The individual may govern himself after a fashion ; but to govern wisely another man, or, still harder, great masses of men, even where there has been community of public interests, of language, religion and custom -- aye, there has been the rub! Human history has often been called a great tragedy; but no tragic element is more ghastly or more overwhelming than the catastrophes in which most governments have collapsed. Ambitious attempts at world-power, the most splendid combinations 1o group nations into a civic unity, have tottered to their fall, as i.urely as the little systems which have had their day and ceased to be, -- shifting, fleeting, impotent. It is not difficult to see \Vhy this has been so. Social life is only one plhase of the great organic hfe of the species ; one scene of the human drama of which the earth has been " the wide and universal theatre." Change, transition, development, birth, growth, death, are universal elements in the cosmic order. Of the slow but inevitable changes in the physical history of the earth, Tennyson savs :

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" There rolls the deep, where stood the tree ; O earth, what changes hast thou seen ; There where the long street roars, has been The stillness of the central sea. " The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form ; and nothing stands ; They melt like mists, the solid lands ; Like clouds they shape themselves and go." If this mutation be true of organic changes in the physical earth, working through immeasurable aeons, it is even as dramatically true of organized social life. We are learning to take a new view of history. It is no longer regarded as a collection of isolated facts. Veracious history is a record of the orderly progression of events, developed by evolutionary processes.