The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863, page 199 by Various Authors
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ration.
Not always, as it seems to us, do the swiftest and clearest methods find favor with these hard-pressed worthies, but rather such methods as they can employ; and in time, as we see, the work gets done.
Take our planet in the condition in which its first proprietor found it on his arrival, and you will see that the improvements would be a heavy item in transactions with a real-estate broker for it. Liberal governments established--Canton, Paris, London, New York built--grain fields, mills, patent offices, world's fairs, electric telegraphs, ocean steamers, iron-clads, Central Park, show a long road travelled, and much rough, terrible, fearful work done by the way--work which has developed a condition for the exercise of the fine sovereignty of woman's pure, gentle, loving, harmonious nature--road which leads by divine intention to her empire. If the hand which has opened it has been red at times, let us remember that no purer color could have been preserved in the Thermopylæ--if the heart has been hard, that a softer one would have been surely defeated and we disadvantaged. Well could we afford to abide in the twilight-land when such struggle was going forward in our behalf, when the sunshine was descending upon such seedtime of the ages--to whose harvest we are drawing nigh.
The sceptre of Supreme Use on the earth is to the hand that is sovereign for that use. In its day every other power is subordinate to that, for it is the nature of sovereignty to be unitary, whether lodged in an idea or a person. It is because of this that personal sovereignty has been indispensable to human progress. Nothing could reign over the strong, undeveloped, turbulent brute life of the early and middle ages but the tremendous will and self-love of a man great according to his time--Charlemagne, Peter of Russia, Henry of Navarre.
And shall we complain that a development is slow which began with a Soudanese, a Papuan, and gives us now a Ruskin and an Emerson--that a career is tedious whi