ine which is essential
to "the unity and married calm of States." But I feel assured that
experience and necessity will cure this evil, as they have shown their
power to cure others. And under what frame of policy have evils ever
been remedied till they became intolerable, and shook men out of their
indolent indifference through their fears?

We are told that the inevitable result of democracy is to sap the
foundations of personal independence, to weaken the principle of
authority, to lessen the respect due to eminence, whether in station,
virtue, or genius. If these things were so, society could not hold
together. Perhaps the best forcing-house of robust individuality would
be where public opinion is inclined to be most overbearing, as he must be
of heroic temper who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the
season in a soft hat. As for authority, it is one of the symptoms of the
time that the religious reverence for it is declining everywhere, but
this is due partly to the fact that state-craft is no longer looked upon
as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay of superstition,
by which I mean the habit of respecting what we are told to respect
rather than what is respectable in itself. There is more rough and
tumble in the American democracy than is altogether agreeable to people
of sensitive nerves and refined habits, and the people take their
political duties lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither
unnatural nor unbecoming in a young giant. Democracies can no more jump
away from their own shadows than the rest of us can. They no doubt
sometimes make mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve it. But
they do this because they believe them worthy of it, and though it be
true that the idol is the measure of the worshipper, yet the worship has
in it the germ of a nobler religion. But is it democracies alone that
fall into these errors? I, who have seen it proposed to erect a statue
to Hudson, the railway king, and have heard Louis Napoleon hailed as the
saviour of society by men who certainly had no democratic associations or
leanings, am not ready to think so. But democracies have likewise their
finer instincts. I have also seen the wisest statesman and most pregnant
speaker of our generation, a man of humble birth and ungainly manners, of
little culture beyond what his own genius supplied, become more absolute
in power than any monarch of modern times through the revere