Books giving us a history of the future—a future bright with the millennial dawn of the optimist or dark with the goblin-haunted night of the pessimist—books in French, with a future French and fantastic, and books in English, with a future Anglo-Saxon and matter-of-fact—are much in vogue. But of books giving a history of the past as it might have been if the current of events had been turned at a critical point by some man with sufficient virtue and mental power, combined with the power which some fortunate material circumstance might have given him, I know not one.
Alas for the world that the makers of history who have had the greatest powers combined with the greatest opportunities have been men whose selfish aims have made their utmost efforts recoil in ruin on their own heads!
Washington, indeed, had great virtues, a great opportunity, and good talents; but neither was his opportunity the greatest that
