ates as a crime upon their people, or who think that, in separating
themselves from the British crown, they were guilty of a deliberate
wickedness which has yet to be expiated. Whether that separation was
fully justified by the circumstances of the time, is a question upon
which we do not propose to enter: but having so separated, it does not
appear that any course was left open to them but that which they have
pursued. Through the negligence of the mother country, no pains had been
taken to plant even the germs of British institutions in her American
colonies, and the War of Independence found them already in possession
of all, and more than all, of the democratic elements of our
constitution; while the feeling of personal attachment to the sovereign
had died out through distance and neglect, and the influence of the
aristocracy and the church was altogether unknown. Even in Virginia,
where, in consequence of the existence of domestic slavery on a large
scale, and the laws of primogeniture and entail, a certain
aristocratical feeling had sprung up, a jealousy of the British crown
and parliament showed itself from first to last, at least as strongly as
elsewhere; and the ink of the Declaration of Independence was scarcely
dry, before those laws of property were repealed, and every vestige of
an Established Church swept away. Nothing then remained, in the absence
of Conservative principles and traditions, but to construct their
government upon the broadest basis of Democracy; accordingly, the
triumph of that principle was complete from the first. The genius of
progressive democracy may have removed some of the slender barriers with
which it has found itself accidentally embarrassed; but it has not been
able to add any thing to the force of those pithy abstractions which
were endorsed by the most respectable chiefs of the Revolution, and
which remain to sanctify its wildest aspirations.

All men, therefore, in America--that is, all _white_ men--are "free and
equal;" and every thing that has been done in her political world for
the last half century has gone to illustrate and carry out this somewhat
intractable hypothesis. Upon this principle, the vote of John Jacob
Astor, with his twenty-five millions of dollars, is neutralized by that
of the Irish pauper just cast upon its shores. The _millionaire_ counts
one, and so does the dingy unit of Erin, though the former counts for
himself, and the latter for his demagogue and hi