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Show The Wisdom of tbe Fathers. I There is a class of men in all countries who seem to have no reverence for the men or achiev-L achiev-L ments of the present; they are always looking backward and seem grieved that the men of a hundred or a thousand years ago were not des-' des-' tined to live forever. Such men in our country ! cling to the very letter of the Constitution and re- fuse to accept the belief that while holding every command of It inviolate still it must be construed to meet conditions which the framers could not have had any conception of. In the same way the v expressions of the wise men of the Revolution spoken in conversation or written in letters, expressions ex-pressions which were never official and which wore meant only to apply to the then conditions, are repeated now as though they were semi-DI-I vine commands. k The fact that the nation has increased from seven millions to eighty-five millions; that the schools have multiplied and increased in scope and usefulness in a still greater ratio; that all tho industries of the country have been revolution-I revolution-I ized; that the perfecting press and magnetic tele s' graph give us each day the history of the world for the preceding day; that things generally have advanced as much as the advancement has been from the spark caught on Franklin's kite to the electric engine and the lights that illuminate our cities at night count for naught with them, j They Ignore the truth that from a few clustering hamlets on the Eastern sea .shore, a continent has been spanned and settled and that invention has made it possible for a man to accomplish ac-complish more now in three score years than could the fathers have accomplished with their methods and opinion in the nine hundred and sixty-nine years allotted to Methuselah. They ignore the fact that such changes of conditions con-ditions have brought with them new duties, new responsibilities and new problems which must be solved. They make no acounting of broadening horizona or of now lights. They stand, where did the priests who thought they were serving God when they made Copernicus recant after he hnd traced out the sublime order of the planets and rolling suns. Such people should read the closing words of Lord Brougham's mai-iul essay on Sir .William Grant. After picturing him a& the foxemost of lawyers, the wisest of Midges as a statesman of such power that on one occasion when he was speaking and Fox was to reply, when members near Fox wero distrubing him by their talk Fox turned and bade them cease saying: "Do you think it Is very pleasant a thing to have to answer an-swer a speech like that? " Still Lord Brougham says: "Yet the commanding intellect, the close reasoner, who could overpower other men's understanding un-derstanding by the superior force o his own, was the slave of his own prejudices to such an extent ex-tent that he could see only the perils of revolution revolu-tion In any reformation of our institutions, and never conceived it possible that the monarchy could be safe, or that anarchy could be warded off, unless all things could be maintained upon the same footing on which they stood in early, unenlightened and inexperienced ages of tho world. The signal blunder, which Bacon long ago exposed, of confounding the youth with the age of the species, was never committed by any one more glaringly than by this great reasoner. He it was who first employed, the well known phrase of 4 ..e wisdom of our ancestors." Strange force of early prejudice of prejudice suffered to warp the intellect the. making of the errors of mankind in tlieir ignorant and inexperienced state the guide of their conduct at their mature age, and asserting to those errors as the wisdom of past time, when they were the unripe fruit of Imperfect culture." |