nt torture-chambers, to crush out
the budding skepticism, and to mould the mind into the monotonous
decency of general conformity. Foe or Fetish, King or Kaiser, Deity
itself or the vicegerents it has appointed in its stead, are
answerable for it all. God himself has looked upon it, and it is very
good, and there is no appeal from that approval of the Heavenly
vision.

In almost every country in the world this deification of institutions
has been promoted by their antiquity. As nobody can remember when they
were not, and as no authentic records exist of their first
establishment, their genealogy can be traced direct to Heaven without
danger of positive disproof. Thus royal races and hereditary
aristocracies and privileged priesthoods established themselves so
firmly in the opinion of Europe, as well as of Asia, and still retain
so much of their _prestige_ there, notwithstanding the turnings
and overturnings of the last two centuries. This northern half of the
great American continent, however, seems to have been kept back by
Nature as a _tabula rasa_, a clean blackboard, on which the great
problem of civil government might be worked out, without any of the
incongruous drawbacks which have cast perplexity and despair upon
those who have undertaken its solution in the elder world. All the
elements of the demonstration were of the most favorable
nature. Settled by races who had inherited or achieved whatever of
constitutional liberty existed in the world, with no hereditary
monarch, or governing oligarchy, or established religion on the soil,
with every opportunity to avoid all the vices and to better all the
virtues of the old polities, the era before which all history had been
appointed to prepare the way seemed to have arrived, when the just
relations of personal liberty and civil government were to be
established forever.

And how magnificent the field on which the trophy of this final
victory of a true civilization was to be erected! No empire or
kingdom, at least since imperial Rome perished from the earth, ever
unrolled a surface so vast and so variegated, so manifold in its
fertilities and so various in its aspects of beauty and
sublimity. From the Northern wastes, where the hunter and the trapper
pursue by force or guile the fur-bearing animals, to the ever-perfumed
latitudes of the lemon and the myrtle,--from the stormy Atlantic,
where the skiff of the fisherman rocks fearlessly under the menace of
beetling c