We shall not, we hope, be suspected of a bigoted attachment to the doctrines and practices of past generations.  Our creed is that the science of government is an experimental science, and that, like all other experimental sciences, it is generally in a state of progression.  No man is so obstinate an admirer of the old times as to deny that medicine, surgery, botany, chemistry, engineering, navigation, are better understood now than in any former age.  We conceive that it is the same with political science.  Like those physical sciences which we have mentioned, it has always been working itself clearer and clearer, and depositing impurity after impurity.  There was a time when the most powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time when the most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it the first duty of a government to persecute heretics, to found monasteries, to make war on Saracens.  But time advances; facts accumulate; doubts arise.  Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day.  The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.  They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness.  But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain and penetrates to the deepest valley.  First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems.  The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind.  Thus, the great progress goes on, till schoolboys laugh at the jargon which imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the illiberality and intolerance of Sir Thomas More.

Seeing these things, seeing that, by the confession of the most obstinate enemies of innovation, our race has hitherto been almost constantly advancing in knowledge, and not seeing any reason to believe that, precisely at the point of time at which we came into the world, a change took place in the faculties of the human mind, or in the mode of discovering truth, we are reformers:  we are on the side of progress.  From the great advances which European society has made during the last four centuries, in every species of knowledge, we infer, not that there is no more room for improvement, but that, in every science which deserves the name, immense improvements may be confidently expected.

But the very considerations which lead us to look forward with sanguine hope to the future prevent us from looking back with contempt on the past We do not flatter ourselves with the notion that we have attained perfection, and that no more truth remains to be found.  We believe that we are wiser than our ancestors.  We believe, also, that our posterity will be wiser than we.  It would be gross injustice in our grandchildren to talk of us with contempt,