barous―yea, of savage-man to be let loose in all manner of evil-doing every year, and call these elections?

Shall we turn over our public schools-aye, our very homes -to the rule of law-breakers, and they who bear false witness? Those who stand on the watch-towers of human progress are warning us that we are upon the border-line beyond which lie great political and social changes, and that the hour is close upon us when once again the American who loves his country must choose the ground upon which he will stand to fight again a battle for the race. The great pendulum of time has swung once again to the point of transition, and the hour hand points to the day-yea, to the very moment-when old ideas and formulas and time-worn methods no longer serve to still the beatings of the great heart of humanity, and man, with uplifted brow, and tingling nerve and bounding pulse, is about to march forward to another stage of his unknowable destiny.

What this change will be we know not. That it will be of the nature of a revolution cannot well be doubted. That there will be a more perfect Union is probable. That money will be less a god of our people we may sincerely hope. We hear the distant tread of myriad feet; the sound of strange cries is wafted to us from the distance, and, like the dumb beasts in the atmosphere of a coming storm, we stand silent and appalled at what we cannot avert. But we need not fear, for, whatever the coming change may bring forth, it will be in the interest and advancement of the cause of humanity and popular government; and they will come forth upon a still higher plane for the progress of the race. Law and order will be maintained, for the Anglo-Saxon is their guardian and protector, but they will be the law and order of a self-governed people, freed from industrial tyranny and the domination of the golden calf.

God grant that, when this hour strikes, we and each of us may be found anchored to the ideas and principles which America has given to the world, and that we shall remember that names are nothing; the achievements or rank of ancestors or kindred are nothing; long descent is nothing; but the culture and growth of each individual in strength of mind and body is everything; fixed principles of citizenship, of morals,

and of business conduct are everything; courage to assert and maintain conscientious and well considered convictions, and to do what we believe, is everything. A feeble race of men, drifting down the stream of time, the sport of shifting currents, and wrecked ever and anon upon the same shoals and rocks of error and folly, cannot too soon perish. But a strong, conscientious, courageous, self-respecting people, standing firm for the right, for human progress, for human liberty, whether rich or poor, high among the rulers of the nations or walking in humble estate, commands and receives respect, and bears with it the seed and promise of continued life. Nor should we forget that sublime saying of the early Puritan Republican, who, having condemned his king to death, was equally as firm in resisting the usurpations of his successor, that "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."

In the veins of all the races that make up the manhood of America, there flows no drop of blood which has not been purified and made strong by rebellion against wrong Whether Teuton, Celt or Saxon, Frank or Scot, in all ages and in all lands, on the plains and mountains of Europe, at Runnymede and Bosworth Field, from Blackwater to Bannockburn, from Lexington to Yorktown, these have wrung from the hands of overbearing power, civil and religious liberty and the crowns of honor. Sad will be the day when the American people forget their traditions and their history, and no longer remember that the country they love, the institutions they cherish, and the freedom they hope to preserve, were born from the throes of armed resistance to tyranny, and nursed in the rugged arms of fearless men.

AMERICAN IDEALS

Democracy

By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

HE framers of the American Constitution were far from

a

wishing, or intending, to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory; in fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and stability. They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race, and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed. The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic affirmations or fine-drawn analyses of the Rights of Man would serve their present turn. This was a practical question, and they addressed themselves to it as men of knowledge and judgment should. Their problem was how to adapt English principles and precedents to the new conditions of American life, and they solved it with singular discretion. They put as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the way of the people's will, but of their whim. With few

exceptions they probably admitted the logic of the then accepted syllogism-democracy, anarchy, despotism. But this formula was framed upon the experience of small cities shut up to stew within their narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where every passion was reverberated from house to house and from man to man with gathering rumor till every impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob, all the more dangerous because sanctified with the formality of law.

Fortunately their case was wholly different. They were to legislate for a widely-scattered population and for states already practiced in the discipline of a partial independence. They had an unequaled opportunity and enormous advantages. The material they had to work upon was already democratical by instinct and habitude. It was tempered to their hands by more than a century's schooling in self-government. They had but to give permanent and conservative form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and direction to their new institutions, especially in supplying them with checks and balances, they had a great help and safeguard in their federal organization. The different, sometimes conflicting, interests and social systems of the several states made existence as a Union and coalescence into a nation conditional on a constant practice of moderation and compromise. The very elements of disintegration were the best guides in political training. Their children learned the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the application of it to a question of fundamental morals that cost us our Civil War. We learned once for all that compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, on the whole, successful? If it had not, would the Old World be vexed with any fears of its proving contagious? This trial would have been less severe could it have been made with a people homogeneous in race, language, and traditions, whereas the United

States have been called on to absorb and assimilate enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous in all these respects, and drawn mainly from that class which might fairly say that the world was not their friend, nor the world's law. The previous condition too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, landing in New York and asked what his politics were, inquired if there was a government there, and on being told that there was, retorted, "Thin I'm agin it!" We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most ignorant, the most turbulent of her people, and have made them over into good citizens, who have added to our wealth, and who are ready to die in defense of a country and of institutions which they know to be worth dying for.

The exceptions have been (and they are lamentable exceptions) where these hordes of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great cities. But the social system is yet to seek which has not to look the same terrible wolf in the eyes. On the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are buying up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts, and making them productive again by the same virtues of industry and thrift that once made them profitable to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting them. To have achieved even these prosaic results (if you choose to call them so), and that out of materials the most discordant-I might say the most recalcitrant-argues a certain beneficent virtue in the system that could do it, and is not to be accounted for by mere luck. Carlyle said scornfully that America meant only roast turkey every day for everybody. He forgot that states, as Bacon said of wars, go on their bellies. As for the security of property, it should be tolerably well secured in a country where every other man hopes to be rich, even though the only property qualification be the ownership of two hands that add to the general wealth. Is it not the best security for anything to interest the largest possible number of persons in its preservation and the smallest in its division?

In point of fact, far-seeing men count the increasing power of wealth and its combinations as one of the chief dangers with which the institutions of the United States are threatened in