This is not a matter of art-criticism.  It is an ethical question hitherto unstudied.  The makers of laws have not always been obliged to face it, inasmuch as their laws are made in part for the present, and in part for that future whereof the present needs to be assured—­that is, the future is bound as a guaranty for present security of person or property.  Some such hold upon the time to come we are obliged to claim, and to claim it for our own sakes—­because of the reflex effect upon our own affairs, and not for the pleasure of fettering the time to come.  Every maker of a will does at least this.

Were the men of the sixteenth century so moderate?  Not they.  They found the present all too narrow for the imposition of their will.  It did not satisfy them to disinter and scatter the bones of the dead, nor to efface the records of a past that offended them.  It did not satisfy them to bind the present to obedience by imperative menace and instant compulsion.  When they had burnt libraries and thrown down monuments and pursued the rebels of the past into the other world, and had seen to it that none living should evade them, then they outraged the future.

Whatever misgivings may have visited those dominant minds as to the effectual and final success of their measures—­would their writ run in time as well as place, and were the nameless populations indeed their subjects?—­whatever questions may have peered in upon those rigid counsels and upon those busy vigils of the keepers of the world, they silenced by legislation and yet more legislation.  They wrote in statute books; they would have written their will across the skies.  Their hearts would have burnt for lack of records more inveterate, and of testimonials that mankind should lack courage to question, if in truth they did ever doubt lest posterity might try their lock.  Perhaps they did never so much as foresee the race of the unnumbered and emancipated for whom their prohibitions and penalties are no more than documents of history.

If the tyrannous day of our fathers had but possessed the means of these our more diffident times!  They, who would have written their present and actual will upon the skies, might certainly have written it in petroleum and wax upon the stone.  Fate did them wrong in withholding from their hands this means of finality and violence.  Into our hands it has been given at a time when the student of the race thought, perhaps, that we had been proved in the school of forbearance.  Something, indeed, we may have learnt therein, but not enough, as we now find.

We have not yet the natural respect for the certain knowledge and the probable wisdom of our successors.  A certain reverend official document, not guiltless of some confusion of thought, lately recommended to the veneration of the present times “those past ages with their store of experience.”  Doubtless, as the posterity of their predecessors our predecessors had experience, but, as our ancestors, none—­none.  Therefore, if they were a little reverend our own posterity is right reverend.  It is a flippant and novelty-loving humour that so flatters the unproved past and refuses the deference due to the burden of years which is ours, which—­grown still graver—­will be our children’s.