pecimen of either ever produced at six months' notice. Dearly do
nations pay for such secular births; still more dearly for their
training. They are commonly rather the slow result than the conscious
cause of revolutions in thought or polity. It is no imputation on
democratic forms of government, it is the unexampled prosperity of
nearly half a century that is in fault, if a sudden and unforewarned
danger finds us without a leader, whether civil or military, whom the
people are willing to trust implicitly, and who can in some sense
control events by the prestige of a great name. Carlyle and others have
for years been laying to the charge of representative and parliamentary
government the same evils whose germ certain British critics, as
ignorant of our national character as of our geography, are so kindly
ready to find in our democracy. Mr. Stuart Mill, in his essay on
"Liberty," has convinced us that even the tyranny of Public Opinion is
not, as we had hastily supposed, a peculiarly American institution, but
is to the full as stringent and as fertile of commonplace in intellect
and character under a limited as under a universal system of suffrage.

The truth is, that it is not in our institutions, but in our history,
that we are to look for the causes of much that is superficially
distasteful and sometimes unpleasantly disappointing in our national
habits,--we would not too hastily say in our national character. Our
most incorrigible blackguards, and the class of voters who are at the
mercy of venal politicians, have had their training, such as it is,
under forms of government and amid a social order very unlike ours.
Disgust at the general dirtiness and corruption of our politics, we are
told, keeps all our leading men out of public life. This appears to us,
we confess, a rather shallow misconception. Our politics are no dirtier
or more corrupt than those of our neighbors. The famous _Quam parva
sapientia regitur mundus_ was not said in scorn by the minister of a
republic, but in sober sadness by one whose dealings had been lifelong
with the courts and statesmen of princes. The real disgust lies in the
selfish passions that are called into play by the strife of party and
the small ambitions of public men, and not in any mere coarseness in the
expression of them. We are not an elegant people: rather less so, on the
whole, even in the aristocratic South than in the democratic North. In
this past year of our Lord eighteen