sses in any community. In the infancy of government, when
a rude and unlettered people are little able to take care of
themselves, the establishment of class distinctions is undoubtedly
conducive to progress, as it tends to unite the people, thereby
counteracting the thousand petty jealousies and strifes and bickerings
which invariably beset an infant people, and to organize and systematize
all progressive effort. It is, in fact, a putting of the people to
school under such wholesome restraints as shall compel them forward
while guarding them against those evil influences which militate against
their prosperity. But in the course of events the time comes when these
restraints are no longer necessary, but rather become hampers upon the
wheels of progress; and when that period arrives, all these invidious
distinctions should, in a well-regulated state, gradually disappear and
give place to that freedom which is essential to individual advancement
as the basis of national power. Trained as our ancestors had been to
consider these distinctions divinely appointed, it was no easy task for
them to abrogate so aged and apparently sacred a system, and nothing but
the material evidence before their eyes in the experience of their own
society, convincing them that such a course was an actual necessity of
their future well-being, could have induced them so to depart from the
teachings of their progenitors. Nor was it less difficult to determine
how far these safeguards of the olden time might safely be dispensed
with, or where or how deeply the knife should be applied which, in the
fallibility of human judgment, might possibly cut away some main root of
their social organization. Here was required the exercise of the
profoundest wisdom and the most careful discretion--wisdom unassisted by
any experience in the past history of the world other than that of the
utter failure of all past experiments in any way similar to their own.
To us of to-day, viewed in the light of intervening experience and of
the increased knowledge of human affairs, this may seem a little thing;
but to them it was not so, for the path was new and untried, and they
were surrounded by the thickest of darkness. Thus it will be seen that
in the founding of our system there were great difficulties, which only
the loftiest aims and the utmost firmness and determination in the cause
of the good and the true, with the liveliest sense of the necessities
and the yearnings