Petersburg in spite of the opposition of the engineers, he
continued: "An intelligent democracy says of slavery, or a law, or a
creed, 'This is justice, or it is not'; the track of God's thunderbolt
is a straight line from justice to iniquity, and the church or state
that cannot stand it must get out of the way." Or take this illustration
of his subject from Athenian life--which is itself Athenian, and very
much in the vein of Demosthenes:--
"Anacharsis went into the forum at Athens, and heard a case argued by
the great minds of the day, and saw the vote. He walked out into the
streets, and somebody said to him, 'What think you of Athenian liberty?'
'I think,' said he, 'wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.' Just
what the timid scholar two thousand years ago said in the streets of
Athens, that which calls itself the scholarship of the United States
says today of popular agitation, that it lets wise men argue questions,
and fools decide them. But that unruly Athens, where fools decided the
gravest questions of polity and right and wrong, where it was not safe
to be just, and where property, which you had garnered up by the thrift
and industry of to-day, might be wrung from you by the caprices of the
mob to-morrow,--that very Athens probably secured the greatest human
happiness and nobleness of its era, invented art, and sounded for us the
depths of philosophy: God lent to it the noblest intellects, and it
flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain-peaks of
civilization.
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