ld not degenerate into license and
result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the
power so often found necessary of representing or destroying their
enemy, when he was found in the person of a single despot."

In this excerpt the true democratic principles upon which the American
Republic was founded, and which principles were largely conceived and
put in shape by Thomas Jefferson, are clearly and concisely set forth.
De Tocqueville, born and reared amid monarchial surroundings, though
brilliant and learned as he was, could not measure the depths to which
Jefferson had dug into the labyrinths of free thought and free
institutions, and the consequence was that all of his conjectures as to
the life and perpetuity of a government based upon the will and wishes
of its subjects could not endure, went for naught, and subjected him to
a just criticism not only by the advocates of such a government, but by
the government itself. Daniel Webster in the Senate of the United
States, while defending the doctrines of universal liberty, for which
the State of Massachusetts had always stood, in his great speech in
reply to Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, exclaimed in stentorian
voice, "I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs
none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourself. There is her
history; the inhabitants know it by heart." So we can say to De
Tocqueville, who had said of the Government of the United States, that
it is all sail and no ballast, and that it possessed no power to resist
internal strife, and, therefore, could not endure: there she is; she
needs no encomium by us; there she stands, and she has stood firmly in
the face of all sorts of opposition for more than a hundred years, and
we believe she will endure forever!

In close relationship to that reign of democratic government which
Jefferson so earnestly sought to establish, lies, in open view, the
necessity for the education of the people, and to its accomplishment he
dedicated, in early life, his talents and his energies. He saw then,
and we, at this later period of our national growth and development,
realize it all the more, that the strength and perpetuity of all free
governments rest mainly upon the education of their subjects. Without
it such governments fall easy victims to ignorant military captains and
civil demagogues of low repute. Free government is better than monarchy
in proportion to the intelligence of