sities of human progress--illustrated in the warfare of
nations, in military organizations for the extension of a common rule
and culture among mankind, and in despotic impositions of order,
justice, and the general ideas of civilization--had relaxed, and a free
course, by comparison at least, was opened for the higher nature of man
in both private and public action. A conception of the soul and its
destiny, not previously applicable in society, underlies democracy; this
is why it is the most spiritual government known to man, and therefore
the highest reach of man's evolution; it is, in fact, the spiritual
element in society expressing itself now in politics with an unsuspected
and incalculable force.

Democracy is contained in the triple statement that men are born free,
equal, and in brotherhood; and in this formula it is the middle term
that is cardinal, and the root of all. Yet it is the doctrine of the
equality of man, by virtue of the human nature with which he is clothed
entire at birth, that is most attacked, as an obvious absurdity, and
provocative more of laughter than of argument. What, then, is this
equality which democracy affirms as the true state of all men among
themselves? It is our common human nature, that identity of the soul in
all men, which was first inculcated by the preaching of Christ's death
for all equally, whence it followed that every human soul was of equal
value in the eyes of God, its Creator, and had the same title to the
rites of the Christian Church, and the same blessedness of an infinite
immortality in the world to come; thence we derived it from the very
fountain of our faith, and the first true democracy was that which
levelled king and peasant, barbarian and Roman, in the communion of our
Lord. Yet nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequalities at birth
itself as make our peremptory charter of the value of men's souls seem a
play of fancy. There are men of almost divine intelligence, men of
almost devilish instincts, men of more or less clouded mind; and they
are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped into them heredity,
circumstance, and the physical conditions of sanity, morality and
wholesomeness, in the body which is her work. Such differences do exist,
and conditions vary the world over, whence nature, which accumulates
inequalities in the struggle for life, "with ravin shrieks against our
creed." But we have not now to learn for the first time that nature,
though