realization of a great idea. It has been chosen
not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and Rome, but to
accomplish a greater work than was assigned to either. In art, it will
prove false to its mission if it do not rival Greece; and in science
and philosophy, if it do not surpass it. In the state, in law, in
jurisprudence, it must continue and surpass Rome. Its idea is liberty,
indeed, but liberty with law, and law with liberty. Yet its mission is
not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true
idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public
and the freedom of the individual--the sovereignty of the people
without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. In
other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the dialectic
union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights of man and those
of society. The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the
detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same,
or assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state. The
American republic has been instituted by Providence to realize the
freedom of each with advantage to the other.

The real mission of the United States is to introduce and establish a
political constitution, which, while it retains all the advantages of
the constitutions of states thus far known, is unlike any of them, and
secures advantages which none of them did or could possess. The
American constitution has no prototype in any prior constitution. The
American form of government can be classed throughout with none of the
forms of government described by Aristotle, or even by later
authorities. Aristotle knew only four forms of government: Monarchy,
Aristocracy, Democracy, and Mixed Governments. The American form is
none of these, nor any combination of them. It is original, a new
contribution to political science, and seeks to attain the end of all
wise and just government by means unknown or forbidden to the ancients,
and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by American
political writers themselves. The originality of the American
constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of our own
statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed from the
constitutions of other states rather than by a profound study of its
own principles. They have taken too low a view of it, and have rarely,
if ever, appreciated its distincti