Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/183

170 mankind. A military despotism was once the best tool man had devised for political work. Where are such things now? Human history is marked by the institutions cast off and left behind. What once is borne as the banner in front of humanity, the symbol of its purpose and the gathering point of its heroes, is one day thrown down in the dust as a worthless rag, and trodden by the rear-guard, nay, by the very stragglers of mankind. How many "settled opinions" of philosophers have perished; how much "immortal literature" has gone to the ground; while laws of Medes and Persians have been repealed by the supreme court of time, and become obsolete and forgotten by humanity. You may trace man's path through time as space by what he abandons. Ancient arrows and pestles are turned up by the farmer's plough, ancient policies and philosophies by the spade of the scholar—forms of the family or of the state successively built up out of human nature and successively crumbling down. In two thousand years the most progressive portion of the Anglo-Saxon tribe has left behind it absolute monarchy, limited monarchy, and aristocracy. In thirty or forty thousand years how much has the human race passed by I All these institutions, like the machines of the world of art, are amenable to perpetual improvement, subject to continual revision in the progressive development of mankind. You and I are not ashamed of a democracy because our fathers once swore allegiance to William the Conqueror, or patiently bore the yoke of Henry VIII. What a difference between the savages world of institutions and that of the civilized man; between this "Indian country" of 1555, and the Pennsylvania of today, with your world of institutions, art, sciences, literature—domestic, social, and political customs. But all of this comes out of human nature—one attempt made after the other, many failing. Here also the advance is through progression by experiment. Look over the seventy volumes of statutes of the British Realm—through the history of medicine or machinery—see how much has become worthless, obsolete, and worn-out: laws lying there like spent bullets flattened out and rusted through; engines exploded long ago; medicines which humanity