an opposite character.

As commerce enlarges, as other professions besides the clerical arise,
as trades become profitable, as cities swell in importance, as
communication improves, raising villages into towns, and hamlets into
villages, and the affairs of central communities become spread through
the circumference, the lower classes rise, the chiefs lose much of their
importance, the value of men for their intrinsic qualifications is
discovered, and such men take the lead in managing the affairs of
associated citizens. Instead of all being done by orders issued from a
central power,--commands carrying forth an imperious will, and bringing
back undoubting obedience,--social affairs begin to be managed by the
heads and hands of the parties immediately interested. Self-government
in municipal affairs takes place; and, having taken place in any one set
of circumstances, it appears likely to be employed within a wider and a
wider range, till all the government of the community is of that
character. The United States are the most remarkable examples now before
the world of the reverse of the feudal system,--its principles, its
methods, its virtues and vices. In as far as the Americans revert, in
ideas and tastes, to the past, this may be attributed to the transition
being not yet perfected,--to the generation which organized the republic
having been educated amidst the remains of feudalism. There are still
Americans who boast of ancestors high in the order of birth rather than
of merit; who in talking of rank have ideas of birth in their minds, and
whose tastes lie in the past. But such will be the case while the
literature of the world breathes the spirit of former ages, and softens
the transition to an opposite social state. A new literature, new modes
of thought, are daily arising, which point more and more towards the
future. We have already records of the immediate state of the minds and
fortunes of men and of communities, and not a few speculations which
stretch far forward into the future. Every year is the admission more
extensively entered into that moral power is nobler than physical force;
there is more earnestness in the conferences of nations, and less
proneness to war. The highest creations of literature itself, however
long ago produced, are now discovered to bear as close a relation to the
future as the past. They are for all time, through all its changes.
While pillars of light in the dim regions of antiquit