of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation
laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness.

Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and
barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was
averted; and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved
press. Liberty is gone, but civilization has been saved.

I have not the smallest doubt that if we had a purely democratic
government here the effect would be the same. Either the poor would
plunder the rich and civilization would perish, or order and prosperity
would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would
perish.

You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I
will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate
I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As
long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land your
laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring
population of the Old World, and while that is the case the Jeffersonian
politics may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.

But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as
old England. Wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as
with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those
Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will
assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be
fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer
mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to
agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man
should have a million while another cannot get a full meal.

In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little
rioting. But it matters little. For here the sufferers are not the
rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed,
but select; of an educated class; of a class which is, and knows itself
to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance
of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained.
The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the
indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again;
work is plentiful, wages rise and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness.
I have seen England pass three or four ti