In his Political History of the Twentieth Century, the late Mimble—­or, as he would have been called in the time of which he writes, Mister Mimble—­has this luminous sentence:  “With the single exception of Coblentz, there was no European government the Liberator did not upset, and which he did not erect into a pure Smitharchy; and though some of them afterward relapsed temporarily into the crude forms of antiquity, and others fell into fanciful systems begotten of the intellectual activity he had stirred up, yet so firmly did he establish the principle, that in the Thirty-second Century the enlightened world was, what it has since remained, practically Smitharchic.”

It may be noted here as a curious coincidence, that the same year which saw the birth of him who established rational government witnessed the death of him who perfected literature.  In 1873, Martin Farquhar Tupper—­next to Smith the most notable name in history—­died of starvation in the streets of London.  Like that of Smith, his origin is wrapped in profoundest obscurity.  No less than seven British cities claimed the honour of his birth.  Meagre indeed is our knowledge of this only bard whose works have descended to us through the changes of twenty centuries entire.  All that is positively established is that during his life he was editor of “The Times ‘magazine,’” a word of disputed meaning—­and, as quaint old Dumbleshaw says, “an accomplished Greek and Latin scholar,” whatever “Greek” and “Latin” may have been.  Had Smith and Tupper been contemporaries, the iron deeds of the former would doubtless have been immortalized in the golden pages of the latter.  Upon such chances does History depend for her materials!

Strangely unimpressible indeed must be the mind which, looking backward through the vista of twenty centuries upon the singular race from whom we are supposed to be descended, can repress a feeling of emotional interest.  The names of John Smith and Martin Farquhar Tupper, blazoned upon the page of the dim past, and surrounded by the lesser names of Snakeshear, the first Neapolitan, Oliver Cornwell, Close, “Queen” Elizabeth, or Lambeth, the Dutch Bismarch, Julia Caesar, and a host of contemporary notables are singularly suggestive.  They call to mind the odd old custom of covering the body with “clothes;” the curious error of Copernicus and other wide guesses of antique “science;” the lost arts of telegramy, steam locomotion, and printing with movable types; and the exploded theory of gunpowder.  They set us thinking upon the zealous idolatry which led men to make pious pilgrimages to the then accessible regions about the North Pole and into the interior of Africa, which at that time was but little better than a wilderness.  They conjure up visions of bloodthirsty “Emperors,” tyrannical “Kings,” vampire “Presidents,” and useless “Parliaments”—­strangely horrible shapes contrasted with the serene and benevolent aspect of our modern Smithocracy!