We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the past having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments and he might have said of peoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to have dripped from the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also, and to their decrees.

That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems plain enough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so clear. With a kind of education--most men taught to read, very few to think--the masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves. They will continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling contrasts of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a social and political structure claiming to rest upon the formula "equality for all, special privilege for none."

The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism, disappointed of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after the ensuing "dark ages," like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece and Rome, emerge with a new civilization and religion.

"Man never is, but always to be blessed." We know not whence we came, or whither we go. Hope that springs eternal in the human breast tells us nothing. History seems, as Napoleon said, a series of lies agreed upon, yet not without dispute.