experiment that a vast community, rich, intellectual, and civilised as those of Europe, guided by the accumulated experience of the older hemisphere and without its special difficulties, prejudices, and dangers, could be governed by the principles of pure Democracy, without any sacrifice of those more exalted objects which political forms exist to serve, they would inevitably exercise an overwhelming pressure on the ancient society of Europe. If they could demonstrate that to be possible which was deemed a chimera, because it is contradicted by the experience of ages,—if they showed us that the objects aimed at by our political and social system may be enjoyed still more amply without the penalty which Europe has always paid, in the shape of so much iniquity and so much suffering, by irresponsible authorities, sanguinary wars, and wanton injury, in the oppression of class by class, of race by race, and of religion by religion,—in the elaborate, deliberate, intentional degradation of the weaker party, for reasons of state, or religious zeal, or by the pride of blood, or by the blind and resistless action of superior wealth and force—if they could exhibit to the world the spectacle of a country as extensive as Russia, as secure from aggression as France, as intellectual as Germany, as free and as obedient to law as Great Britain, cursed with no restrictions on personal freedom, without fleets or armies, without pauperism or national debt,—if, in short, America could give the light without the shade of political life, then I believe that the venerable institutions of European polity would go down before that invincible argument.
Those institutions have grown old, and their old age is vigorous, because we are confident that they will stand the tests of expediency and right, because they are either necessary or conducive to the general advantage. But if America should destroy the validity of that defence, then the only inducement by which the masses of mankind will be made to tolerate the evils and injustice incident to our system of society, will be the short-lived argument of force. There were many who believed that the mighty problem was solved, and that America had accomplished the work
