Power implies responsibility. The rigid administration of justice is part of this responsibility. Let us have none but good laws, and a strict execution of them. Homicide sometimes has the air of an epidemic in the United States, thanks in great part to the non-enforcement of the laws against carrying secreted weapons. Chicane, an exhaustless armory of conflicting precedents and decisions, stupid or corrupt juries, too ready power of appeal, and other sources of legal wrong, are quite within the reach of reform, and their continued domination is an anachronism.
Population and wealth have, in their rapid increase, added at once to the temptations and the opportunities of the evil-disposed. Of course, some unwholesome fruits of so extraordinary a movement were to be looked for in the great mass of better ones. Here in America, for one item, is a nation of sixty millions, the product of a single century, all to be organized, clothed, fed, educated, and policed. They are composed of many different races, speaking different mother tongues, and reared under every conceivable circumstance of climate and polity. The new people has not only created itself a civilized home out of the wilderness, but has exerted a powerful reflex influence upon the Old World, contributing to it inventions abstract and material and awakening its energies as they were never stirred before. It has in turn borrowed what Europe could contribute to the common stock of knowledge and progress. A great deal she has contributed, too. The deepest thinkers are apt to be found in the older and more settled communities: investigation craves a certain degree of repose. Thus, in science, literature, and even in mechanical contrivance to a great extent, Europe has remained in the lead. The lights of discovery have beamed first upon her soil. Davy, Berzelius, Arago, Dalton, Faraday, Darwin, Daguerre, and a long list of almost equal note belong to her. We may claim Fulton, Whitney, Morse, Bell, and Edison, besides Franklin, who dates with the opening of our century.
The task of applying steam to locomotion, the central one of the period, was divided between the two great Anglo-Saxon states. England placed steam upon the rail after America had set it afloat. The steamer and the locomotive have gone, we had almost said, everywhere. The latter, however, has yet new worlds of wilderness to conquer. Practically, it has borne the sea inland, and created navigable creeks and rich harbors in the heart of continents. The telegraph follows its path, and goes beyond it into the desert which it will yet traverse and under the sea where it cannot go. Napoleon's boast that the Alps had ceased to exist has been made good by the railway, and it will ere long obliterate Sicily and England as islands.
The railway, the ocean-steamer, the electric light, telegraph, and motor, photography, chloroform, and minor discoveries attendant or dependent, date within the memory of men not well past middle age. Divided into periods of comparative facility of intercourse and unification of interest, the world's whole history centres less than fifty years ago. Who shall predict the events of another half century? All these triumphs are triumphs of peace. War is incothpatible with them. They have created a sort of "Federation of the World," though the "Parliament of Man" be not yet called to order. His rulers, in fact, are a little afraid of their new tools of destruction. Torpedoes, iron-dads, hundred-ton guns, and dynamite shells are fearsome playthings. Nobody can say how any of them will turn out when tested against each other. Sea-fights may eventuate like the combats of the condottieri in mediaeval Italy, where the antagonists were prostrated in their impenetrable armor and neither could rise again.
But the preacher and the schoolmaster are both abroad. If men learn to think, they will think right; and to think right is to he just, and to be just is to be good. The choice of guides, for present and future, was never freer or wider. What more can be said ?