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CHAPTER IX.

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA.

THE PRECEDENT.

"The American Democracy is a territorial Democracy."D'Israeli.

"The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty and advancements of every person according to his merit: the enjoyment of those never more certain, and the access to these never more open, than in a free commonwealth. Both which, in my opinion, may be best and soonest obtained, if every county in the land were made a kind of subordinate commonalty or commonwealth."-Milton.

"Now my idea of American civilisation is that it is a second part, a repetition of that same sublime confidence in the public conscience and the public thought that made the groundwork of Grecian Democracy."

"Not only the inevitable, but the best power this side of the ocean, is the unfettered common sense of the masses.

"We are launched on the ocean of an unchained Democracy, with no safety but in those laws that bind the ocean to its bed, the instinctive love of right in the popular heart." -Wendell Phillips.

"Not Democracy in America, but free Christianity in America, is the real key to the study of the People and their institutions. Christianity the great reality of history. In Europe Christianity was paralysed by divisions into national Churches. So that until State and Church were separated, a higher spirit was hopeless.

"The Church in the old world was therefore unable to do what the men of two centuries ago proposed, when England was in her noblest mood, for never had she been so noble as in the days of Hampden, Falkland, Milton, and Cromwell, and when she sent forth a religious band, who founded a colony in the new world. By this exodus, which brought Christianity out of the State Churches, men escaped from feudalism to the system founded upon equality and justice."-Goldwin Smith.

Three mighty problems, in which all Peoples and systems are concerned, are now, in the fullness of time, nearly worked out upon the American Continent.

THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN NATION, FEDERATION, AND DEMOCRACY.

That making means the ascendency of the nationality over its two deadly foes,-materialism and oligarchy. It means the definitive victory of national unity, not only over law-made classes (the vice of the old world), but over sectional and sinister interests supported by "State" power.

It is the NEXT STEP, in the world logic of history, to the English and French Revolutions, which settled, on the carcases of Kings, the principle of the right divine of Peoples.

The English revolution failed of its direct purpose. The people could not continue in power, but they had broken the spell of prerogative, and made possible a successful contest between the few and the one, the families and the sovereign. It took England from Cromwell to the Reform Bill to get from the power of the few to that of the many.

The sea saved the English from an intervention of Catholics and Legitimists, or perhaps from an European war.

The French, without the sea, had their European war. Since then, the revolution has energised the empire and the empire has organised the revolution, both have been a propagandism for Europe, and French emperors have been its hierarchs or victims.

What the sea did for the English, the ocean has done for America and the world.

Three thousand miles of water, which first saved the infant Republic, have now saved the oli

garchs and men-stealers of the South from extermination. They have also saved America a thirty years' war, which European Statesmen might have made into a universal war, had the Peoples of Europe allowed them.

The next step to the assertion of the representative or the national sovereignty is now taken.

The Royal nation is at last definitively constituted. The People sit at last in their own Purple, —with no equal yet in the world, and with no master save their conscience, their reason, and their God.

It is proved not only that slavery is not necessary to Republics, but that it cannot exist in a true Republic. And as for oligarchy (a form of barbarism), the voiding of it out, is an act, so to speak, of mere Republican nature.

And we need not explain here, how that nature, the temperate zone, and Republicanism, being all against slavery, the South had always to choose between secession and defeat, or concession and the gradual destruction of Slavery, and with it, of the material basis of oligarchy.

Free labour was everywhere invading, and "demoralising" the border States, and the waiting game of the North, working with the exactness of economics, and the remorselessness of Destiny, left no one chance for slaveholders, save a move further South, a re-opening on a gigantic scale of the Slave Trade, and the erection in the real South of a veritable Slave Empire.

This chance, the "Statesmanship" of Davis, and the armies of Lee, have lost to the Devil and to the South, for ever and a day.

The principle of national unity has triumphed over the licence of individuals, and even the licence of States. Secession is the reductio ad absurdum of State rights, as anarchy in that of freedom. America now presents the completest example yet of what a State should be. In complete contrast to German Federalism, it secures the full liberty of the individual, and reconciles it to the strongest expression of nationality.

"The political constitution of Germany (says Hegel, p. 455, 'Philosophy of History') involves no thought, no conception of the proper aim of a State. . . The establishment of a constituted anarchy, such as the world had never before seen; i. e., the position that an empire is properly a unity, a totality, a state, while yet all the relations are determined so exclusively on the principle of private right, that the privilege of all the constituent parts of that empire to act for themselves, contrarily to the interest of the whole, or to neglect that which its interest demands, is guaranteed and secured by the most inviolable sanctions."

This mighty danger is passed for America. Instead of straining the principle of State rights to the denial of national and individual rights, and to the formation of a "constituted anarchy," it has gone naturally and necessarily on, upon its natural unities of race, language, religion, boundary, and (now of) institutions, to a Democratic empire.

The great Montesquieu thus unconsciously pro

nounces upon the advantages of this Republican Federation:

"It is therefore very probable that mankind would have been, at length, obliged to live constantly under the Government of a single person, had they not contrived a kind of constitution that has all the internal advantages of a republican, together with the external force of a monarchical Government. I mean, a confederate republic.

"This form of Government is a convention, by which several petty estates agree to become members of a larger one, which they intend to establish. It is a kind of assemblage of societies, that constitute a new one, capable of increasing by means of farther associations, till they arrive to such a degree of power, as to be able to provide for the security of the whole body.

"It was these associations that so long contributed to the prosperity of Greece. By these the Romans attacked the whole globe; and by these alone the whole globe withstood them. For, when Rome was arriving to her highest pitch of grandeur, it was the associations beyond the Danube and the Rhine, associations formed by the terror of her arms, that enabled the barbarians to resist her.

"A republic of this kind, able to withstand an external force, may support itself without any internal corruption; the form of this society prevents all manner of inconveniences.

"If a single member should attempt to usurp the supreme power, he could not be supposed to have an equal authority and credit in all the confederate States. Were he to have too great an influence over one, this would alarm the rest; were he to subdue a part, that which would still remain free might oppose him with forces independent of those which he had usurped, and overpower him before he could be settled in his usurpation.

The

"Should a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate States, the others are able to quell it. Should abuses creep into one part they are reformed by those that remain sound. State may be destroyed on one side and not on the other; the confederacy may be dissolved, and the confederates preserve their sovereignty.

"As this Government is composed of petty republics, it enjoys the internal happiness of each; and, with regard to its external situation, by means of the association, it possesseth all the advantages of large monarchies."-Montesquieu, vol. i. pp. 165–167.

The American nation and Democracy are made.