The belief belongs to what may be called the cataclysmal theory of
progress, which improves the world by sudden starts, and clings so
fondly to liquor-laws, and has profound faith in specific remedies
for moral and political diseases. What commercial panics and great
national misfortunes do not do, particular bits of legislation are
sure to do. You put something in the Constitution, or forbid
something, or lose a battle, or have a "shrinkage of values," or
have a cholera season, and forthwith the community turns over a new
leaf, and becomes moral, economical, and sober-minded. We doubt
whether this theory will ever die out, however much philosophers may
preach against it, or however often facts may refute it, because it
gratifies, or promises to gratify, one of the deepest longings of
the human heart--the desire which each man feels to have a great
deal of history crowded into his own little day. None of us can bear
to quit the scene without witnessing the solution of the problems by
which his own life has been vexed or over which he has long labored.
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