oon must, as in fact it soon did, pass away
with the delusion that gave it birth. The habit of obedience to written
law, inculcated by generations of respect for actual government able to
enforce its authority, will persist for a long time, with an ever
lessening power upon the imagination of the people; but there comes a time
when the tradition is forgotten and the delusion exhausted. When men
perceive that nothing is restraining them but their consent to be
restrained, then at last there is nothing to obstruct the free play of
that selfishness which is the dominant characteristic and fundamental
motive of human nature and human action respectively. Politics, which may
have had something of the character of a contest of principles, becomes a
struggle of interests, and its methods are frankly serviceable to personal
and class advantage. Patriotism and respect for law pass like a tale that
is told. Anarchy, no longer disguised as "government by consent," reveals
his hidden hand, and in the words of our greatest living poet,

lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all!

The ancient Americans were a composite people; their blood was a blend of
all the strains known in their time. Their government, while they had one,
being merely a loose and mutable expression of the desires and caprices of
the majority--that is to say, of the ignorant, restless and reckless--gave
the freest rein and play to all the primal instincts and elemental
passions of the race. In so far and for so long as it had any restraining
force, it was only the restraint of the present over the power of the
past--that of a new habit over an old and insistent tendency ever seeking
expression in large liberties and indulgences impatient of control. In the
history of that unhappy people, therefore, we see unveiled the workings of
the human will in its most lawless state, without fear of authority or
care of consequence. Nothing could be more instructive.

Of the American form of government, although itself the greatest of evils
afflicting the victims of those that it entailed, but little needs to be
said here; it has perished from the earth, a system discredited by an
unbroken record of failure in all parts of the world, from the earliest
historic times to its final extinction. Of living students of political
history not one professes to see in it anything but a mischievous creation
of theorists and visionaries--persons whom our grac