Woe! woe! to the nation that anticipates too much its manhood. It will find that the first law of Earth, as of Heaven, is order; that the People that will not learn, cannot rule; that to the victors, always and everywhere, are the spoils; and that Victory involves force, organisation, and selfrestraint, always sooner possessed, and easier won and wielded, by the smaller Unity.

But there is, perhaps, a greater Woe to the nation that prolongs too much its minority,-that will not, or cannot (Priest-bound, Tradition-bound, or Devil-bound), take its manhood. It will fall back into the ruck of nations, and be nothing and nowhere in the world-race. It will breed families, and not men, and send the circles of its life-blood in and in towards extinction. The nation that forestalls its greatness, will be taught by the sword. The nation that declines the progressive glories of Democracy,-will rot.

Before the People can rule themselves, they must submit themselves to the double victory of education and religion;-they must have the rule of others' intellect, or of their own; the law of God, or else of some sort or other of "Better men. The result expresses the value of the nation.

Given, the proportion of educated Christian men to the population, and you have the value (relative and positive) of that population, and also its fighting, and its peaceful progressive qualities. If there be none such, there is no nation. If there

be few, the nation is barbarous. If many, civilised. If the majority, it is a Democracy. The UNITY of the collective Reason and Will is the only complete and absolute Unity, for that alone is a complete Unity in which the Units are individually complete and thoroughly equipped. There alone can no revolution enter, where the reason and the interest of all do rule. Sectional interests may be general injuries. The universal or the necessary can alone be the warrant of the absolute.

Whatsoever cause has availed itself of this secret of power in developing and organising all available intellect, has succeeded as far as success was possible. The results are certain, as far as the power can be used.

Christianity, wielding not only the intellect, but the conscience and imagination, and working not only with the Few but with the All, is the only complete instance of an appeal to the whole and to the All. What were its successes until Constantine, certainly a murderer-probably a hypocrite, chained religion like a dead body to the State!

China has used it, and by her select bureaucracy, the result of her universal competitive system, has ruled for twenty centuries a third of the human

race.

Rome papal used it, and from all classes she enlisted those battalions of intellect that so long mastered the world.

The Chancellerie Russe has given the world startling proof of what an aristocracy of talent can do.

The French Revolution used it, and it intensified an impulse which will yet complete the circuit of the globe.

The world knows well the meaning of "the open career," as the necessities of Society carry the soldier, the lawyer, the diplomatist, the writer, or the artist, victoriously to the front.

As long as Democracy had had no actual representative; as long as no People had arisen able to bear its Cross, and take its Crown; as long as national manhood seemed a lusus naturæ, and "Republics" were Republics of Slaves;-so long might "Patriots" assassinate order without bringing Liberty to Life ;-so long might

"The hive of Roman Liars worship the Emperor-Idiot.”

So long, even after age upon age of trial, must the People subside from their Cromwells to their Stuarts.

And now, at last, when a nation has arisen with valid claims to be also a Democracy, nothing but a gulf wide as the Atlantic,-nothing but such armies and fleets as the great Republic has created -could have kept the helots of reaction from intervening to crush a nation that determined at last to be wholly and truly a nation; to vindicate the honour of its Democracy by arms; and to void out Slavery, the reductio ad absurdum of Oligarchy,the excrement of fifty years of crime!

It remains then,-since this rivalry truly international has got to be fairly worked out—to welcome the FIRST MANHOOD of a NATION,

and to test its future and that of the waiting world of common men, not by the frantic outcries of the worsted few, nor by the old blasphemies about rights divine, but by PRINCIPLES, plain and simple, of political science, and by the FACTS, as we see them, in the History and Life of this American nation.

It is the "system positive," with a vengeance. For no light half so bright and searching ever beat upon cause or nation before. Nevertheless, Democracy is justified of her children.

DEMOCRACY :

AUTHORITIES.

"Any form may be kept together by extreme force, but that is good which flourishes by its native energy."-Aristotle.

"The People at large may always quash the vain pretensions of the few, by saying, we collectively are richer, wiser, and nobler than you."-Aristotle.

“Consider, if a man should in this manner appoint pilots of ships according to their valuations (property), what would be the consequence. They would, said he, make very bad navigation, and is it not in the same manner with reference to any other thing or any Government whatever?

a fault. two.

"Oligarchy would then seem to have this which is so great But such a city is not one, but of necessity, Always plotting against one another. By Jupiter,' said he, it is in no respect less.""-Republic of

Plato.

6

“The end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of Reason, is the highest and most harmonious development. The individuality of power

and development."-Baron W. von Humboldt.

"The masses which can never be corrupted, should be the constant source from which all power should emanate." Napoleon III.

"The all of A, how much less is it in the eye of A than the all of B in the eye of B.”—Bentham.

"When does a People stop,-when it ceases to possess Individuality.”—Mill.