Let us transport ourselves for a moment on the magic carpet of fancy to the year 1783 that saw the formal close of the war for independence, and listen to a few passages from an imaginary lecture delivered by a prescient professor of moral and natural philosophy in an unnamed American college to a group of boys preparing themselves for labor, achievement, and destiny in the republic so recently ushered into a chilly and doubting world.

“Young gentlemen: You who hear my voice, if you cross the normal span of life, will be living when the first quarter of the nineteenth century has turned. Those among you who are blessed with the four score years of the Scriptures will approach the borders of the mid-century before the long night falls upon your path. Your children, who will learn their early lessons and derive their bias from your instruction, will be among the citizens who govern the country in 1850, and your grandchildren will face with dimming eyes the dawn of the twentieth century. These facts, we might say, to anticipate the language of a coming philosopher in this ancient college, are ‘stubborn and irreducible.’