and excessive devotion to fashion, of
which I have spoken, are due, largely, to a still more radical defect in
our social education. I mean its _anti-republican spirit_. This is our
crowning absurdity. We are good democrats--in theory. It is a pity that
our practice does not bear out our theory, for the sake of the homely
virtue of consistency. To a great many otherwise sensible people our
simple republican ways are distasteful, and they are apt to look with,
admiring, envious eyes on the conventional life of foreign lords, not
considering how burdened with forms it is, and full of the selfishness,
the pride and arrogance of the privileged and titled few, at the bitter
expense of the suffering, untitled many. The aping of aristocratic
pretensions has been a much-ridiculed foible of American women. It is
certain that American society needs republicanizing in all its grades.
We have widely departed from the simplicity of the early days and of the
founders of the republic, in social life, just as in our political
course we had suffered the vital essence of our organic law to become a
dead thing, and the whole machinery of the Government to work reversely
to its intention. And the cause has been the same in each case. The
spirit of a government and the theories embodying it are the reflection
of the social condition of a given age and people, so that the one will
never be of a higher order than the other; while it is, also, equally
true, that the best and most advanced political theories may be suffered
to languish in operation, or become wholly dormant, from the influence
of social causes. Thus it was that the demoralising effect of human
slavery did, up to the time of the great shock which the nation received
in the spring of 1861--a shock which galvanized it into life, and sent
the before vitiated blood coursing hotly, and, at last, healthfully
through all the veins and arteries of the national body--persistently
encroach alike upon Government and society. The slime of that serpent
was over everything in the North as well as the South, and if it did not
kill out the popular virtue and patriotism as completely here as there,
where it is intimately interwoven with the life of the people, the
difference is due to that very cause, as well as to the inextinguishable
vitality that God has conferred on the genius of human liberty, so that
when betrayed, hunted, starved, outlawed, she yet seeks some impregnable
fastness, and subsi