people, or for mankind, to pass into a new form of
being, unseen hands draw the bolts from the gates of futurity; an
all-subduing influence prepares the minds of men for the coming
revolution; those who plan resistance find themselves in conflict with
the will of Providence rather than with human devices; and all hearts
and all understandings, most of all the opinions and influences of the
unwilling, are wonderfully attracted and compelled to bear forward the
change, which becomes more an obedience to the law of universal nature
than submission to the arbitrament of man.

In the fulness of time a republic rose up in the wilderness of America.
Thousands of years had passed away before this child of the ages could
be born. From whatever there was of good in the systems of former
centuries she drew her nourishment; the wrecks of the past were her
warnings. With the deepest sentiment of faith fixed in her inmost
nature, she disenthralled religion from bondage to temporal power, that
her worship might be worship only in spirit and in truth. The wisdom
which had passed from India through Greece, with what Greece had added
of her own; the jurisprudence of Rome; the mediaeval municipalities;
the Teutonic method of representation; the political experience of
England; the benignant wisdom of the expositors of the law of nature
and of nations in France and Holland, all shed on her their selectest
influence. She washed the gold of political wisdom from the sands
wherever it was found; she cleft it from the rocks; she gleaned it
among ruins. Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of
all the experience of past human life, she compiled a perennial
political philosophy, the primordial principles of national ethics. The
wise men of Europe sought the best government in a mixture of monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy; America went behind these names to extract
from them the vital elements of social forms, and blend them
harmoniously in the free commonwealth, which comes nearest to the
illustration of the natural equality of all men. She intrusted the
guardianship of established rights to law, the movements of reform to
the spirit of the people, and drew her force from the happy
reconciliation of both.

Republics had heretofore been limited to small cantons, or cities and
their dependencies; America, doing that of which the like had not
before been known upon the earth, or believed by kings and statesmen to
be possible