They like to have the opportunity of supplying their own wants and luxuries, and will resist any tyrannical interference with the methods they prefer.

They are not disposed to become food for animals, or to remain unprotected from the climate. If they succeed in making a cup, they betray a tendency to ornament its rim or stem, or to emboss a story on its side. Men will not starve, if they can help it, nor thirst, if water can be gathered in the palm or reached by digging. Certainly it is a grand and lucky thing that there are so many people grouped along the lines of divine consistency. The many-colored and astonishing life conceals a few simple motives. Superficially it is a great way round from the lichen to the vine, but not so far by way of the centre. They hold the moisture, the metal, the gem, the seeds of alternating forests and the patient routine of countless harvests. These rugged water-sheds inclose, configure, temper, fertilize, and also perturb, the great scenes and stretches of history. Their great, simple features uplift and keep all landscapes in their places, and prevent life from falling through into the molten and chaotic forces underneath.

That is to say, it is very fortunate that men and women inhabit the earth. If people mean, when they say that Human Nature is always the same, that a few primitive impulses appear through the disguise of all ages and races, which can be modified, but never extinguished, which work and are worked upon, are capable of doing good or harm according to circumstances, but are at all events the conditions of life and motion, it is fortunately true. If they bore a fair numerical proportion to the listeners of doctrinaires and alarmists, the repetition would be eventually resisted, with an indignation equal to the amount of literary and political damage which it had effected. But people of a finer wit are not so easily surprised. Successive audiences yield, as to the circus-jokes of the clown, who hits his traditional laugh in the same place so often that it is a wonder the place is not worn through. They create the alarm because they are contented and intend to remain so. The Tories of all ages and countries content themselves and alarm their neighbors by an adroit interpolation of this formula in their speech. ДЄmong the stock fallacies which belong to public writers and thinkers, and which exercise a kind of conventional influence as often as they are paraded, there is none greater than this, - that History always repeats herself, because Human Nature never changes. Read PDFs of part two, part three, part four, and part five.

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