ideas actuated society. The
remorseless mill of selfishness would keep on grinding, grinding,
grinding toward dissolution. Look at our literature, our architecture,
our science, our political and moral theories, our social arrangements
generally, and especially our hideous, almost diabolical arrangements or
lack of arrangements for the care of the poor and the unfortunate, and
what a confused jumble they present! Having no grand animating idea, no
all-pervading principle of harmony, no universally recognized standard
for anything, we are necessarily the most anomalous, amorphous,
helter-skelter aggregation of independent and antagonistic
individualities ever gathered together since nations began to exist.
What can prevent such an agglomeration from falling to pieces? What can
hold it together?

Thus, with the frightful decay of Christian, and even manly
virtue--alas! too plainly visible all around us--and the entire
divorcement of morality or religious ideas from politics, what fate is
in store for us but the inevitable triumph of anarchy, and through it of
despotism? Herein lies our real danger. The great struggle is _not_, as
many assert, between aristocracy, or monarchy, or despotism and
democracy. But it is between despotism or absolutism and
constitutionalism. It is the struggle of the pagan system (revived by
the renaissance), based on the idea that 'man is his own end,' with the
Christian system based on the idea of mediation, involving the idea that
the true end of man is God. It is not true, therefore, that democratic
institutions are now on trial in the United States. Democracy, pure and
simple, precisely in the form it is assuming or has assumed in this
country, was tried long ago. It was tried in ancient Greece, and found
wanting. It was tried in Rome, and ended in the dissolution of the
empire. And in both these trials it had, to begin with, a much more
highly finished, fresh, robust, and whole-souled manhood to work with
and to work upon than that of modern democracy. More recently it was
tried in France, and for the present is blooming in the despotism of
Napoleon III.

The question, then, I repeat, is whether constitutionalism, as
originally developed in England and embodied and reproduced by our
fathers--who, perhaps, 'builded wiser than they knew'--can come safely
through this crisis and triumph over the two ideas which, thus far, have
predominated in the American mind, and driven us with fearful str