where so many wiser men have spoken before me. Precluded, in my
quality of national guest, by motives of taste and discretion, from
dealing with any question of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to
me wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic of
comparatively abstract interest, and to ask your indulgence for a few
somewhat generalized remarks on a matter concerning which I had some
experimental knowledge, derived from the use of such eyes and ears as
Nature had been pleased to endow me withal, and such report as I had been
able to win from them. The subject which most readily suggested itself
was the spirit and the working of those conceptions of life and polity
which are lumped together, whether for reproach or commendation, under
the name of Democracy. By temperament and education of a conservative
turn, I saw the last years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers
saw with delighted amazement a century ago, and have watched the change
(to me a sad one) from an agricultural to a proletary population. The
testimony of Balaam should carry some conviction. I have grown to
manhood and am now growing old with the growth of this system of
government in my native land, have watched its advances, or what some
would call its encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those of a
glacier, have been an ear-witness to the forebodings of wise and good and
timid men, and have lived to see those forebodings belied by the course
of events, which is apt to show itself humorously careless of the
reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing a sagacious old gentleman
say in 1840 that the doing away with the property qualification for
suffrage twenty years before had been the ruin of the State of
Massachusetts; that it had put public credit and private estate alike at
the mercy of demagogues. I lived to see that Commonwealth twenty odd
years later paying the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her
sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith, and that while
suffering an unparalleled drain of men and treasure in helping to sustain
the unity and self-respect of the nation.

If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger cities, as it
certainly has, this has been mainly because the hands that wielded it
were untrained to its use. There the election of a majority of the
trustees of the public money is controlled by the most ignorant and
vicious of a population which has come to us from abroad