Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 May 1881 — Men Who Influenced Their Age. [ARTICLE]

Men Who Influenced Their Age.

The course of history is not a mere game played by a few great men ; nor yet does it run in an inflexible groove which no single man can turn aside. The great man influences his age, but at the same time he is influenced by his age. Some of the greatest of men, as far as their natural gifts went, have been useless or mischievous, because they have been out of gear with their own age. Their own age could not receive them, and they could not make their age other than what it was. The most useful kind of great man is he who is just so far in advance of his age that his age can accept him as its leader and teacher. Men of this kind are themselves part of the course of events ; they guide it; they make it go quicker or slower, but they do not thwart it. Can we, for instance, overrate the gain which came to the new-born federation of America by finding such a man as Washington readymade to its hand ? Or take men of quite another stamp from the Virginian deliverer. The course of her history for the last 800 years has been largely affected by the fact not only that we underwent a foreign conquest, but that we underwent a foreign conquest of a particular kind, such as could be wrought only by a man of a particular kind. The course of our history for the last 300 years has been largely affected by the i'act that, when English freedom was in the greatest danger, England fell into the hands of a tyrant whose special humor it w as to carry on his tyranny under the forms of law. English history could hot have been what it has been if William the Conqueror and Henry VIIL had been men othergthan what they were. One blushes to put the two names together. William was great in himself, and must have been great in any time or place. Henry, a man not without great gifts, but surely not a great man, was made important by circumstances in the time and place in which he lived. But each influenced the course of events by his personal character. But they influenced events only in the sense of guiding, strengthening and quickening some tendencies and keeping others back for a while. Neither of them, nor Washington either, belong to that class of men who, for good or for evil, turn the world upside down, the great destroyers and the great creators of history.— Freeman, in Fortnightly Review.