but
centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last
into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military
despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew
democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely from
books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton, who,
having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had written to the
"Times" demanding redress, and drawing a mournful inference of
democratic instability. Nor were men wanting among ourselves who had
so steeped their brains in London literature as to mistake Cockneyism
for European culture, and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan
breadth of view, and who, owing all they had and all they were to
democracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding to join in the
shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.

But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid or
the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity against
any over-confidence of hope. A war--which, whether we consider the
expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, or
the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the most
momentous of modern times--was to be waged by a people divided at home,
unnerved by fifty years of peace, under a chief magistrate without
experience and without reputation, whose every measure was sure to be
cunningly hampered by a jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who,
while dealing with unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a
hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. All
this was to be done without warning and without preparation, while at
the same time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the
political condition of four millions of people, by softening the
prejudices, allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the
cooeperation, of their unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were
an occasion when the heightened imagination of the historian might see
Destiny visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of
her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three years;
never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that strength be
so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the people,--to
that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion
possibl