It has not created a new science, but it has shown to the trembling and to the waiting world a developed and united People,-a working model of Democracy.

Naturally, the world of the few is full of fears, blasphemies, unbelief, and despair,—the world of the many, of hopes, faith, and exultation.

The flag of the People stands. It waves at last over a ROYAL NATION.

American Democracy sprung from the best part of the best age of England. It has flourished in spite of and by means of every foe, especially of its last and greatest,-Slavery. It contains two elements never before united, for long, in Democracies,- FREEDOM and EQUALITY. The first secures it from oppression in the present; the last retains to it self-Government, and secures it from those forms of Oligarchy which may at last degenerate into the fact of Despotism. Equality can alone so completely prepare the individual as to make him a fitting material for the vastest international combinations.

The qualities and proportions of the great American nation are, in fact, at present, the one essential question for the future of Democracy and Nationality everywhere. And, strange to say, they are still to the politicians of this generation almost an unknown quantity.

The constitutional balance between the Man,

the Institution, and the Government ;-the completion of freedom, municipal organisation and nationality; the boundless area, the Federal bond, the exhaustless resources, the equal conditions of life and competition, the "Black Yankees," who may populate and work that portion, comparatively small, of territory below the temperate zone;-the unity of ideas (not forgetting the bond of a common Anglo-American literature), interests, principles, and territory; of institution, language, race, and religion;-all these conditions (working together, also, for the destruction of the oligarchic or slave element, with which they cannot coexist) combine to make,—-have made—such a NATION as the world has not seen before, and therefore is not, as yet, quite prepared to recognise, even in the great Anglo-American Continent,—the home, we say, of that royal nation which beckons on all other nations towards the future.

Thus did Bentham comment, even in his time, on the disturbing influences of this American precedent :

"But now, suppose the same or a similar accursed Government, with the accursed prosperity, transplanted from that blessed distance,-planted under our very noses, with no more than one and twenty miles of sea to dilute the stench of it, without so much as a single useless place, needless place, overpaid place, unmerited pension-not to speak of sinecures, -no, not so much as a peerage, to settle a borough or buy off a country gentleman-suppose these miscreants and not more than half a guinea or a crown, not more than a three hours' row, necessary to enable a man to see it!

"In this case, by what possibility could the eye, the head, or the heart be shut against the spectacle of the united nuisances -prosperity and good government?

"There they are-but happily with the Atlantic between us and them-the never sufficiently accursed United States, living, and, oh! horror, flourishing- and so flourishing! flourishing under a Government so essentially illegitimate.

"There they are-but happily with two thousand leagues of sea between us and them-the millions of two-legged swine, with the illegitimacy and the unencumbered and undisturbed prosperity in which they wallow."-Bentham's Plan of Reform, p. 8.

This is about the English of all talk about Democracy not being conservative. That the disturbing cause in the late tremendous conflict was Oligarchy, and that the Atlantic may now be said to be bridged by steam, if not joined by the cable, takes nothing from the force of the above, or from its appositeness to the subject of this work.

Oligarchy, we have said, was the disturbing cause. In a deeper sense it has been the irresistible, ceaseless march of Democracy that has disturbed and uprooted all things contrary to it since the world began.

And before and after all other considerations is this one, supreme in politics. Only as the organisation and the forms express the spirit and essence of power, can there be formal conservatism. Only as a four-fold freedom of School, Press, Church, and Assembly complete the development of an ever-increasing proportion of the all, is the final preponderance of universal national manhood approached, and the right national spirit attained. Till then, destruction may be conservative, and conservatism destructive. Manhood is Democracy, -and that must include conservatism, which tends to the completion of manhood.

The history of America is the history of manhood.

It began when a perfect manhood was first shown forth to the world.

When Rome failed to develope manhood, manhood passed from Rome, and prepared to associate against it for freedom in German woods.

England continued its story, but to mature freedom into equality it wanted a new world, and it found it yonder.

Equality must be the crown of all nations that are to continue. How this is to be accomplished is a comparatively trifling question.

BOOK II.

DEMOCRACY IN ENGLAND.

"Mr. Carlyle's judgment on this point (his inferences from the fact that Roman Democracy could not get on without Dictators) is like that of a man who had only known the steam engine before the invention of governor balls, and was ready to declare that its mechanism would be shattered if a boy were not at hand to regulate the pressure of the steam." The Times, April 4th, 1866.

"They had institutions partly derived from Imperial Rome, partly from Papal Rome, partly from the old Germany. Our laws and customs have never been lost in general and irreparable ruin. With us the precedents of the middle ages are still valid."-Macaulay.

"In perusing the admirable treatise of Tacitus on the manners of the Germans, we find it is from that nation the English have borrowed the idea of their political government. This beautiful system was invented first in the woods,-' De minoribus rebus principes consultant, de majoribus omnes; ita tamen ut ea quoque, quorum penes plebem arbitrium est, apud principes pertractentur." "—Bancroft, 212, v. i.

"The great constitutional theory of jurisdiction in AngloSaxon times was not feudal, but primitive Teutonic."-Hallam.