and to incapacitate him for a place in the public councils. This singular new nation was no respecter of grandfathers. It took its superior men wherever it found them. It picked its chief statesman out of a log cabin in Illinois, its chief military hero out of an Ohio tannery, its most eminent poet from a carpenter's shop, and its leading man of letters from a pilot-house on the Mississippi. Such standards! Henry spent a life-time elaborating his grand principle of the degradation of energy, to explain to himself why the three grandsons of two presidents of the United States all ended miserably: one as President of the Kansas City Stock Yards; one as a member of the Massachusetts Bar; while one had sunk to the level of a Professor of History at Harvard.
From the point of view of these antique republicans, the period from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century proves the truth of all the prophesies against the average man. This is the period of triumphant democracy—meaning, of course, the triumph, not of the political party, but of the religious principle. In this epoch, the gates of opportunity open as never before to the populace, to the new men. What are the results? Throughout the period, the steadily waning influence of Eastern
