Common Sense in Politics

eir patriotism and their depth of learning. He does not believe that their utterances must be taken as a perpetual guide for all modern conditions of which they could not have had knowledge and which they could not even have imagined. Intellectual life during Revolutionary days differed as much from present intellectual life as the rules of fractions differ from integral calculus. Commercial conditions were as simple then, compared with conditions now, as addition is compared with the binomial theorem. Many of the sciences were in their infancy, and many which contribute to-day to the luxuries and necessities of lifewere then unknown. Transportation and the diffusion of knowledge have reached a point never conceived by the Fathers. During Washington's second administration he expressed confidence that the mails would some day be carried from Philadelphia to New York inside of twenty-four hours. He was laughed at by the people and ridiculed by the press for this prophecy. To-day the mail is carried from Jersey City to Philadelphia in ninety minutes. Had Jules Verne written at the time of the Revolution his imaginings would have been deemed to border on witchcraft. To-day his romancing has merged into realization. Trains run under rivers and through the earth; men fly through the air; messages are conveyed by electricity and are sent through the air without physical medium. The human voice can be heard over hundreds if not thousands of miles of distance, and whis...