being governed by laws, ought always to be equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms.  The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling panics, startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial crime and folly.  Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take care not to tell, because we shall not be believed?  Let the ditch-water philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many a landslip.  It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most common-place motives; but, for that reason, ready and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the consequences be what they may.

How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades?  Were they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other?  Certainly not for lightening an overburdened population.  Nay, is not the history of your own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one of the most startling instances which the world has seen for several centuries, of the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in man?  Believe me, man’s passions, heated to igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled down to freezing point, are the normal causes of all great human movement.  And a truer law of social science than any that political economists are wont to lay down, is that old Dov’ e la donna? of the Italian judge, who used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or criminal, which was brought before him, Dov’ e la donna?  “Where is the lady?” certain, like a wise old gentleman, that a woman was most probably at the bottom of the matter.

Strangeness?  Romance?  Did any of you ever read—­if you have not you should read—­Archbishop Whately’s “Historic Doubts about the Emperor Napoleon the First”?  Therein the learned and witty Archbishop proved, as early as 1819, by fair use of the criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic School, that the whole history of the great Napoleon ought to be treated by wise men as a myth and a romance, that there is little or no evidence of his having existed at all; and that the story of his strange successes and strange defeats was probably invented by our Government in order to pander to the vanity of the English nation.