rmined or
disanimated, and it has come to pass that the only government possible,
where the divine idea is eliminated from politics, is one in the form of
absolutism. How long this form will continue in France remains to be
seen. But it is certain that European Democrats or Red Republicans, with
their ideas--or rather lack of ideas--will never comprehend the
constitutional system, and will never rehabilitate or reanimate those
intermediary municipal institutions, the monuments of which De
Tocqueville was surprised to find scattered so generally through
continental Europe, as well as in England and in New England.

Turning, now, to the United States, it is plainly evident that the whole
tendency of our politics, intensely accelerated by the influence of
Jefferson's French views, has been, first, to lose out of mind the true
significance of those intermediary institutions embodied in the common
law of England, and inherited by us from the mother country; and,
secondly, to depreciate them as standing in the way of the people's
will, or popular sovereignty; and, lastly, to break them down entirely,
and substitute for them the tyranny of an irresponsible majority, or
democratic absolutism. The persistent efforts to get rid of grand juries
and trial by jury, to popularize the judiciary, to make senatorial terms
dependent on changing party majorities, to reduce the representative to
a mere deputy, and other similar schemes to bring about the direct
_unmediatized_ operation of the popular will upon the subject, are all
illustrations of this direful tendency.

Concurrently with, and greatly aiding this tendency, there has been a
gradual decay of the manly virtue that charactized our fathers. Men have
become less conscientious in the performance of their public duties, and
more regardless of private rights. A genuine manly self-respect implies
sincere respect for the rights of others, and both inevitably decay as
the fear of God dies out. When men continually act on the idea that man
is his own end, and when each one is intensely engaged in seeking his
own interest, what can result but jarring of interests, opposition,
repulsion, disregard of law in so far as it clashes with private ends,
and thus, finally, social and political disruption more or less
extensive? Thus our trouble lies deeper than slavery. Remove the canker
of slavery to-day, and yet the tendency to disruption and dissolution
would evermore go on while prevailing