f^"^ . 1^- ^M^' ..^5 ^¦¦ ^ ;'%:*. U.S. of MERICA AND EUROPE. BY ADAM G. DE GUROWSKI. NEW YOEK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 846 & 348 BEOADWAT. M.DCOO.LVn. Enteeed according to Act of Congress, in the year 1B57, By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, in the Clerk's Office ofthe District Court ofthe United States, for the Southern District of New York. Ea^i.sSl c o ]sr T E ]sr T s . CHAP. I. — ^Population, Races, II. — Character, . "'' III. — Democract, IT. — Self-Government, Y. — Slatery, . YI. — Manifest Destint, YII. — Foreign Elements, VIII. — EnuCATioN, . IX.— The Press, X.— The Pulpit, . XI. — The American Mrsn, XII. — Customs, Habits, Manners, etc., XIII. — Country asd Ciir, Conclusion, . PAGE 1 6076 127169 230 259 287 309 366S9S409 America, the progeny of Europe, differs from the generator in many of the most salient features of her social and political organisms, differs in public and domestic life. To point out these dissimilari ties, to ascertain their sources, is the aim of the fol' lowing pages. A rapid and succinct view of human affairs and events, as far back as the dimmest light of history extends, shows that the diversified aspects of civilization have been successively elaborated through different people and at different eras. It demonstrates that the civilizing impulses have been inherent, inborn in man, of almost all historical ra ces and nations, and in various regions and cli mates. A higher principle has inspired, mightier laws have presided over the destinies of mankind, than the exclusively physical law of races. Human ity soars above races and nationalities. However active, and at times, however seemingly all-powerful may have been the agency of the law of races, it has never been paramount. In the progressive development of man, in the march, the oscillations of civilization, the law of races, now scarcely perceptibly, then more dis tinctly but well-nigh uninterruptedly, has receded VI before the more elevated, nobler, and more truly hu mane principles and incentives of man's mental fac ulties, aspirations, and actions. In America these principles and laws have been put in action with a fulness unwonted and impossible in the old world, generating here a social state and evolving institu tions almost unknown to the past. The social and historical standpoint reached by America, solves several problems, which up to this time have been distinctly regarded as nearly inso luble, from epoch to epoch, from generation to gen eration. Man as a unit, in the free untrammelled devel opment of his individuality, has been more or less thoroughly absorbed in various aspects and ways for the benefit of the whole ; and was so even in the freest ancient or European communities and states. In principle and in fact, individuality has been and is still limited, circumscribed, compressed. This is the case in the still surviving social structures, as well as in the ancient and modern theories of ini tiators, innovators, socialists, reformers, of whatever name and principle, with a few rare exceptions. For the first time in free America, man's individu ality has been normally fixed and established, its rights asserted and realized. Fourier's theories of association, hitherto abstract and unrealizable, but wantonly and ignorantly confounded with what is commonly called socialism — ^these theories alone reveal a higher, more scientific, and therefore fuUer scope and guarantee for the developement of indi viduality, for the play of its moral, mental, and vu physical powers and activities. But America fills the present, throws effulgent rays into the future. Authority and liberty have always struggled for pre-eminence and leadership over the historical development, and the domestic hearth of nations. The past has witnessed countless centuries of the reign of authority, religious, political, social, and gov ernmental ; and comparatively, only lightning-like flashes of that of liberty. The former always endea voring to recover the lost ground, to seize the supre macy over man's mind and his social economy. Moralists, men of genius as Dante, philosophers, statesmen, have continually attempted to conciliate the two antagonistic principles and forces, to mo dify or reduce their extremes, to bring them into peaceful juxtaposition, to find in their combination an equipoise for society. Some way or other, how ever, authority gets the lion's share in theory as in practice. Here the relations of authority and lib erty to each other and to man have received a new and elementary realization. The principles from which the institutions of America have been evolved, form the source of her material prosperity. It does not enter within the range of this work to detail the giant steps of her progress, nor to present statistical comparisons. Statistics, even the most detailed and complete, never axiomatic and conclusive in themselves, serve only to elucidate and verify the soundness and potency of a dominant social and governmental system. And the universally admitted prosperity of America, wants not a statistical confirmation. vm Generalizations always embrace all existing or presumable exceptions. To specify these, would have been tedious or altogether impossible. For good or for bad, for large or smaller contingencies, exceptions are implied in the generalizations, which constitute the strictures of comparison between America and Europe, or relate to customs, manners, habits, and usages. A few scattered mountains or hills do not constitute the general physiognomy of a country, a few warm or cold months do not make a soft or a rigid climate, a few brave men or cow ards do not make an army fight, win, or run. The same axiom applies to social and political condi tions, to the appreciation of the most various and minute public or private relations, to the moral, so cial, and domestic character of a land and its inhab itants. AMERICA AND EUROPE. CHAPTER I. eaces, POPTTLATION. A leading social feature distinguishes America from the European nations. This is the union of the utmost indi vidual independence and equality with a well-regulated social and political organization. This radical difference already existed in the germs out of which sprang the ancient, the European civilization, and this new world. In both cases, the embryo was different. Different was the his torical process of formation. A principle begot the Ame rican society ; force and conquest were the parents of the ancient one. To the various characteristics of races are nowadays ascribed the various manifestations of social structures and civilizations, in their progressive unfolding. Such charac teristics, wholly physical ia their nature, are set up as ex clusive and omnipotent agencies in the development of human destinies. They are supposed to constitute the power of man to elevate his existence, to elaborate the various conditions of his social culture. To those charac- 1 2 AMBEICA AUD ETTEOFE. teristics are subordinated all the other incentives and inspirations, which stimulate man's unappeasable activity ; nay, they are said to constitute his mental and moral essence. By the oscillations which mark the development of the world's history, the centre, the focus of civilization, became displaced from South to North. Now a verdict contrary to historical evidence proclaims the so-called southern races of every region, of each hemisphere, to be deprived of initiative, of active powers, in the labors and struggles for social amelioration. On account of the climate, and of certain presumed anatomical dissimilarities, they are declared to be too weak morally for freedom ; too weak physically to be its supports and sanctuary. In man, however, as in the universe, every thing is wonderfully united. In all regions and in all conditions, he is endowed with the germs of similar passions, inclinations, tendencies, aspirations. Their development and play, ac tuated by the events and conditions which surround and press upon him, carry man decidedly astray at times in a special direction, or keep him more fully under the influ ence of his purer and indestructible essence. This law — if positive, well-defined laws are to be recognized — is human in its nature, all-embracing, and more elastic and expanding than that which, according to the variety of races and of their dwellings, distributes their participation and significance in the eternal epos of our social destinies. Societies, nations, and states move, act and live by the combination of facts and events of the external world with internal human impulses and propensities. Sometimes the higher human powers succumb under the pressure of exter nal, and merely material circumstances. Herein the true cause is to be found, amidst many explications, of the fluctuations of civilization, of its slow march, of its difl^cult expansion even in one and the same nation, dwelling in EACES, POPULATION. 3 the same region. Moreover, because, by the fortuitous concourse of events, a nation, mostly forming a small branch of what ethnologically is CaUed race, and favored by peculiar combinations, has often become a leader of a given epoch, such ascendency was not predestined nor permanent. There have been several Ionic States, but only one AihencB, and the Beotians were likewise Greeks. The same phenomenon is reproduced in the development of all the cardinal and secondary races. The lights which illuminate the orbits of the human race were not enkindled simultaneously, but one by one. They radiated in various directions. Neither North nor South, neither this nor that primordial race, nor any branch issuing therefrom, has been, in ancient or in Christian times, the exclusive and predestined holder of the sacred fire. So neither the man of the North nor that of the South, is exclusively endowed with the love of liberty, or with exclusive mental and physical powers to secure and to sustain it. There is no social or historical law by which a special race is intrusted with the highest gifts which alone constitute the supremacy of man over the inferior creation. The tendency to happiness is common to all, as well as the efforts for amelioration. These tendencies manifest themselves differently, and at various epochs among various nations. They are evoked by accidents of human character, and constitute the brightest phenomena in the ascending movement of humanity. Their investiga tion unravels the laws by whose action nations appear and march on the stage of history. And if there is an absolute historical law, revealed by the uninterrupted labor of the human race, by its strug gles with nature and with itself, by the bloody as well as the luminous pages which fill history, by the efforts for ameliorating the moral and material state wherein consists 4: AMEEICA AND EUROPE. civilization, by the religious and philosophical speculations enkindled in the succession of ages, by the multifarious manifestations of the human spirit in literature, in refine ment, in arts, in industrial, mechanical, and agricultural pursuits — it is the law of the successive appearance of races and nations in the course of history. It is the law of transmission from one to another of the sacred fire of civilization ; it is the succession of nations to each other on the foreground of the events of ages. Not simultaneously in all places, and by all races and nations, but in succession is civilization to be elaborated. When the time had ar rived for calling a people to light and truth, it mattered not whether it lived amid the snows of Scandinavia, or on the burning plains of India. The cause of this law has hitherto been hidden, unexplained, but the law speaks to the mind from all the pages, from all the events, from all the evolutions of history. There is no absolute reason why the light of civilization should not have spread simul taneously over the plains of Iran and over those of Ger many — especially as branches of the same stock, of the same family or race, extended, moved, lived, worked, suf fered and enjoyed over this space. But perhaps more than forty centuries elapsed before the light, already shining and evoking a higher lifg south of the Himalaya and along the Indus, reached the Ehine and the Atlantic. And in that space and time, how many, and how variously endowed actors, how many fertile ideas, and mental and social mani festations, what various utterances of the human inind have filled the ages, succeeded to each other, all of them in turns initiators and initiated into the great, mysterious and nevertheless luminous sanctuary of human development and progress. In this succession, each race or nation, in its time, brought its offerings, elaborated one or even many ideas, according to its own peculiarity, according to EACES, POPULATION. 5 special data and conditions. But the impulse, the aspira tion towards progress and amelioration, the ethereal sparks of this life-giving fire, how different its manifestations ; it was and is glimmering in the mind, in the bosom of man in all regions, all climes, and all physical conformations. A luminous current of culture runs throughout the whole history of the race, and constitutes its development. Some times rapid and broad, then at times slow and dimmed, but never interrupted. The tyranny exercised over historical and philosophical studies and comprehension, by the nar row-minded, one-sighted classicisms, — a tyranny resulting in a blind confidence and devotion to the axioms and ver dicts of Greek and Roman writers, — overclouded the judg ment of sound, impartial reason. Thus, on Greek civiliza tion and philosophy was bestowed a power of virtual originality and self-creation unjustified by the investigation into the history of human development. In our times, another tyranny prevails and overshadows the mind ; a tyranny more exclusive, because concentrating in one race all the better and higher endowments of man, endowments constituting the higher essence in which consists the cul ture of our time. It is presumptuously asserted, that only northern races are enabled to achieve civilization, in all its various mental, social, and material manifestations; that only a few northern nations are the exclusive bearers and the agents of the culture of the globe. Thus the modern post-Roman civilization — according to this haughty verdict — ^is exclusively worked out by the German mind, the German race. On this continent, freedom, democracy, ac tivity, those highest goods and conditions of the happiness of man, are to form in their turn, preeminently, if not ex clusively, the lot of a single family — the Anglo-Saxon one. How little history justifies all this sweeping range of asser tions, can be shown by taking the evidence even at random b AMEEICA AND EUROPE. which is amply scattered over its pages. History demon strates that neither climate nor certain geographical con ditions enervate mind and body, disabling men from mental and industrial laborious activity. It shows that man is subject to these powerful external influences, that under their action the events of his life are variously combined and manifested. Man reacts on all nature or the medium wherein he moves and works. Every thing in creation is subject to reciprocal action, — stagnation is death. Man is the centre, the focus of the universe ; in him nature or mat ter reaches the highest combination with mind. Thus he reproduces and reflects all the countless variety and com binations of those two essences, their modifications and graduations, their affinities, repulsions, attractions. Thus he is versatile in his utterances and actions, in his modes and methods, in his ways of shaping out the fruits of his mental and plastic productivity. For this reason, in cer tain conditions, under certain combinations of events and of influences, under the inward impulse of faculties and propensities, some of them may acquire greater fulness and power of expansion than others; these in this ma.nner becom ing crushed, crowded out, remaining in an embryonic state. So in inorganic as in organic nature — from various pro portions and combinations of rather a small number of chemical elements, come forth an innumerable variety of ores and stones, of colors, flavors, tastes, of forms and pow ers in the vegetable and in the animal realm. The greatest, the most crushing and difficult material works and labors have been accomplished in the hot re gions of Asia, at epochs when man did not possess such various scientific means and tools to bridle and master the reluctant elements of nature. There at remote times was first accomplished the hardest, the rudimental task of civilization. To-day a blast of powder severs immense EACES, POPULATION. 7 blocks of granite ; machinery cuts, separates and carries them to various destinations. But are the first inventors in mechanics not even more astonishing than those who inherited the results of their efforts, and of their suc cessful or frustrated attempts ? The man who understood and applied the first rudiments of mechanics, probably spent as much power of observation, combination and cal culation as did Fulton, for whom the former prepared and smoothed the path. And so with all other sciences, in ventions, industries and productions. Daily experience shows how unconquerable and deadly to man is the exu berant vegetation of hot and tropical regions, how difficult in those regions to subject nature to the power, to the will, to the handling of man. Far more in the Southern clime does nature resist and defend itself than in that of the less reproductive and moderate North, where now civilization shines more brightly. But the plains of Egypt, Syria, and of the Indus, cut by canals, watered by art, highly cultivated and nourishing millions and millions at the re motest times, those regions covered then with rich, power ful and monumental cities, swarming with industrious, en terprising and therefore skilful and intelligent populations, bear witness to the falsehood of the assertion concerning the inability of the Southern races for hard labor, and of the absolute enervating influence of climate. What an immense amount of labor, skill, industry, invention were spent, used up, before those regions reached that high state of culture which they enjoyed forty or fifty centu ries ago. The gigantic ruins of the Egyptian civilization show a high degree of development in the mechanical and architectural arts, as well as of others. And the Brah- minic remains ? Energy, industry, refinement flourished on the Indus when Greece was probably occupied only by savage barbarians, when the man of the now proud North 8 AMEEICA AND EUEOFE. had scarcely a hovel wherein to crouch, or the skin of a wild beast to cover his shivering body. In their times those Southern tropical regions were the seat and representa tives of the highest degree of culture and civilization, which man was to reach in a given epoch ; in the same way as the man of the Northern regions represents it now. Corresponding mental culture of course was the twin, or rather the incentive to material progress, and mental cul ture, as reproduced in a higher comprehension of social duties in social organization, manifested itself in the past, in the remotest antiquity. Love of country, the exten sion over all members of a given society of the means of information, the absence of social privileges of caste can be traced out to nearly immemorial times, even beyond the boundaries of the Indo-European family. The antiquity of the now slightly treated Chinese civ ilization is not ascertained. But for the whole period of positive history, this civilization seems to have made little if even any progress, having at that remote epoch al ready reached a remarkably diversified and eminent devel opment. It is still an unsolved historical problem, whether the Chinese received civilization from Egypt or India, or transmitted it to those regions. Such an antiquity proves at any rate an inventive and exertive power of the Tura- nic or Altaic race. When the proud Indo-Germans were shrouded in torpidity and savageness, the Chinese culti vated the soil, the arts ; had various manufactures, had mental development ; the art of writing was familiar to them. The society of the ancient, as well as of the Eu ropean world, was and is based on distinctions and privi leges of castes ; was and is construed out of social super positions. Slavery under various forms existed among all the nations. No traces of either of these evils exist in the Chinese social structure. Castes, privileges and slavery are stUl the great chains obstructing, impeding the free development of the Christian, as they did that of the an cient world. The whole social history is the reproduction of the struggles and of the attempts of men to free them selves from those troublesome deformities. The highest conception of social advancement not yet attained even in our epoch, is the recognition of the position of the indi vidual in society, not according to inherited privileges and accidents of birth, but according to his individually ac quired mental, and scientific distinctions and accomplish ments. On them, however, has depended social position in China for uncountable centuries, and nowhere are to be found traces of existence of social, civil or military slavery. There are, to be sure, many black spots and deficiences in the Chinese social state and civilization — many wherein they are greatly inferior, but from the other side the above-mentioned phenomena throw many of our boasted superiorities into the shade. Knowledge, such as exists in China, is brought within the reach of the whole population ; and with all our facilities for printing and diffusing of letters, we are left far in the background by the Chinese, among whom for long centuries the habit of reading is as general among the masses as any other function of daily life. Books are at a price lower than the smallest alms. The whole Empire forms a leaf, covered with written sen tences and axioms of their moralists. Schools accord ingly existed there for the masses of the people at a pe riod when European nations did not even dream of the availability of learning. Printing, that great engine of modem progress, was probably known to the Chinese when Harlem was a wilderness. The use of powder was undoubtedly brought to Europe from China. In India the education of the people through public schools, the universal knowledge of reading and writing, date back 1* 10 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. from a time when neither of these accomplishments was thought of as a necessary element in the existence of the masses. They were not judged indispensable even in Greece and Athens ; nor even for long centuries afterwards in Europe, where even now more than half of its popula- , tion is wholly illiterate. The Mahometan conquest and the English dominion ruined the Hindoo people, destroyed schools, destroyed arts and industry. Oppression and the turn of human events enervated and debased these regions, and in every way exerted over them their baneful influ ence. The facts which constitute civilization, are scattered here and there over various regions and various nations. Times and circumstances are seemingly confounded. But there is a wonderful chain stretching over the course of centuries, enclosing the world and accommodating itself to the ebb and flow of human affairs. Many civilizing rays warmed Greece, reaching there from the East, and to those the Greeks and the Romans added again their own products. When the men of Northern Europe made their appearance in history, they became initiated into a new life ; a light was at once transmitted to them, and however feeble were its morn ing rays, they alone quickened the germ of modern civili zation. The love of freedom, the attempts to establish society on great democratic foundations were neither the specialty of German races, nor did they originate with them. Both were pre-existent in history ; they grew to maturity under the combined action of Christianity and human events; and the indestructible and eternal ele ment in the essential destiny of man. Two races especially emerged out of the ruins of the Roman Empire and inherited its civilization. The one, the Celtic, was already partly interwoven with the Ro- EACES, POPULATION. 11 man civilization, and had early received the Christian vivifying teaching. From the Celts emerged the Romanic nations, as they are now called. The other race, the Ger man, broke forth furiously and savagely, and establishing itself upon the Roman ruins, extended a dark and heavy shroud over the dissolving fabric of society. The labor of centuries was required to reinvigorate its remaining and feebly smouldering sparks, which were again to warm and stimulate and fertilize the minds ofthe Northern barbarians. But as they are the last comers and actors, they proclaim themselves the originators and creators of all the good in modern civilization. Invoking the fallacious aud super ficial evidence of craniology and physiology, they assert that the comprehension of freedom and of equality was ex clusively located in their brains. But history overthrows the condemnatory verdicts, and teaches that the fact was the reverse, and restores to their due share the disappeared, wasted and withered races and nations. Paleontology teaches that in the animal kingdom, gene ra and families disappear after having fulfilled their time, or become transmuted and further developed in others, called more perfect. The so-called monsters of the antediluvial world were as perfect in the condition of their existence, as can be the actual living animals, created among differ ent vegetations, a different state of the earth-crust, different combinations of air, gases, atmosphere, and the thereby stimulated productivity of the soil. Animals of the last creation, man included, would have been unable to live when our planet was in the Jurassic or even diluvial con dition. The animals of every kind belonging to those by gone epochs, were as perfect in their way as the conditions of life and existence required and allowed. An animal world disappeared in revolutions of the globe, revolutions covering it with new strata, and fostering now creations. 12 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. The present animal kingdom is subject to the same abso lute conditions, but modified or adapted to new combina tions, appropriate and adapted to the so-called higher forms and functions. And so it is, in a higher philosophical appreciation, with races, nations, and even individual families. Their work done, or transmitted to successors, they retire into the background, or even, — above all the so-called historical families — they die out. New ones succeed them in the ascension of an infinite spiral. During the periods of their vital activity those races, nations and individual families, answered fully to given and existing conditions, and in given epochs they constituted the acme of general life. For right and for wrong, even dynasties and families embodied, influenced and directed human events during long spaces of time. Now the race enter. formation, or a superior volume of brain, as birds endowed with a less volume of brain than quadrupeds, have a more violent instinct of independence. Fishes, compara tively brainless, are more indomitable. Not this savage sentiment of personal independence was pregnant with the social and mental freedom to which gravitates the human race, for which it works and toils. And if this should be the distinct mental specialty of the German race, in all its ramifications down to the past or to the modem Anglo-Saxons, raising them in this manner above other races and nations, their colaborers and com petitors in the social arena, this specialty would rather class the Germans with a lower mental degree. Modem science ascribes to the Celtic race the desire for social equality. If this is the case, then in psychological appre ciation the Celtic race would be the exponent of a higher social and mental endowment. Equality is of higher psychological origin than the merely animal craving for individual independence. Animals have not the feeling of equality, and the weaker keeps at a respectful distance and avoids crossing the path of the stronger. There is an end to individual independence. But a man relying on the equality of rights, raises his head boldly and proudly in the face of mere physical force and superiority. Events 18 AMEEICA AJ!JD EUEOPE. and history, show to the utmost, that social liberty and equality are fruits of association and culture ; that they were stimulated and developed by the run of human af fairs — and began always to ferment among those nations, which possessed a comparatively higher culture and civili zation. History shows sufficiently, that neither of these germs was brought, or exclusively developed, by any of the branches of the German race. Further, the ulterior fate of the Christian world, of the Christian creed, was secured by the northern invasion. But Christianity was already firmly rooted in humanity, otherwise it would not have resisted the furious attacks of those formidable pagan invaders. The spirit of Christi anity as well as its dogmas was developed in its utmost plenitude and purity in the first centuries of its existence, and therefore by men of the southern and Semitic races. To them belong all the holy fathers, and the north has not augmented their number by a single name. Even Luther preached the return to the original principles of Christi anity, the return to the so-called primitive church. The primitive Christians suffered martyrdom for mental or re ligious, as well as for social emancipation. They suffered for not recognizing gods in the Roman Emperors before whom the whole world trembled, at whose bidding men with their own hands shortened their lives. Emperors were even more adored than gods. The poor Christian refusing to sacrifice to the Emperor, shook the Imperial structure at the basis, aimed a blow at the head of society, and thus committed a religious as well as a social revolt ; and so it was considered by those most interested in the preservation of the past, by the pagan Emperors, and by the pagan society. For them the Christians were religious and social subversionists. Those who publicly scorned this Imperial worship, on which reposed the social EACES, POPULATION. 19 structure, who by thousands and thousands were murdered for this act of revolt, were the first martyrs in the cause of liberty. German races have the smallest number of the like martyrs. The tribes who overran the Roman Empire, received the Christian teaching from Celts, Latins or Greeks ; and to those who remained on their primitive soil, Christianity was afterwards brought and preached prin cipally by Celtic and Latin apostles. The German races produced the smallest number of such primitive mission aries. But the German races, as soon as they asserted themselves in history, and began to participate in a more regulated way in the movement of events, were the first in the West who politically identified church and state, thus inaugurating the greatest aberration and adulteration of Christian or Catholic, and virtually spiritual organization. The German races, or kings, the Franks, the Carlovin- gians, the Saxons gave fixity to the power of the Popes and submitted to it. They were its defenders. A German emperor, a Hohenstauffen, burnt the Italian Arnold of Brescia, who, in the 12th century, contested the temporal power of the popes. In one word, without the powerful aid of German races and sovereigns, papacy would not have taken such a firm hold of Europe at the very begin ning of the middle ages. Born in rigorous climates, crowding on each other by their rapid increase, unacquainted with agriculture, or averse to it, and on these accounts obtaining with difficulty the means of subsistence, some of these German tribes saw before their eyes, others knew by report, the abundance and the luxuries of ample, well cultivated regions. They were at the same time urged on by extreme want, and strongly excited by the presence of plunder. Such were the reasons which, at the distance of several centuries be fore, urged and attracted the German hordes of the Cymbri 20 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. to Italy at the time of Marius, who, previous to the Cae- sarean wars, stimulated the Helvetians to abandon their Alpine hollows and peaks, and to descend upon the more cultivated Gaul. The German tribes pressed on each other, and the nearest to the boundaries of civilization were continually wedged in by the pressure of others. To repulse this pressure, Csesar was obliged to cross the Rhine, and the Roman emperors to push further and further into the interior of Germany the boundaries of the empire. Hence the mostly imaginary wrongs complained of by those savage tribes. The Franks who flrst invaded Gaul, penetrated into Spain before the epoch of general irruption ; they were bands of robbers united under a chief, leaving behind them all the family ties ; attracted, stimulated by the thirst of gold and wine, and going on a mission of bloody massacre and fierce destruction, as is the case with all the beasts of prey. After this attempt of the Franks, other savages for nearly three centuries invaded the em pire; and gorged with plunder, they burned, ravaged, murdered, destroyed, for the sake of destruction and mas sacre. There was no higher or better impulse in their breast than the fierce pleasure of playing amid the chances of the world and life with power and liberty ; at the ut most the indulgence in the joys of activity without labor. Such was the romance which inspired those invaders. Thus out of murder and rapine emerged the present Europe. Out of individual hardships and toils, out of the sweat of the brow, expressed not in battling with civilization, but in breaking the virgin soil, and enkin dling the light of culture, out of the labor of the first set tlers along the Alantic shores, emerged America, the land of promise, and the revelation of higher and broader destinies. The German invaders were the bearers of the corrup- EACES, POPULATION. 21 tion, the vices, the crimes inherent in savage races. Rob bery, murder, rape, theft, were practised on a large scale in the newly subdued lands, just as they were practised by and among them, in their primitive forests. When those conquerors established themselves in a fixed position, they began to collect the legal customs, or common laws, as they asserted, which prevailed among them of old, and they condensed these customs in written codes. Very nat urally those codes re-echo what was observed by the Ger man tribes in their primitive state, and they give an idea of their morals. The laws of the Francks, the Goths, the Burgundians, the Anglo-Saxons, and the other German tribes, dwell principally on the above-mentioned crimes. Robbery and similar offences are ever constant themes of the capitularies of Charlemagne. Among the Germans, from remote times murder was ato'ned by a composition under the name of weregild, and paid by the murderer to the relatives of the murdered. This of course does not give an elevated idea of the feeling of individual honor and dignity which could have been satisfied with money or its equivalent. The ferocious vendeta as practised by other races, is less degrading, more natural in the men of primitive state, and shows more manliness and dignity. Civilization, Christianity have softened among us the feeling of revenge. We may forgive — but even the mean est will not accept a composition for the blood of a parent, a brother, a sister or a chUd. This peculiar way of atonement used by the barba rian Teutons previous to their irruption over the world, was not a result of weakness, as it does not prove their humanization. The comparative mildness with which crimes were punished, is the best proof of their frequency. When in a society, assassinations, mutilations, and other similar attempts are very rare, they are regarded with 22 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. horror, and the perpetrators are severely punished. Where certain actions — in a society of whatever charac ter — are considered as heinous offences, the legislator, the public opinion, expressed in common law or usage, will reverberate the public conscience. But when crimes are frequently committed, they insensibly lose their enor mity ; not only those who commit them, but the society — whatever it may be — becomes accustomed to them, and bears them with indulgence. Such were the German races when history began to throw light upon their doings, and such they must have been for centuries before, — in the times of Tacitus. His enthusiasm for them was the counterpart of his manly indignation at the effeminacy of Rome. He embellishes them purposely. He contrasted with Rome the savage Germans, by whose bravery he was dazzled, and with whose usages and domestic life he was not and could not have been as thoroughly acquainted as we imagine. Sidonius, who lived among them after they had already been for a long time under the soothing influence of Christianity, exclaims : " Happy the eyes who do not see them, happy the ears who do not hear." Very likely Tacitus exalted the Germans for the same reasons which incited Rousseau, St. Pierre and others, to endow the fancied primitive man Vhomme de la nature, with all moral perfections. The flerce, treacherous and thieving Indian, who abhors every kind of culture and civilization, was held up as a model of purity and simplicity not only by sentimentalists, but by minds as positive and clear-sighted as that of Jefferson. And even according to the testimony of the enthusiastic Roman, the Germans, like the Indians, were more fond of plunder than of labor, and he likewise mentions some tribes that were subjected to the most debasing despo tism. EACES, POPULATION. 23 The husband and father among the Germans had as abso lute dominion over the wife, the daughter, and the son, as he had among the Romans. He had the power of life and death over his family, and could sell them. By the common law and usages of England, the Anglo-Saxon right to such a traffic still exists, or has only lataly been erased. The German wife espoused the quarrels of the husband, fought at his side ; so did the Gallic, the Celto-Iberian women — precisely as in given circumstances, the same acts of devo tion have been Shown on all parts of the globe. The chas tity of the German woman, and the fidelity of the man, which Tacitus so highly extolled, clash singularly with the above-named tenor of the laws derived from usage ; and at any rate they must have disappeared very soon, and gone the way of all flesh. Monogamy was not absolute in the German forests. Csesar says that Arivistus had two wives, and Tacitus speaks of other Germans who had them also. Beyond romance there exist no proofs in the German customs and manners, to justify the assumed assertion that the position of the woman was elevated by them to its natural purity and virtue. The Germans did not surround woman with the reverence due to her purer devotion. The women of the Germans were domes tic slaves, performing the hard field or garden labor, as they do still in Germany, and as is still customary among all savages, as well as among Christian nations of a lower degree of civilization. In this respect, material progress and labor-saving inventions will alone fully emancipate woman and restore them to softer functions. The Ger man women, wife, and daughters, had no civil rights, no property. The Roman daughters had a dowry ; their rights in this respect were under the guarantee and the guardianship of the law. The German husband could punish publicly or privately, with the utmost severity, 24 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. even by death, the infidelity of the wife ; but among the Germans, as among all past and present nations, the wife has no rights and no legal method to punish the infidelity of the husband. Whatever might have been the degra dation of the woman in antiquity ; the mother, the true matron, was honored and respected. Xenophon's Econo mics bears testimony that it was so in Greece. The matrons of the better centuries of Rome were surrounded with respect and deference by the usages and the laws ; and these matrons are among the loftiest adornments of Roman history. The chaste and pure priestesses of Ceres in Athens enjoyed an elevated social standing : and in the privileges which surrounded the consecrated Roman Vestals, the highest worship was paid to chastity, even by a society in which the comprehension of morals did not extend to sexual passions. Among the Slavi, women were honored in the remotest times, in those of their ante-historical ex istence. Monogamy prevailed in their usages, the women stood in high consideration, and exercised great influence. This fact is alluded to so far back as Nicolas Damascenus, a friend of King Herod. The most sublime phenomenon of our civilization, the purification, ennoblement and elevation of woman, is alto gether the work of Christianity. Christianity taught man that woman ought not to be his slave, but his equal, his companion. The atrocious right of life and death was destroyed. Christian charity purified the manners, and thus elevated woman, whose dignity is incompatible with corruption and licentiousness. Christianity is the source whence this powerful, salutary, and generous influ ence emanated. This is the origin of the dignity and honor of woman in Europe. Women were the most ar dent and devoted apostles of Christianity among the bar- EAOES, POPULATION. 25 barians. The sacred ties of marriage united the barbarian to the Christian woman. Thus Clotilde Christianized the fierce Clodwig or Clovis and his Franks ; Dombrowka brought Christianity to the Poles ; Olga and Helen to the Russians, and the same way of propagation prevailed among nearly all the various Northern tribes. The Southern nations invaded by the Teutons, were already Christian. Thus woman was already purified and honored among the nations of Celtic, Latin or Romanic descent. From them the Germans received the initiation into the purer and loftier appreciation of woman in domes tic and in social life. Chivalry found woman for centu ries purified, raised, surrounded with veneration. It sur rounded the womanly charm with inspiring illusions, with passionate, religious gallantry and devotion. And the poetical source of the legends of chivalry lies not among the Germans — still less among the Moors of Spain, whose houris are the opposite of Christian virgins and unblem ished wives — ^but among Celtic Britons.* The most violent, ungovernable and reckless passions, in their most unsocial manifestations, prevailed among the Germans in their for ests, as well as when by their victories over other coun tries, they found themselves in a new situation. If they were bearers of new germs, those germs were of such a kind as to stifle society in its cradle ; and this they did in reality and for centuries. The Germans in their forests not only made slaves of their prisoners of war, as did all the nations of antiquity, but often gambled themselves into slavery. All the vices and crimes that form the spe cial characteristics of a savage state of society, were com mon to the various German tribes, who under various * Arthur, Lannoelot, and the whole legend of the Eound Table belong to Brittany. 2 26 AMEEICA AND EUEOFE. name^, one after another, or at times simultaneously, for centuries poured into the Roman empire. Destruction was the watchword for all. The differences of caste and of class, nobles and villains, which (according to the testi mony of Caesar and Tacitus) existed among them in their forests, were brought to the countries which they subdued. The ancient nobles, chieftains and princes, being for the most part the leaders of the invaders on the battle field as well as in the division of the conquered lands ; those military distinctions soon acquired even a new and stronger fixity than they had in the original German countries. No where, not in a single case, are to be detected among these tribes, the germs or notions of social equality. " Legiti macy of royal races among European nations is a Ger manic idea," says Ranke ; and so was that of the mili tary nobility, which had been partly already brought from the German forests, and partly sprouted out from the new social conditions, into which the conquest over men, soil, cities and vast uncultivated lands, had put the conquerors. The Goths overran the greatest part of the Roman empire. They broke in, East and West, and finally took possession of some of the most beautiful portions, as Ita ly, the South of France, and Spain. It is believed that their domination extended previously from Scandinavia to the Danube, at least under Hermanric, one of their great est leaders. Others pretend that the Goths are not of a German stock, but are the direct descendants of the an cient classical Getse. This doubt is based on the histori cal fact, that the Goths alone among the German races, did not compound for murder by a fine or weregild. At any rate they are now counted among Germans, who re ceived from them a written language, in the translation of the Scriptures, by Ulfila, a Gothic bishop. They received architecture, moreover, and many rudiments of refine- EACES, POPULATION. 27 ment, which the Goths themselves learned from the Ro manic nations which they subdued. The Goths entered the civilized regions under the leadership of their royal races, of the Amali and the Balti, and both, according to their national creed, of superior half godlike origin. The Gothic nation was divided by various social privileges ; they had the Gapelleti, or long-haired, and the Pilefori, distinguished by wearing caps in the presence of the King and at the divine sacrifices. To wear long hair was a kingly and nobUiar distinction among other German tribes. The Pilefori formed a supreme theo-aristocratical class, and had the power to elect a king or a reigning dynasty. When the Goths became Christians of the Arian creed, the privileged class of the Pilefori perpetuated itself, absorb ing in its members the dignity of bishops. The same was the case when they subsequently melted into Romanism under the reign of King Recarede. This is the origin of the great power and influence of the Westgothic Bish ops, as shown ,in Toulouse, and above all in Spain during the Westgothic rule. The celebrated councils of Toledo, held by Gothic bishops, legislated for the kingdoms ; by the decree of bishops. King Vamba was dethroned. Montesquieu as well as Guizot, was puzzled to flnd the origin and the cause of this power exercised by the Gothic or Spanish bishops; as no other Roman Catholic nation at that time submitted to the power of the clergy to that extent. The source of the power was in the an cient caste of the Gothic Pilefori ; as therefrom likewise comes the right of the Spanish Grandees to remain with their heads covered in the presence of their sovereign. Social gradations and nobiliar privileges, partly as the perpetuation of their primitive social state, partly deriving their strength from the nature of such a military establishment, as was in its origin and beginning the Ger- 28 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. man conquest ; these were implanted and extended over Western Europe by the Germans. Therein was the origin of feudality, — an organization natural to all nations con quering and extending under the leadership of chiefs and dynasties. Thus at the dawn of history, when the Iranic or Arrian races made au irruption over the ancient world, encompassed in the then known circle embracing Asia from the Indus to the Mediterranean, a part of Greece, and Egypt ; this immense Empire was for several centuries of its existence propped up on feudal dynasts or magnates. Out of those feudal dynasts were the Median, Bactrian, Afghan princes, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and Cyrus himself Darius Hystaspes put an end to this ancient Eastern feudal regime, which was reproduced after long centuries in the West, and evoked by similar causes, by the current of affairs and events, similar to each other, at least, in their general outlines. None of the above charac teristics of the German conquerors could in any way have been pregnant exclusively with democratic germs. Old Cato spoke of Greece as " mendax in historia." Niebuhr, Arnold, and many modern writers on Roman history, show to what an extent it is necessary to be dis trustful of Roman historians and annalists. Grote, who, of all historians, has rendered the most eminent services to the comprehension of the beneflcial workings of the dem ocratic principle ; Grote has shown how prejudiced, par tial, and unjust in several respects to their country, to their eminent men have been the Greek writers, full often from a heinous spirit of party. All these short-comings are fully reproduced by German writers. Notwithstand ing their unequalled erudition, as soon as in any way it concerns Germanism, the spirit of historical justice vanishes ; their judgment is overclouded. History, facts, and events are twisted and forcibly wedged into a precon- EAOES, POPULATION. 29 certed scheme. By such a process, the invading German races were surrounded by a poetical halo, and endowed with all the highest social characteristics. What events, ' circumstances, affections, passions, relations, contact with other nations, and with their different modes of life brought forth, — what the Germans received or learned from others, — all this was absorbed in behalf of the Ger man race in comparison with all others. And thus modern civilization, with all its social and mental manifestations and variations, was to be exclusively the work of the German world. The influence of human affairs on social development, — as well as the fallacy of distributing the highest human attributes according to races, or to physiological, and crani ological conformations, is most strikingly elucidated by throwing a rapid glance on the Slavic neighbors of the Germans, and from whom the latter at the commencement of their historical existence, learned several rudiments of cultivation, and among them the plan of communal organ ization. It can be said, that from the remotest times, the tribes known in history under the name of the Slavic race, occu pied the same portions of continental Europe in which they now dwell They were undoubtedly the first agri culturists in the North, between the Rhine and the Volga. Although savages and barbarians similar to the primitive Germans or Celts, the Slavi early attached themselves to the soil ; no traces of nomadic or roaming life are to be detected among them. The dawn of history finds them living in villages as agriculturists, under simple com- mmial institutions, with elective chiefs, and judges, or administrators. A special fact elucidates their social usages ; in those remote times the Slavi alone among all nations recorded in history — the Chinese excepted — never 30 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. transformed their prisoners into slaves, but after one year's detention allowed them to return to their own coun try. The enslaving of conquered enemies began among the whole race only in Russia, and this very likely with the establishment of the Romans or Variagues. Subse quently, certain human events, which it is not necessary to enumerate here, created slavery and serfdom, nobility and princes among the various Slavic tribes,— and German example, German influence, can be counted among the foremost. And now, serfdom on an enormous scale still exists among the Slavi ; serfdom strengthened by circum stances and by events, it crushes down a branch of the human family ; the only one which, in the cradle, was free from this social curse. In the course of centuries, by wars, conquests, and German migrations, the Slavi became involved, mixed with the neighboring Germans, and Slavic sprouts ex tended in different directions into Germany. Thus in various ways they taught the Germans agriculture and horticulture, previous to the introduction of Christianity into the German forests. They introduced into Germany the culture of rye, which was unknown before to such an extent to the Germans, that Charlemagne in one of his capitularies especially enjoins its culture upon his Ger man subjects. The Slavic tribes extending along the Bal tic shores were daring navigators. According to the Chron icler Saxo Grammaticus, and the historian Sismondi, they united in the predatory excursions into Britain and Gaul with the Angles and Saxons, and with the Danes. And when the communal and municipal organization, suppressed by the German rule, began again to give signs of life in the south of Europe in the eleventh century, according to the authoritative testimony of the erudite and truthful Mura- tori, it was in the Slavi city of Ragusa among the Slavic EACES, POPULATION. 31 Dalmatians that took place the first municipal elections, as recorded by history. Circumstances, to a great extent, destroyed the communal and municipal as well as the other liberties among the Slavi, as circumstances evoked them from smouldering ashes, gave them life, virtuality, and force among the other contemporary nations. Where the Germans permanently established their dominion, they also in various ways established servitude, serfdom, and slavery among the conquered, including the burghers, the rural populations, the artisans and • the laborers. They themselves despised every kind of peace ful occupation. Neither industry nor agriculture had any attraction for them. All this was abandoned to the indi gent. In Italy, Spain, France, and Britain, the conquerors, spreading over the lands, settled not in cities, but outside of the walls, erecting strongholds and castles, or burghs. They divided the whole land into cities and populations according to certain tenures, which, in their various appli cations, constituted the feudal system. The cities, the trades paid revenues to the new lords, the lands were tilled by aborigines, of Celto-Romanic descent. In the course of time, the descendants of the common soldiery among the conquerors, whose services were rewarded with the smaller lots or freeholds, became impoverished ; then willingly or by force they were turned by the mightier knights and barons into rustics, and became subject to predial servitude equally with the natives. Others among them retired to cities, and increased there the number of laborers and workingmen, still remaining dependent on the lords. But this kind of influx into the cities could not influence or modify the character of the natives, who were far more numerous. The question therefore of the rekindling of culture after the terrible night which contin ued through centuries of invasion, the question of the first 6'.i AMEEICA AUD EUEOPE. efforts for disenthralment and emancipation from the ty ranny exercised by the feudal nobility, those questions are still pending between the Celto-Romanic and the Germans. In Germany proper, serfdom, oppression, and slavery were established, not by conquerors over the conquered of dif ferent origin, but over a people of the same blood. This was principally done after the example of what was pre viously consummated on the ruins of the ancient Empire. Germany proper was the last in turn to receive feudalism ; she was last in turn in the effort for disenthralment, last in turn in enkindling civilization. For every thing, Ger many, for centuries, went to school to Italy and France. Throughout the whole extent of the ruins of the Ro man Empire, the half burnt and desolated cities were peo pled by the remains of the ancient inhabitants. After the frightful confusion of centuries began to subside, the cities little by little began to recover ; industry gave feeble signs of vitality ; and for its products as well as for money the inhabitants were enabled to buy from their masters, if not a recognition of rights, at least some small temporary liberalities or concessions. In the cities and among the natives were preserved the feeble traditions of previous municipal rights, the almost expiring sparks of once flour ishing cultivation. What Savigny has proved and firmly established concerning the Roman law, can with safety be applied to the preservation and continuation of the over thrown civilization. If the Roman law was never wholly suppressed, nor ever disappeared from use in the darkest and most confused times ; in the same Way there was nowhere a total suppression and extinction of ancient civilization. This feeble spark was preserved of course, and not by the brute, unlettered, savage conquerors, but by the natives. The clergy, moreover, a powerful and softening agency, formed a connecting link between the old and new ele- EACES, POPULATION. 33 ments of society, and the clergy belonged principally to the Celto-Romanic race. During the early part of the mediaeval epoch the darkness was the thickest, the confusion the greatest ; right and light were downtrodden, suppressed ; arbitrari ness and recklessness were the general rule. The Ger man races alone were the exponents of the state of society as well as its exclusive leaders. Only the clerical robe enjoyed some immunity and respect, and was sheltered from outrages. But even this was often a feeble, insuf ficient shield. It was, however, natural, that, feeble as this protection was, individuals among the oppressed na tives should seek quiet and refuge under it. Thus the monasteries became the exclusive asylum of such remains of the ancient mental and material culture as could be pre served from total extinction. In the monasteries, there fore, not only letters were preserved, but the rudiments, or rather the remains of arts and industry ; and even the culture of the soil. The arts of healing, of architecture, with all their belongings, were then almost the exclusive possession of the clergy and the monks. Those belonged every where to the conquered Celto-Romanic race. Feudality soon invaded the Church ; the abbeys became rich in aristocratical feoffs and investitures ; the conquer ors began to enter the orders, and the abbots were se lected from among the privileged, noble German class. The chronicles of most of the monasteries mention violent and often deadly strifes between the monks and the ab bots; strifes originating generally in the difference of blood and descent. Through such a state of things — ^through such a bloody mire — was society dragged for centuries by the Germans. Traffic and commercial intercourse, that elastic, indestruc tible agency of humanization ; that stimulus to industry, 2* 34 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. and the consequent to peaceful and orderly occupation and activity of intellect and of mind, was preserved, and car ried on by the natives alone. Orderly activity, that all-embracing hearth of civilization, manifested itself ex clusively at first among the Celto-Romanic inhabitants of cities, where the German element either did not exist at all, or was mixed in a comparatively imperceptible pro portion. The German, still clad in steel, was familiar only with the use of the sword and of the battle-axe : — even the poorest one among them, who tilled his own freeholds, considered mental, industrial, and commercial pursuits, as unmanly and mean. During this whole terrible and protracted epoch, the Eastern or Greek Empire was the seat where culture, arts, industry, trade, studies, refinement existed, and compara tively flourished ; parts of Italy recognized the supremacy of Byzantium, and maintained an uninterrupted intercourse with the then capital of the civilized world. This inter course contributed to a great extent to preserve in Italy the smouldering sparks of culture. By the combination of those various tutelary and nursing agencies, these sparks were kindled, light began to dawn, to spread, to radiate. Slowly strengthening and increasing these remains of an cient culture, in Italy, in Spain, in the south of France, on the Loire and Seine, along the Rhine, every where among the cities it successively embraced, warmed the Celto or Gallo-German regions of the North, and was forwarded to Germany itself. Generally the German rulers, especially after Charlemagne, as soon as they began to comprehend the benefits of culture, erected cities which served either as so many asylums for the natives, or as centres for the slowly-reviving industry and commerce. In this slow- paced march towards the North, one country and city transmitted culture, vitalized the other. EACES, POPULATION. 35 As soon as prosperity began to give vitality and strength to the cities, the spirit of independence began to revive, and the cities began to strive against the tyranny and oppression exercised by the surrounding lords and barons. The first raising of cities was made in Italy, and in Italy the municipal and communal institutions then be gan' to be recalled into life. The Italian cities began to be emancipated before the time of the crusades, at which time they already formed independent corporations and municipalities, some quickly transforming themselves even into powerful sovereign States. Venice alone survived the terrible conflagration caused for centuries by the ir ruption of the barbarians, alone preserved independence and liberty. Venice, the asylum for the martyred and conquered race, Venice, which never recognized the con querors as masters, might have been a powerful stimu lant for the other Italian cities to imitate her example. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the cities of Lom- bardy, of Liguria, of Tuscany, began successively to break the yoke of the feudal barons. Uniting sometimes with the rural populations, they attacked the frowning nests and abodes of the nobles, by which they were sur rounded, took or destroyed them, and forced the nobles to settle within the walls of the cities, to submit to com mon rule. Thus the nobles or descendants of the Ger mans came within the action of civilization, and began to be warmed by it Moved by similar reasons, the French and Walloon cities afterwards took the same course, and the last in this work of disenthralment were the cities in Germany. Thus the first move for disen thralment was made in Celto-Romanic lands, the first fee ble cry for social 'liberty was uttered by Celto-Romanic voices. This struggle of cities or of the middle classes, first 36 AMEEICA AKD EUEOPE. against nobility and then against royalty, extended to our own time. It had various manifestations and forms — at times violent, then under some cover of legality. Thus it was sometimes carried for the preservation of certain privi leges ; finally it was carried by legists, and was called then a parliamentary one. It played an eminent part in the history of liberty, and for centuries its principal lead ers on the continent were France and Flanders. During its continuation, the influence of cities or of the bour geoisie steadily increased, until it became almost omnipo tent in the great French revolution of 1789, as the mass of the people had their turn in 1792-93. Although, in the course of time, the combination of various events and affairs gave moral and material fuel to the contest, it can, nevertheless, be considered as an uninterrupted effort of the descendants of Celto-Romanic stock, against the de scendants of German conquerors. The burghers, as a class or as individuals, were continually recruited in France, as every where else, from among the rural popu lation ; and thus was sustained uninterrupted and almost unadulterated the primitive distinction of blood between the privileged oppressor and the oppressed. Hand in hand with the attempts at liberation from the petty tyrants, with the revival of industry and of com merce, hand in hand and in the same regions began the dim revival of mental culture. The cities and their in habitants, the burghers, were its agents, its disciples. This revival at flrst took place in Italy and in France. Aside from the clergy and the monks, the middle classes alone, rarely the peasantry, furnished scholars, teachers and disciples. From them were the professors of vari"bus sciences, the philosophers, the theologians, the jurists and lawyers, and the physicians. All these pursuits and pro fessions were despised for centuries by the conquerors, EACES, POPULATION. 37 those ancestors of the nobility. Originally the clergy served them as amanuenses, and thence is derived the ap pellation of a clerk for inferior officials, doing the harder mental and written work. For ages following the con quest, the nobility throughout all Europe showed the same aversion to mental pursuits. Those who did other wise were exceptions. It is on account of this ignorance of the nobles, for centuries the rulers and administrators of society, that the jurists and lawyers, who all belonged to the middle classes, acquired thus early a prepondera ting influence in the administration of the affairs of state and of justice. In France the nobles formed the judicial courts. There they judged and decided about various matters between themselves and the natives. Charle magne principally organized such courts of the Reichem- bourgi. The same custom prevailed among the Longo bards in Italy, and the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Brit- tain. But the ignorant nobles were obliged to have their amanuenses at their side. Originally those clerks were seated in courts each at the feet of their master. By slow degrees their significance and influence increased ; the no bles were glad to throw on them the burden of affairs ; the clerks became permanent judges. Thus originated the gentlemen of the long robe, and in France the cele brated provincial court of parliament. Early in the sec ond part of the middle ages France stood at the side of Italy, and was foremost in the orbit of civilization, as it then existed. Not the French, not the Spanish or Ital ian nobility, nor the German, was instrumental in this slow and difficult dispersion of darkness and of ignorance. Every where the nobility kept aloof from the burgher class. For long centuries intermarriage with burghers was considered dishonorable, was considered as contami nation of the purity of blood. In Spain until the time 38 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. of King Riceswindus, any intermarriage of a Goth with a native was punished with death ; this prejudice was per petuated there as by all the nobles of Europe, and trans formed into a horror of mixing with burgher or ignoble blood. Thus when the most difficult, because the first steps in the road of culture were made, the nobility no where participated in them either as a class, or through the mixture of blood ; and the palm for having nursed the feeble sparks of culture throughout Western and South ern Europe, belongs wholly to the lower or not noble classes, that is, to the descendants of Celto-Romans. Un doubtedly intermarriages between conqueror and conquered were contracted, and this might have been the case even to a large extent in Italy and France as well as in Britain. But according to the usual process where social distinc tions prevail, it was the man from the superior position who married a woman from the inferior one, and very sel dom the reverse took place. The children of such mar riages followed the condition of the father, enjoyed all his privileges and shared all his prejudices. In Italy, when the cities forced the nobles to live within the walls, they thus brought them within the focus of civilization, and bestowed upon them the possibility of warming themselves at its vivifying fire. The nobleman could receive tuition in schools, could follow the labor of professors, for the reason that the Italian nobles were the first in Europe who became polished and distinguished by superior men tal accomplishments. But every where else the nobility lived as it does now in castles and burghs, and for a pro tracted period, for centuries, nourished the old prejudices of their ancestry, the conquerors, against light and cul ture. Not with them were filled the halls of professors and of universities when those were created. Not nobles were professors, nor to any considerable extent were they EACES, POPULATION. 39 pupils in the first period after the establishment of the University of Paris, that Alma Mater of all the universi ties north of the Alps. This was entirely filled, used and profited by burghers, those direct descendants of the con quered nativfes. The Germans in Germany received the initiation from Italy and France. Coming last in turn, they afterwards penetrated into some parts of the domain of mind and of knowledge to a greater depth than their previous masters. But it was not the Germans that enkindled the culture of Christian or modern Europe, nor the Germans that were the first to strike for freedom and break down tyranny. Therefore not from the Germans exclusively did the post- Roman or Christian world receive its higher and purer character. Circumstances and events aroused the Celto-Romanic nation to action far previous to the Germans, either Franks, Saxons, Anglo-Saxons, or any other branch of the great stock. Events alone transformed the Germans as conquerors into oppressors, and the conquered into oppressed. Thus what in history is called the darkest epoch of the middle ages, was exclusively the work of the German race. It extended an iron net over the whole Christian Western world. The knights and nobles were independent of any superior overmastering power, they lawlessly carried out their arbitrary wUL Italy, Germany, above all, France, were transformed into nearly as many independent suze rainties as there were nobiliar families, strongholds and castles. The sovereigns were impotent and poor, nearly deprived of power, without revenues, and leaning willingly on the cities, who proffered them money and means to curb the reckless feudality. The movement for emancipation on the continent of Europe was however not at all demo- 40 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. cratic in its nature. The paramount question then was, to secure the nearest available good, and to get a respite from the immediate oppressor. The royal power was a more sure support than could possibly be obtained from the people at large, the rural masses, enslaved by the nobles. The primitive movement for emancipation in Europe, England included, had nowhere the broad democratic character of securing rights to all ; this era was inaugurated by the American revolution. The European cities tried to ob tain and secure privileges. These privileges in themselves were deductions from eternal principles, but at that time the principles were only dimly comprehended and by a few persons, and not positively asserted. The question was to obtain security and guarantees, and any one was wel come who could procure and defend them. In this man ner originated on the continent a kind of understanding between royalty and the cities, and the burgher classes were thorough monarchists. The legists who issued from the middle classes, finding in the Roman law a forest of axioms in favor of the absolute will of the sovereign, be came its violent and decided partisans. Stimulated by ha tred of the nobility, from the middle classes issued the boldest supporters of absolute authority. These, and the like events, were arbitrarily construed in proof of the love of absolute power by the Romanic nations. But no where for centuries did the German races show any decid ed or exclusive tendency, or move in a democratic direc tion ; nowhere is to be detected among them a recognition of the pure democratic principle. Events subsequently disengaged and extricated the principle from the meshes wherein it was entangled; events to whose development contributed proportionally the Germans, as well as the Celtic, Gallic and Romanic descendants. When ideas find their way into the world and become EACES, POPULATION. 41 facts, they are modified by external circumstances, by spe cial relations corresponding to the mental and political state of society. Their availability and the ease of their extension depend upon the state of society, upon the de mands, the aspirations, and the readiness to accept the new comer. For this reason ideas, longings and needs, more or less generally felt, were often suddenly seized, at the most propitious time, appropriated and embodied by a spe cial nation rather than a race, which was in a more favora ble condition for the new task or mission. In the course of ages Romanism became all-powerful, oppressive, endangering the destinies, the mental and politi cal progress of the European, or Christian Western world. Society in its mental life as well as in its political govern ment and civil relations, was to be detached forcibly from the Vatican for the sake of preservation. In various ways Europe longed for emancipation, for freedom of worship or of conscience, for separation of church and state, or for giving to every church a national organization independent of Rome. Previous to the 16th century, the papal tem poral power had as many friends as violent enemies in It aly. Arnold of Brescia, mentioned before, was one of the martyrs of this idea. The small Celto-Romanic tribe of the Albigenses and Waldcnses never submitted to the Roman papal spiritual power, and the wholesale murders of these populations, carried out by fanaticized Franks, directed, sanctioned by popes, saints, bishops, and by all kinds. and degrees of the priesthood, will for ever remain in history as the true exponents of Romanism. The Bo hemians, the Moravians, all of Slavic stem, fought and suffered for the independence of teaching, and the free construction of the Gospel, as proclaimed by Huss. They extorted from the papacy and from the imperial power, which was subservient to it, the right to administer the 42 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. Lord's Supper in both kinds, before the Reformation firmly established this order of worship. Even the celebrated Thirty Years' War, which established Protestantism on fixed foundations in Germany, was started not by Ger mans, but by the Bohemians. Thus in different lands and at different times, the idea of emancipation from Rome burst out and kindled into a flame. It was, however, suppressed previous to the apparition of Luther.* The time for its easier expan sion approached, and the soil was moved by the previous mental as well as positive attempts. The reform of the 16th century was in all minds. Luther applied the spark to the mine. He embodied the general longings that were confusedly felt. The religious reform may justly be con sidered as having contained within its womb all the sub sequent reforms and revolutions of Europe, as having pro duced or facilitated not only the religious and mental, but likewise the social and political emancipation of society. But as to Luther himself and his immediate supporters, friends and disciples, it can be said that all of them were the decided enemies of political reform ; they did not wish to touch in the slightest way the social and political or ganism. Luther's sole idea was to put an end to the power of Rome over the dogmas, the worship, and the or ganization of the church ; to emancipate the individual reason in affairs of conscience. Otherwise he was wholly devoted to the existing organization of society, to the power of sovereigns or princes. There was no more stanch supporter of the absolute, nay, the divine power * About the year in which Luther was bom, died in Switzerland a fugitive Dalmatic bishop, who was pitilessly persecuted by Rome, for proclarming the necessity of the same reforms which afterwards were preached by Luther. See in Job. v. MuHer's History of Switz^ erland. EACES, POPULATION. 43 of the emperor than Luther, even to the extent of not op posing his authority even if he used violence against the Protestants. When Francis Lambert, a Frenchman, at tempted to instil into the reformation a revolutionary and democratic spirit, Luther strenuously opposed it. The German peasantry, galled to the quick by the reckless and arbitrary oppression of the nobles, embraced in their minds the union of the two reforms, the religious and the politi cal, but they found in Luther the most bitter and decided enemy. It must not pass unobserved, that the rising of the German peasants against the nobles, was far posterior in date to the French Jacqueries, and to the war against the nobility, or the battle of spurs in Flanders ; occurrences in which the original Celto-Gauls attempted to break down the yoke under which they suffered. All those insurrec tions of the people in France, in Germany, as well as that of the Kentish boors, prove that similar reasons and causes produce similar results in this or that race, nation, or form of government. Luther and most of the Lutherans were not moved by the grievances and the projected reforms of the Saxon and Franconian rustics, who in a short but brilliant strife, for a moment forced princes and nobles to accept and sign the submitted reform. Four centuries back those simple men, those genuine democrats, put the German question on more tangible and practical grounds than did the science and statesmanship of professors in 1848. The peasants moder ately demanded the cessation of all kinds of tithes, and of every other species of grinding injustice. They asked for the introduction of a uniform currency, and of uniform weights and measures, the abolition of serfdom, of internal custom houses and duties, the abolition of privileges of caste, -free popular courts of justice, bails for imprison- 44 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. ment, etc. ; in one word, their demands embraced all the fundamental and not subversive principles of a free and well organized state. To all this Luther answered, that " A pious Christian should rather die a hundred deaths than give way a hair's breadth to the peasants' demands. The government should exercise no mercy ; the day of wrath and the day of the sword was come, and duty to God obliged them to strike hard as long as they could move a limb. Whoever perished in this service was a martyr of Christ." Altogether the first Protestants or Lutherans in Ger many stood on the side of legitimacy. " Cujus regio ejus religio," said Luther, transferring thus to the sovereigns the power over the church that had been wrested from the popes, and investing the princes with the exclusive power of the reformation. The Lutherans further maintain, that God alone sets princes and sovereigns over the human race. They insisted upon the duty of submitting to unjust and censurable sovereigns. The English or Anglo-Saxon reform carried out by Henry VIII., as the Episcopal Church, was the most faithful to the spirit of Lutheran principles. If, therefore, the spirit of reform is ana lyzed and classified according to certain predispositions or aptitudes of races, the spirit originally evinced by the German race with all its branches, the English or Anglo- Saxon included, was a conservative one in all social and political questions. From another language, from another race came the breath, by which the spirit of reform ac quired its full, all-comprehending signification and fulfil ment. The social, democratic ideas of Lambert were taken up by Calvin to the great dislike and repugnance of Luther, and of the immense majority of German reformers. Without Calvin a Frenchman, the reformation would have preserved its monarchist character. Calvinism gave to it EACES, POPULATION. 45 the republican and democratic one ; to Calvinism belongs the merit of having thoroughly reinvigorated and renovat ed the Christian world. Calvinist writers, as Languet and others, maintain that the people make a state and not the sovereign; that the states can exist without the prince, but not without the people. Such principles were pro fessed by the French and Flemish Huguenots, and brought to Scotland by Knox. The Scotch presbyterians and pu ritans, not by any means the descendants of Anglo-Saxons, but Huguenot and Flemish refugees, introduced these prin ciples into England. There they fructified in independ ents and puritans, those founders and inaugurators on this continent of a new evolution of humanity. Democratic in principle was the life of the primitive Christians, sustained and animated by fraternity and equal ity. The example of the primitive Christians, the principle of election prevailing among them, moved to imitation the Calvinistic and puritan reformers, and not the inspirations resulting from a distinction of race. Even in the Catholic hierarchy a shadow of democratic principle was preserved ; as dignities were conferred by a kind of election, and func tions bestowed according to mental capacity, and the people likewise originally participated in the election of Bishops. Democratic tendencies were spread and working, previous even to the reformation, among the Italians. Rienzi Savon arola proclaimed the principle of the sovereignty of the people. Even the Jesuits, those stanchest apostles of ab solute power, and of legitimacy, in cases of need paid hom age, in their peculiar manner, to the principle of the su premacy of the people. Parsons, Allen in England under Elizabeth, Bellarmine in Italy, and many others of these fathers wrote and asserted : " That God has not bestowed the temporal or worldly power and authority on any one in particular,; whence it follows that he has bestowed it on the 46 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. masses. The authority of the state is lodged therefore in the people, and the people consign it sometimes to a single person, sometimes to several ; they perpetually retain the right of changing the form of government, of retracting its granted authority, of disposing of it anew." In this spirit wrote Suarez. Above all, the Jesuit Mariana elaborated the dogma of the sovereignty of the people. True it is, that for these Jesuits of the sixteenth century the princi pal object was to prove, that Elizabeth, and Henry IV. could be deposed by their Catholic subjects. But to es tablish this they were obliged to bow before the absolute principle of the sovereignty of the people. The principle, albeit not in its absolute purity and vigor, became generalized, reinvigorated, and established as an indestructible fact by the spirit of Calvinistic reform. Switzerland alone formed an exceptional case. The es tablishment of the Swiss republics, of which only those of the three primitive cantons were then democratic in principle, resulted from events perfectly human in their nature, and not out of any specialty of race, as both the oppressed and the oppressor belonged to the German one. Thus likewise, in the struggles of the sixteenth century, the confluence of events brought that to pass ; albeit the populations of the French language, wherein Calvinism spread the most vigorously, had the greatest number of victims murdered by Charles V., Phillip II., Alva, and the Papal or Roman inquisition. Those of the German tongue succeeded in finally overthrowing Romanism and despotism, and in establishing the Dutch republic. Nowhere therefore in the development of modern civ ilization, in what by some is called the modem social and political comprehension of liberty, does the German men tal or ethnological element prevail to such an extent as to give to it a peculiar character. If even the domain of EACES, POPULATION. 47 abstract speculation or metaphysics is by common fallacy assigned almost exclusively to the German mind, it was yet a Frenchman, Des Cartes, who laid the foundations of modern post-scholastic metaphysical philosophy ; it was Spinosa, a Hebrew, who laid those of the modern rationalistic system. In all the struggles of our epoch for liberty on the continent of Europe, the Celto-Ro manic nations struck before, and more boldly, than the German ones. The great French Revolution led the van. In 1822-28 Italy and Spain attempted to establish constitutional governments, while the Germans were still speculating ; and so in 1848, the first shock came again from Celto-Romanic descendants. Those Romanic na tions rose repeatedly, imperiously urged and spurred by events, and events alone influence and shape out the desti nies of the human family. The invaders of Britain, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutlanders were a branch of the German race, issuing out of the stem which extended over the greatest part of the North, and to which belonged the Scandinavians, the Prisons, and some others. These Angles and Saxons dwelt between the Eider and the Elbe, where now is Holstein — and even now the Holsteiners can be considered as the original and pure root. The primitive mode of life, the customs and characteristics of the Anglo-Saxons were common to them, with the great majority of the whole German family, as were common too all the myths, and the divinities, and the legends. It would seem, however, that in destructiveness and ferocity the invaders of Bri tain surpassed all the other kindred tribes. Fire and sword was their law. The natives retired before them to the North and to Wales, and about four hundred cities, the remains £>i Roman culture, were destroyed. This Anglo-Saxon invasion was not, however, similar to that of 48 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. the tribes who poured into the continental Roman world, moving with whole families to the West in search of new homes, wholly abandoning their former seats, and leaving behind them a solitude open to the invasion or oc cupation of a new tribe, or of a new race. Not the whole tribe moved from the banks of the Elbe, but bands of ro vers, leaving behind them all the family ties. The same thing was done by the Scandinavians, the Danes, the Nor mans. They could not encumber their embarkations with women or children, to face the dangers of the stormy sea. For their predatory purposes they wanted hands rather than mouths. These expeditions accordingly were wholly different from migrations. When a portion of land was already subdued and secured, then only succeeding expedi tions carried with them women and families, but never in sufficient number, and the majority of the conquerors would naturally, therefore, be induced to take wives from among the natives. The scarcity of women is the prevailing fea ture of all colonizations. The same was the case with the first settlements in this country, although made under pa cific and well regulated conditions. American history re cords how this scarcity of women was felt, and by what curious methods it was often supplied. In those distant barbarian times, the same mode of supplying the want could not take place, nor did there exist cities filled with such a marketable produce. Therefore, when the Anglo- Saxons began to settle in Britain, they must have united with the native women. Those women, already born and brought up in a certain culture and refinement, naturally charmed and attracted the rude barbarians. That is a common and general occurrence, and can be considered as an unavoidable as well as a logical law, in the play of human passions. In this way, by intermarriage with the native women, even in the first generation, in the first years of RACES, POPULATION. 49 the conquest, a considerable adulteration must have been made in the purity ofthe Anglo-Saxon blood. Subsequently the Danish and the Norman invasions produced new amal gamations. The ' Normans, brought originally from the same stem as the Anglo-Saxons, had been modified for cen- tui'ies by the influence of new combinations and events, by the settled mode of life in Normandy, and by contact with Western culture. Thus they brought with them to Eng land characteristics new and wholly different from those of their Scandinavian and German ancestry. Out of those various combinations and crossings came forth the Englishman, whose character and features are thoroughly different from any of the German stocks and tribes from which he is ethnologically descended. The English character was formed under the action of special combinations and events, and the institutions framed out and developed by the action of time, were the result of special historical circumstances. If these institutions can be exclusively ascribed to a special mental Anglo- Saxon and therefore German qualification, why did they exist neither in Holstein nor in other parts of Germany, where the source ought to have been preserved in its un altered purity, and where there was no contact whatever, no mixing with the ancient, declining world ? Some rough traditional customs were very likely pre served ; but new emergencies, new modes of life, new creeds, claimed new solutions. Therein and not in the distinctness of race, lay the germs of the future English nation. The English history bears eminently the marks of events, and not of any special predestination. The Anglo-Saxon laws and customs, wherein some, with unabated pertinacity, look for the germs of political liberty and democracy, are more or less similar to those of all the other Germanic tribes of that epoch, and there- 8 60 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. fore neither are marked by a special spirit of liberty, nor by the recognition of equal rights to every individual member of the State. The much spoken of Witenage- mote, were councils of the elder or Ealdorman and kings, that is, of the more influential and powerful of those who were entitled to it by the personal privilege of birth or of social position. Bishops participated therein. Besides that, such councils are common to the rudest state of so ciety, and they were in use among other tribes. The meet ings of the Indian chiefs and sachems to discuss their af fairs had the same bearing, and in principle the same origin. Not these Witenagemotes contained the germ of the repre sentative system subsequently developed in England. In ancient republics — -always municipal — each citizen having political rights, exercised them in person by vote. The same was the case with the Germans. They had their March and May meetings. When they settled on conquered lands, became scattered over extensive spaces, and formed large States, their domestic habits became more flxed and orderly. These gatherings became more necessary and more frequent. The new mode of social life begat more numerous and various interests, and complications in creased. The administration of justice at the outset of society was almost exclusively in the hands of the Ger mans. This obliged the knights, who were scattered over waste territories, to appear in person in cities where courts were to be held. But a peaceful residence in cities was repulsive to the majority of the knights. It seems that under Charlemagne they already preferred to delegate their powers and the duty of participating in the courts of justice to such members of their body as inhabited the cities, or as were more willing to sojourn in them for a time. This might have been the beginning of the repre sentative system, originating in new social combinations. EACES, POPULATION. 51 habits and necessities. The same or similar causes might have existed in England ; but the time of its commence ment, or the positive causes which brought forth this sys tem, cannot be ascertained with historical certainty. When the Norman barons called the cities, the inferior knighthood, and the yeomanry, to participate in a limited manner in the administration of the State, the cities, which were incorporated bodies, and the country gentry, very naturally could not appear in mass, but only by their mandataries or representatives, as some centuries before was practised in France under Charlemagne, and perhaps even earlier. The subdivisions into privileged classes was even more strongly marked among the Anglo-Saxons than among the other Germans. The social body was composed of the high aristocracy or Ealdorman, where- from the earls, of gentry or Thanes or Thegons, of the free yeomanry, who stood under the patronage of the powerful, called Hlaford or bread-giving patrons, and the slaves. All these classes were separated and distinct from each other, by a proportional gradation of the rights which they enjoyed. The composition or weregild existed among the Anglo-Saxons, and was proportioned to the social order of the victim. The same was the case among other German tribes. The oath of an earl was equal to that of six Thanes, and so down proportionally. An offence com mitted against a woman of noble birth was punished some times with death, which same offence against one of lower origin was atoned for by a proportional fine. So much for Anglo-Saxon democracy. Feudality was the cement of Anglo-Saxon conquest, and of the division of the subdued lands. The constitutional liberty of England is the work of the Norman barons, who could no longer endure the op pression exercised over them by the kings. The move 52 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. ment originated not with the Anglo-Saxon part of the population, nor was it an outburst of a higher principle. The kings injured, in various ways, the rights, the material interests of the barons, and they rose to defend them, but not because they were moved by an abstract love of free dom, or urged to action by preconcerted ideas. The agencies in the English movement of the 13th century were wholly different from those which previously acted throughout the continent. On the continent, burghers and even villains united with kings against the nobles; in England the nobles were the first to strike against tyranny, and called in and admitted the commons. This was a stroke of good policy, by which the king was prevented from draw ing the cities to his side, a policy taught to the barons by the events of the continent. The movement for emancipation on the continent was effected when the Anglo-Saxons, that is, the mass of the people, trembled at the bidding of Nor man barons and sovereigns. These barons are the fathers of the English liberties. After the battle of Lewes, Si mon Montfort, a French nobleman, and the other barons called the commons to their parliament ; they did it in order to strengthen themselves against the arbitrary action of the king. For a long period those commons — the only genuine Anglo-Saxon element, if there be any — the knights, the gentry and yeomanry ; all of them very reluctantly and even against their will participated in the parliaments. This is illustrated by the fines which were continually im posed upon them for non-appearance. So much for the in nate Anglo-Saxon love of self-government and of liberty. The movement against King John originated in the lesion of interests. The barons wished to submit no longer to arbitrary taxation, to the arbitrary disposition and administration of feudal estates, to unlawful wardships over minors, and above all they wished to have the free EACES, POPULATION. 53 use of forests. The rest of the nation, who were equally injured in property and security, responded to their ap peal. All this is perfectly in accordance with the com mon course of human affairs, and no proof of a special predestined exclusive mission. The division of the districts or counties into the thungs and hundreds, was the result of organic necessity in a population principally living on scattered farms and country-seats, in a land having then few and poor boroughs rather than cities. In the necessity of organizing origi nated the division of the population and of the city under the Roman, Athenian and other republics and municipali ties. The tens and hundreds might likewise have been made in imitation of the Slavic communes, as the An glo-Saxons were of old the neighbors of the Slavi. A continual intercourse existed between the two tribes ; they united in predatory excursions, and some of the Slavi very probably participated in the conquest of Britain. The division of the Slavic communes into tens and hun dreds, for administrative purposes, can be said to be im memorial. It still prevails in Russia, and no traces of such a division are to be detected in Germany the foun tain head of the Anglo-Saxons. The emancipation of cities is thus described by Hal lam : " The progress of towns in several continental coun tries, from a condition bordering upon servitude to wealth and liberty, attracts attention. * * * Their growth in England, both from general causes and imitative policy, was very similar and nearly coincident. Under the An glo-Saxon line of sovereigns we scarcely can discover in our scanty records, the condition of their inhabitants. * * * But the burghers of some towns were already a distinct class from the ceorls and rustics, though hardly free according to our estimation." 54 ^ AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. The cities in England were oppressed, and in England, as every where else in the ancient and the modern world, it was oppression and arbitrariness which evoked emancipa tion. The oppression of the feeble and poor by the rich and powerful gave birth to the laws of Solon ; the same causes produced the Tribune in Rome, gave power to the crushed plebeians, and were the principal agencies in framing and developing the immortal y«s civile. Oppression, as has been pointed out already, aroused Italy, Spain, France, brought the Norman barons into arms against royalty, and resulted in the initiation of the commons into political life. Ma terial interests were at the bottom of all these move ments, and Hallam says with truth, " that in the further development of English liberties, these liberties were pur chased by money." If any special characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons is perpetuated in the Englishman, it is the deferential respect paid to aristocracy, a feeling which penetrates the English people to the core. Events evolv ing from new combinations, different from those of the Anglo-Saxon epoch, framed out the English institutions. The conquest of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans, is one of the easiest recorded in history. What history calls the Norman times, gave and marks the mettle of the Eng lish character. The institution of the jury is claimed to be specially Anglo-Saxon. If so it is specially German. As such it ought to have existed in Germany as well as among the original Anglo-Saxons on the Elbe, and other northern branches of the same stem. It cannot be expected that the contact with the Roman civilization destroyed there the original German judicial habits. Such an assertion can be applied with some plausibility to the Franks, Goths, Burgundians, Longobards — but is of no avail in respect to the immense majority of the German race. EAOES, POPULATION. 55 The method of settling disputes and litigations by councils, composed of the oldest of the tribe or of the community is, it may be said, inherent in the rudest social state. It has prevailed from time immemorial, and among various nations, and to it can be traced with certainty the origin of what is called juries. Thus the Amphictyons were a kind of jury. The Roman law, nearly from the beginning of its development, used a kind of jurors in civil matters, jurors whose opinion on a given case was submitted to the prsetor. How this judicial custom be came obliterated does not belong to the present discussion. In criminal matters, in Athens and Rome, nearly the whole people composed the jury and the judge. The primitive Germans had certain judicial obser vances for the investigation of material truth, more or less resembling those of other tribes. The so-called jurors of the Anglo-Saxons served as means to investigate and find out the material facts of the case, but not to give any opinion about its validity. The circuit judge or function ary, an earl, or a count, called the nearest neighbors of the litigants to give evidence according to their knowledge of facts. Under the Saxon kings no criminal cases were sub mitted to the deliberation of such witnesses, or to that of any body of jurors selected from among knights or yeo.- men. The kings themselves, or their mandataries deci ded all such cases. Not the Saxon epoch therefore can alone be considered as having been pregnant with the great judicial institution. The historical development of the institution of the jury in England, out of Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Roman judicial elements is very complicated. It took place under various political and social combina tions and conditions, which it is impossible to compress within a brief outline. A jury in criminal cases, and above all for political offences against the monarchy and 56 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. the State, can be traced no farther back than to the reign of Henry III., an epoch completely Norman. The barons insisted always on being judged by their peers, according to the universal privilege of nobility and chivalry all over Europe. This privilege was extended over the nation, together with all those constitutional liberties, into which she was initiated by the Norman barons. The last but the most beneficial of liberties, that of the free press, was for nearly three centuries wholly unknown and unnecessary in England. The cradle of the liberty of the press was Holland, after it became a republic ; and from Holland it was transplanted in the 18th century to England, and radiated successively over all Europe. Human events, by whose diversified influence various European evolutions and changes have been carried out, as well as the liberties of England, nursed in their infant development, those eternal principles which have given to America her lofty position in the history of social pro gress. As the Englishman has no physical or special men tal resemblance to the German or the Anglo-Saxon, so the American has only few and very dim features in common with the Englishman, from whom he descends. Not An glo-Saxon, therefore, is the character of the Americans, and not to this assumed origin are to be traced the facul ties and qualifications which mark the American political and social institutions. Neither history and physiology, nor psychology and logic justify the favorite American theorem, that their freedom and democracy are the fruits of their Anglo-Saxon descent. It is, however, the prop erty of fallacies, in proportion as they extend, to run out into what is absurd and illogical. Statistics show that in the early periods, when the English began to settle on this continent, two other na tions composed the British Empire. The Irish and the EACES, POPULATION. 57 Scotch — both of Celtic origin — migrated to America in such large numbers as to immediately produce a new physiological amalgamation. Various kinds of oppressions expelled them from their native lands ; freedom and more equal social organization attracted and fused them in America. Scotch and Irish poured in freely in the seven teenth and eighteenth centuries. Buchanan and other statisticians assert that from 1691 to 1743, 263,000 Irish emigrated to America. This emigration was occasioned partly by the stagnation of the linen trade, partly by polit ical and religious oppression. According to the same au thorities, during the eighteenth century down to 1829, about a million of Irish and a quarter of a million of Scotch came to America. The Dutch element in New York, and that of the first French settlers in the Carolinas must likewise be taken into account. All the various elements of popu lation were cemented together by religious and political liberty, embracing every one, and admitting him to equal rights in the community, and not on account of his former descent or nationality. Under the combined action of climate, new habits, new necessities and hardships, new daily pursuits and occupations, new and more intense men tal and intellectual activity, the Americans became in a short time totally unlike the English in all external and internal characteristics. Even in the heart of New Eng land it is nearly as easy to point out a genuine Englishman, as to point out a Frenchman, an Italian, or a Hebrew. The elongated, sharp, dried-up features of the American have nothing in common with the round, slightly turned-up, and juicy-faced Englishman. The long-necked American has not his type in England. Similar divergencies extend to the hair, and to the whole frame. The English phlegm is directly the opposite of the febrile American, who with reckless impetuosity hurries his pursuits, and uses up his 3* 58 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. own life. In proportion as the American character is ac tive and expanding, these differences become more nume rous, salient, and puzzling. All these changes were effect ed by the paramount action of combined physical and mental events, and their all-powerful and uninterrupted influence and activity reveals itself in the various geo graphical and political sections of the Commonwealth. Not only the man of the Southern States descends origi nally from the same English social class — ^for the cavalier descent from English nobility assumed by the Southern planters is not sustained by history — as the man of the North, but New England has to a large degree peopled the Southern States. The Southerner, however, of the present day, has no resemblance in character either to the Englishman, or to his countrymen in the East and in the North. A gulf separates them in mental, social, and moral respects. The language is the only common tie. Two absolutely ethnologically different races of the old world, could not present a deeper contrast with each other. The American world was not called to life, and is not circumscribed by the narrow, blind, fatalistic physical laws of race. Amidst ups and downs, in smooth and in thorny paths, at times overshadowed and then brilliantly luminous, the American world has been the bearer of the all-embra cing, truly human manifestation of principles. They in spired the Puritans, and to save them they abandoned the old world with its oppressions and prejudices. Races and tribes are already fully represented in history. Each spe cially has given the last solution, the last word, if in re ality a law of races has presided over human progress. To initiate man into a higher sphere, America issued out of nothingness. The right of reason watched over her first steps. Carried as he is here by the current of time, and of circumstances, man is to make a worthy use of the EACES, POPULATION. 59 principles, and the mental and intellectual qualifications with which he is endowed. Then only they lead him to freedom. Freedom is the mass of all our physical and mental powers. It is the final aim of their combined ef forts. It is at once development and consummation. Thus comprehended, freedom has reached its highest ex pression in the institutions of the American free States, and freedom has carved out and has given the peculiar mark to the character of the man and to the citizens. 60 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. OHAPTEK II. CHAE AC TERISTICS. The character of an individual or of a nation is the re sult of a mass of variously combined inclinations, affec tions, volitions, dispositions, convictions, determinations. They are all general and special, and the traits or charac teristics determined by them are common, human, or indi vidual, when evoked by the agency and play, in and upon us, of special conditions. Thus nearly every individual, and every nation, aside of what is in its character hu man and common with others, has certain peculiar fea tures of its own. And so have the Americans. The differences in character between the inhabitant of America and that of any other country whatever in Europe, are as salient as are the differences of their social state, of their political development, of their pursuits, habits, and com prehension of life. Those differences are related to many causes at once ; their impartial appreciation explains and solves naturally, and therefore easily, the so-called enig matical peculiarities of the Americans. New and powerful interests and strivings have evoked an unwonted and special current of activity, and with it new and diversified manifestations of man's nature. Therein is to be found the source of certain characteristic dis- CH A EACTBRISTICS. 61 similarities between the man of the new and of the old world. And the American people absolutely ought to have certain characteristic traits of its own to fulfil the task before it, to elaborate this task by a new and special process, and to perfect its own destinies and those of the part of the hemisphere adopted and appropriated for such an end. . The character of the American, with all its sunny and shady sides, was not to be throughout the re flection of the European one. Sameness is repulsive to nature, indefinite multifariousness is the everlasting mani festation of her creative power. Man was placed here in new moral and material conditions and needs. Out of the fathomless depth of human nature these agencies evoked to the surface, that is to life, to activity, new characteristics in the individual and in the people. Political and social institutions often give an indelible mark to the character of a people, and as often again th^y are its reflection. History is full of the evidences of this fact. In America the character of the people and the institutions have acted reciprocally on their development ; a case of very rare occurrence in the history of nations and of their political and social evolutions. No nation, no people now existing is so thoroughly and intensely iden tified with its institutions as is the American people. With sacred jealousy the American people watches over the national honor, over its relations with other States, over national independence. Being in possession of the highest goods, no sacrifice can be too great for their defence and preservation. No invasion from whatever quarter, no conquest, no overthrow of the existing order, could ever be successfully carried out. Not the presumed Anglo-Saxon blood, but the genuine American feeling, pouring out from constitutive principles as from a foun tain-head, is the repelling force. Patriotic, exalted devo- 62 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. tion is not an effort, but a natural lineament of character, a simple but inherent element of national life. The love of social independence, of domestic liberty, and their fullest enjoyment, produces in the American character that unbending quality which disables the indi vidual from becoming a permanent denizen of other pow ers, of other States. There may be a few rare exceptions. It is almost impossible to imagine an American becoming a servant of kings, subservient for ever to social caste. Soon his better nature must revolt ; but numbers of Euro peans, from all social orders and positions, assimilate them selves easily and in a short time to the state of things pre vailing here ; they become identified with it to the core. To an Americanized, and therefore a reinvigorated Euro pean, a return to the past worn-out conditions of existence would prove unbearable. Whatever shadows and shortcomings may be discov ered in individuals, or in the mass of the people, as mani fested in their domestic, internal complications — shadows and shortcomings mostly inseparable from our nature — a public spirit animates the whole people, and is forming here a public general characteristic, unrivalled in history. Such is the prominent and decided feature deeply carved out in the general national character. It breaks out with such a fulness and vitality, that definitions could only impair its comprehension. Not that patriotism in itself constitutes a dissimilarity between European nations and the American people. The virtue of patriotism is a patrimony of human nature. But here it has a different source, a different essence, and thus its workings and manifestations are different from those of other nations. I Their domestic gods differ. The gods of old nations are local divinities ; those of the American people are all-embracing, pure and elevated principles. CHAEACTEEISTIC8. 63 Tradition surrounds the one with its venerated halo, which is often stifling and obfuscated by narrow prejudices, by indurated hostilities ; the American lares emit a life- expanding flame. Its action is quickly penetrating. Out of a social commingling issues the American people. It derives its lineage from various nations that are tradition ally hostile to each other. On this soil fusion operates, ancient hereditary alienations melt and evaporate. One common patriotism embraces and inspires them all ; rea son, freedom and humanity are its watchwords. Not less salient and peculiar than the public spirit, and created by the same or similar causes, is the characteristic of the American mind manifested in the thirst for know ledge, for information. It imperatively urges the individ ual with a pertinacity and generality not to be met with in any other nation on the globe, to satisfy this noble men tal irritation, to satisfy it by sacrifices of the time and means, whether large or small, at his disposal. It is thus the most brilliantly projecting feature, and an individual property of this people. Not the wealthy, not the better circumstanced are principally the expression of these ur- gings, but it is rather special to the laborious masses. Not outward worldly leisure produces or evokes it, but an in ward impulse. That is one of the cardinal differences be tween American and European populations. This craving results from the radical recognition of equality of rights in every individual, inspiring him with self-consciousness, with self-respect, and opening before him the bright hori zon of nobler purposes and aims. It is not a transmission by blood, nor the result of certain liberal concessions, called in Europe liberal institutions. In the English peo ple, the nearest kindred to the majority of Americans, and living under liberal institutions, this spontaneity is not 64 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. awakened, and the mass still gropes its way in a self-con tented ignorance. Neither is this craving incited by an admonition exer cised from above, by the efforts of a government, by the prevalent suggestions or example of a so-called superior stratum of society. This American phenomenon strength ens the faith that the human race is to bask in floods of light, that enlightenment is the essence of man's nature, although its effusion may have been benumbed for un counted ages. This characteristic trait redeems at once the broadest and most truly democratic comprehension of a people, from the cavils heaped on it by the apostles of an absolute supreme authority, which, according to their assertions, is to hover providentially above the masses, to take the initiative and to direct their mental development. / Extremes seemingly prevail in the American charac ter. It is a combination of violent, nervous, feverish ex citement and sturdy quietude, of calculation and daring, of cautiousness and swiftness in decision and action, of steadiness of purpose and recklessness in pursuits. It is stubborn and mobile, impressible and cold, cunning and straight-forward. Often inflated with immense pride and self-conceit, now soundly appreciating ones powers, and then humbly underrating them. Excitement is one of the most powerful springs in the American. It is so contagious that new comers, af ter a comparatively short residence, are affected and car ried away by it. Easily excited, the American cheerful ly, nay enthusiastically, greets the object which for the moment satisfies this necessity of his temper ; and no ef forts of his own invention are spared to endow this object for the moment with all imaginary attributes. Neither age nor sex is exempted from this intoxicating pleasure. He pays willingly and with the best grace for the moment CHAJEACTEEISTICS. 65 of satisfaction, and raises the idol to the skies. But when the excitement is over, he lets it slide, unceremoniously, or often drops it roughly, careless where it may fall, to run the next moment after another. The people at large, as well as the various circles in which sociability divides society, all equally whirl in this dervis dance ; sometimes in common around a so-called public character, a literary, artistical, or any other often adventurous celebrity; then around the deos minorum gentium, thrown in their way by chance, or whom often their own excited fancy adorns with imaginary distinc tions. Many and various are the causes accounting for and explaining this peculiarity. The nervous irritability ly ing at the bottom, most probably is produced by the in fluences of a trying and changeable climate. This turn given to the character at an early epoch has become now hereditary. The uniformity of the ancient colonial life, the rigidity of the Puritans and of their imitators, might have contributed to form it. Human imaginative nature revolts against uniformity, compression, against turning in one and the same circle. Single-track routine in life is repugnant, and any object or event is welcome which breaks such tiresome evenness. After contraction follows re laxation in some manner or other. So the imagination eagerly and indiscriminately seizes upon any provender with which to appease its cravings. / Even now, although new and more diversified elements are mingled in American life, a certain sameness still per vades it. The circle extends, the horizon enlarges, and nevertheless monotony dominates the whole. It becomes the more painfully sensible, as the multifariousness of the world from without, and the longings from within excite, at tract, and tickle the Americans. What therefore seems 66 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. to offer a momentary interruption of monotony, excites and carries away, and often overpowers the better and cooler judgment. During the colonial or embryonic period, the colonists were separated from the events of the world. The gloom iness of such an isolation was only cheered up by arrivals from Europe, from the mother country. The communi cations were rare, and thus whatever could give a new turn to the monotonous existence, must have been heartily greeted, as a link connecting the Americans with the gen eral, social and civilizing movement. It was an^'echo from a distant, fairy land, and even its feeblest or most discord ant sound must have deeply moved, strongly excited and affected those whom it reached. For domestic as well as for social reasons, any accession of new comers, settlers or visitors, must have been felt as increasing the moral and material worth and significance of the colonial existence. By all these accumulated reasons, as well as by the physi cal conditions so powerfully acting on the nerves, on the frame, on the temperament of the inhabitants, excite ment became almost a second nature. And what among the society of Europe is only a rare and transient out burst, becomes here almost a normal condition. Often by superficial observers, as well as by the Amer icans themselves, excitement is confounded with enthusi asm. But enthusiasm has its hearth in the mind and in the heart. Its sacred, ever-glowing fire pours from within, warms and inspires ; excitement blunts the imagination, or at the best reflects only a delusive mirage. And for the honor of human nature, below the froth of excitement, lies in the American breast the deepest enthusiasm for all that is grand, generous, and noble. Enthusiasm generated their history, enthusiasm inaugurated their political exists CHAEACTEEISTICS. 67 ence ; and among all the nations they alone emerged from such a sacred source. The great reproach made by Europeans to the Ameri cans, and one which has become proverbial among them selves, is the excessive love of money, the fact that they are a money-making people. Undoubtedly money-making has eaten itself deep into the American character, but the love of money, although considered a moral disease by all the moralists of antiquity and of our times, has been and is now ¦ the most deeply-rooted passion in human nature. Under one or another shape, in this or that manner, money has ruled the world at all times. Neither is the love of it less violent, less intense among the immense majority of Euro peans than among the Americans. If among the latter money-making seems to form the main object of existence, it is the effect of various causes, intrinsic and normal, and explained as such by their history, by the concatenation of peculiar events and circumstances, which have sur rounded them from the cradle. Money and commerce were the only ties between the colonists and the mother or any other country. The colo nies of modem Europe have been exclusively mercantile enterprises. Mercantile speculation sent out the first set tlers, and even the Puritans looked to trade as the sole means of maintenance, and of preserving the imperatively ne cessary intercourse with the old world. Mercantile rela tions therefore formed the pivot on which turned the ex istence of the colonists and of the colonies. Thrown upon their own scanty resources, the colonists could only obtain for money or money's worth, all the necessaries of life, the implements and requisites whose possession alone could preserve them from destruction when they first exhibited themselves on this soil. All this was to be paid for, in some way or other. Thus almost before the first immigrant took 68 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. a firm root in the soil, money-making became the absorbing object of his activity, as upon money depended his domes tic, his family, and his social existence. His entire social position and significance depended upon his commercial means. The colonist, his toilsome labors and sweat, must have been the object of greedy speculation in the mother country. Every thing therefore powerfully urged and contributed to develop in him from the start the money- making propensity, and to make it paramount to all oth ers. It was his defensive weapon and his salvation. So from infancy every thing stimulated, nourished and devel oped this passion. Since the Americans elevated themselves to the dig nity of a nation, the character of the American commu nity is even more industrial and commercial than it was of old. Their growth, their increase, their prosperity, are in dissolubly connected with the extension of their mercan tile or industrial operations. Thus money-making becomes more intense and all-absorbing, as the love of money is more inherent in commercial occupations than in any other, and in America every occupation runs out into a com mercial one. Only a prosperous nation can be considered as truly civilized, as enabled and prepared to enjoy democracy and self-government. The prosperity of such a nation consists in the prosperity of the whole population. It is the duty of every individual to devote all his faculties to securing this blessing to himself, and in this way to the community. Money-making, in its true sense, is the reward of intelli gence, labor, and toil ; it was and is the road to individual and to general prosperity. It is an inborn and noble pride to be the artisan of one's own position and independ ence. It is one of the noblest manifestations of the con sciousness of human dignity. The possession of wealth CttAEACTEEISTICS. 69 has always been among the most powerful incentives to action ; money-making by industry, enterprise, specula tion, is the only legitimate and honorable way to reach the goal. And of such a nature is the money-making, which engrosses an immense majority of the Americans. It con tinually extends the area of culture. It conquers the rug ged face of nature, transforms the wilderness into a habit able and cultivated soil. It is this which pushes the American to cross torrents, cut his path across primitive forests, disembowel the earth, people solitudes. He tries to make money out of the rough forces of nature. The sons of farmers, artisans, operatives, as soon as their faculties are developed, look forward to the means of securing their independence, of making money. They leave home, plunge into distant regions, and into hardships, privations and toils. They try to discount, to turn them into money, that is, into their own well-being and prosperity, and that of their families. Money-making has given the unparalleled expansion to American industry and commerce, covered the ocean with American bottoms, the land with prosper ous cities, with nets of railroads, with mills and factories. In proportion as prosperity increases and expands, in creases and expands general civilization. The genuine Yankee, that is, the man of the East and his kindred in other States, is considered the most sharp in this feverish pursuit. But they have the best and most numerous public schools and scientific establishments, buy the most books, and subscribe most generously for all public establishments and objects, as well as for alleviating pri vate miseries and sufferings. True it is, that this all-ab sorbing fever has likewise its morbid results. But when the good and the evil are summed up, good comes out victorious. All conditions being equal, consideration will always 70 AMEEICA AND EUROPE. attach itself to wealth. Agamemnon became the leader of the Greeks in the Trojan war, because, as Thucydides says, he was the wealthiest among the confederated kings. The starting point of the colonists was nearly alike, as was also their aim. The one who first reached it honestly must have enjoyed consideration, the more so as in the colonial life there existed few other distinctions. Almost all were in one way or another devoted to trade, and the so-called ancient families derive their pre-eminence from the fact that by successful labor or trade, they acquired before oth ers a proportional independence. The distinctions are therefore only chronological questions ; their source, their origin are alike. Those who first acquired wealth, and there was no other way to do it than by money-making, became benefactors of their community, establishing and endowing various public establishments. It was only by acquiring wealth they were able to satisfy their nobler im pulses. , ' The sneer at Americans for their money-making pro pensity does not become Europeans. As mentioned above, to this propensity the country owes the major part of its greatness. What is done by governments and sovereigns in Europe, is done here either by private individuals or by communities rendered prosperous by their own exertions. European society had its origin in the absorption by one class of the labor of another, and this still continues to prevail. The European social organization contains va rious social parasitical existences, not less greedy to ac quire and make money ; only the greediness is overlaid by certain conventional definitions and incrusted prejudices. If the European aristocracy, if the world of leisure, the official world do not make money themselves, in the same way as the Americans, these European classes make money by oppressing millions, and living upon their labor, or CHARACTERISTICS. 71 upon the taxes. European society has various social in herited distinctions, to which it pays due, or oftener undue deference. American society, from the start a commercial one, very naturally paid and pays deference to the success ful money-makers. It may be that nowadays wealth en joys in certain cases too much of consideration. But even this is paid to it rather in social and private relations, than in political ones. However desirable it might be to have this current modified at least, if not changed, still it is not absolutely to be condemned in itself. It is in human nature to pay deference to success. In the great events of the world, success is considered as God's verdict. In a society constructed like the American, moving in such an orbit, generally devoted to pursuits of a commercial char acter, success crowned with money is easily appreciated, understood, and felt by society at large. By such a suc cess society is mostly benefited. A man who has made his fortune by honorable means and enterprise, of whatever kind or nature, such a one, however deficient he may be in general culture, has nevertheless given proofs of certain eminent faculties of intellect ; powers of judgment and of combination ; ability, in seizing hold of the opportune moment ; endurance, skill, activity, energy ; and so he de serves consideration. A fool or an imbecile will never become rich — -never be able to make money. With all the numerous and dark drawbacks of this '' propensity, it does not generate avarice in the Americans. If generally they are infuriated in the pursuit of money, they spend it as freely as they make it. If they are called men of the dollar, at any rate they are not hunters of cents. Parsimonious economy is not their characteristic, and in general the racing after dollars, the thirst for gain, does not make them contemptible misers, or callous to oth ers. The celebrated axiom, " Help yourself," signifies 72 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. that every one ought to make his choice independently, and build up his position by personal exertions ; but it is far from including any egotism, any cold indifference to his neighbor, to the efforts of any one undertaking a difficult path in life. Americans are generally the most cautious persons in the world, in giving free advice, in going direct to the point. They shun the responsibility of deciding for another — of disillusioning him, or of interfering with a contrary advice or opinion. Thus when asked a question, they mostly answer in generalities. But if the choice is once made, the pursuit or object selected, then they stand by with counsel and action. The settler in a new and strange land, is heartily supported in his toils by his neigh bors. A foreigner or native, starting in any honest un dertaking finds support and credit, this mainspring and soul of a commercial society, and nowhere so largely and liberally conceived, or carried to such an extent, as in America. Comprehended in a broad national sense, money-mak ing, a result of the combination of events that have pressed upon Americans from the start, and amidst which they still live, is neither reprehensible, nor abject, nor mischiev ous, as it is commonly represented. That this propensity belongs originally to human nature, and that here it is stimulated by special and peculiar circumstances, is evinced by the fact, that the Europeans, continually pouring into this continent, do not yield in any respect to the native Americans in the heat and the eagerness of the race. Among the largest fortunes may be counted those made by Europeans, and great numbers, especially from the com mercial class, immigrated here exclusively for the purpose of money-making, unmoved by any other broad interest. Further, without the money-making and money-spending Americans, European industry must burst of plethora, or CHARACTERISTICS. 73 come to a stand stUl. Unacquainted as I am with the whole nature and manipulation of articles of this kind, I judge and appreciate the general results. The general character of commercial and other business transactions, seems not to be impregnated with so much dishonesty as is often witnessed by England. Aside from the astounding forgeries and bankruptcies which have recently burst over that country, foreign merchants, above all those in the East, complain of frauds perpetrated upon them by the English manufacturers, and others of the commercial brotherhood. Although such occurrences, almost inherent in the nature of commerce, of intense money worship, and forming the dark side of both, might happen in America, at the same time as much integrity, honesty and rectitude is to be found there as in any country in the world. Undoubtedly, in individual cases more or less numerous, money-making degenerates into a degrading and coarse passion ; but such cases do not prejudice or stamp the national character. With many who entered the race early in life, this passion has subdued or absorbed all the other faculties of intellect — it has become a second nature. As almost every body is obliged to run the gauntlet, one that stops even for respite, is soon overwhelmed. The whirlwind seizes and carries them away. Money-ma king becomes an unquenchable thirst, an object of love, an attraction similar to that which art or study exercises over the artist or the scholar. It is a power and a dis tinction. Then money is made not merely for the sake of becoming independent and rich, of enjoying both, but from habit — on account of finding any other congenial occu pation impossible. It becomes an intellectual drilling, and a test of skill It becomes a game, deeply combined, complicated — a struggle with men and events, exciting, captivating, terrible, hand to hand, man to man, cunning 4 74 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. to cunning. The socially passionate life in Europe, diver sified, and full of various enjoyments, gives to a successful winner, new scopes, attractions and pleasures, such as so ciety does not proffer, allow or create in this country. An American can with difficulty if at all turn in another direction, plunge in another passion, or activity, seek around for new and different drastic or soothing pastimes, to quench this ardor whicH for the greatest part of his life has been concentrated in money-making, and has been urging and directing his course. Thus where the Euro pean can stop or divert his attention to other objects, an American once in the middle of the torrent must go on, spurred by habits, by the force of events ; as even to pre serve an accumulated fortune, becomes in itself another race, another almost deadly strife. Such is the exclusive money-maker, but he is not the type of the general char acter, — he has no hold on the people at large, his dens are in large cities. "No nation is equally sensitive and impatient of criti cism as the Americans. They often become irritated not only by the finding fault with their character, customs, manners, habits, institutions, or culture, but find it disa greeable when climate, soil, fauna or flora is judged infe rior to those of the old world. Various causes provoke this sensitiveness, and it can be accounted for in various ways. It results from both pride and diffidence. The Americans are well aware of their deficiencies, but they feel the sting of injustice done to them by those foreign ers who obtrude themselves as unrelenting judges. Gen erally the faults are overrated, and the people are lashed by scorching and undeserved ridicule. The American, the last comer into the family of nations, is continually on the alert — not to be treated or considered as a parvenu, not to be slighted or disparaged. Youth is generally suscep- CHAEACTEEISTICS. 75 tible and irritable before it enters manhood. The more so, when occasional shortcomings are maliciously pointed out, when the intrinsic good is almost overlooked. The taunts of English travellers and writers, of the English press, have principally provoked this irritation, and made it nearly chronic. Such authors, taking a superflcial glance at the country and at its inhabitants, have misunderstood, misrepresented what they saw. Without investigating the cause of certain effects, by which their genuine or assumed fastidiousness was offended, they deliberately calumniated by wholesale, for faults committed by some. The European standard, when forcibly applied here, must necessarily wound and be faulty, the two states of sociability differing wholly from each other. Boasting is often carried by certain Americans to the extreme. Often however it is a reaction against slights, an effort to veil deflciencies, an effort made by a people aware of them, but on the other hand conscious of having accomplished in two or three generations what it took other nations centuries to perform. Generally, human nature re volts at taunts, at arrogant reproof, at undervaluation. Experience and time alone teach a becoming equanimity. European nations bear scoffing more patiently because they have thrown it occasionally for centuries at each other's head. Like old war horses accustomed to the roar - of battles, they remain cool and self-possessed. There is on the American surface much to be rubbed off and rounded. Rude angles are to be softened, ease, flexibility instilled. Time must do the work. Refinement is a fruit slowly ripened by ages. And in America the whole people, not a class, is the tree on which the fruit is to be borne. In the people at large reposes soft mould below the apparently coarse crust, and in due time, the plastic virtue of nature will cast it into congenial and sociable forms. 76 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. CHAPTEE in. DEMOCRACY. American nationality has two hearth-stones — democracy and self-government. The origin of all other nations and states, past or present, was different from that of the American commonwealth. America was evolved from a fruitful social element and principle. The authority of one exercised over the many, acquired by traditional influ ences, by superior physical or mental force, or by volun tary submission of individuals, forming one and the same race, family or tribe — such in all ages was the beginning of societies. Nimrod, Zohabk, Saturn, Japhet, Danaus, Cadmus, Theseus, Romulus, Odin, Pharamond, and all those heroic legendary founders of nations and states, bore the same character, acted under similar circumstan ces and conditions. Conquest and the individual author ity of one over all, or afterwards of few over many, begat classes and castes. And so to the present day, whatever may have been the changes and modifications, European society, like that of the ancient world, is composed of three principal elements. The one, which under different names rules and legislates ; the second, which shares in the power, in the spoils, prominently executes the laws. DEMOCRACY. 77 defends, fights and upholds the privileged state ; the third, on whose shoulders reposes and presses the whole struc ture. Not one of these elements existed at the outset of American communities. No hero or chief, implantinn; his sword or banner, marked out around the foundations of the city the boundaries of an empire. No submissive companions or subjects were the pillars of the genuine American structure, nor was it cemented by any authori tative will. Democracy was the vital essence of this new society, and democracy was cradled and nursed by the combination of events which brought it into existence. And not one of the facts, axioms and theorems, which for ages ruled the old world, had any bearing on the new one. ; Identical convictions, aims and purposes, attracted and united the primitive settlers. Therein was encompassed social equality. Those among them who might have be longed in the mother country to a superior or privileged class, at the start gave up all such distinctions, doing it either by conviction, or by force of circumstances. The first administrators or directors among the settlers, were freely elected by them. Their fitness, their mental supe riority were the qualities which influenced the choice, and not any recognition of privileged aristocratic superiority. Besides, no social supremacy or distinction can be trans fused from an anterior condition, or built up in colonies, with such beginnings as those on this northern continent, and above all those of New England. However socially mixed might have been the first body of settlers, necessity would bring them at once under the rule of equality in rights and duties. Each colonist was to carve out his own path, to work for himself. Mutual assistance could only have been accorded by the principle of association, and not by that of any obligation deriving from social inferior- 78 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. ity. The first commune or village was composed of equals, socially and politically. From such a germ the whole society was developed. No masters -nor lords obliged others to work for them and obey. Neither the func tions in the community, nor the economic occupations, pursuits, labors, separated its members into different classes or stamped them with inferiority or superiority. All were equally necessary, useful, and therefore honorable ; pulpit, office, trade, artisan, workman, daily laborer, were equal, closely interwoven and connected with each other. A log cabin was their original abode, was the common cradle. The old and the new society are as two streams issuing from two wholly different sources. And in their whole course , the original difference maintains itself and prevails. The states of antiquity all began, as Cicero justly says, under the kingly form of government. The king or hero founded and ruled a city ; the city was the state ; time, events, revolutions, transformed cities into republics. America began in settlements, in cottages, in townships and villages, and when cities were formed, no social or politi cal privilege elevated their inhabitants above their breth ren in the country. Modern Europe at the outset bris tled with menacing towers, strongholds and castles, over awing the ancient cities, the ancient civilization. Shad owed by the banner of the all-powerful lord, the boroughs, the villages and hamlets filled with serfs and slaves, crawled timorously before him. The church, the curate, the parish, leaned against the walls and battlements of the stronghold, and the helmeted lord was the founder and protector of the house of God. A school for master or serfs was not thought of. A church or meeting-house, a school, a common hall, formed the hearthstones of the first American settlements, cementing, enlivening the log cabin, the cottage, the vii- DEMOCEAOY. 79 lage, the township. In all this there was no germ, no ba sis, no fuel for an aristocracy. No special privileges or liberties to localities or cities, no corporations, guilds, han dicrafts, or any such subdivisions, classified the population, creating interests opposed and hostile to each other. The embryo of the future State and nation was unadulterated by any of the antiquated elements which prevailed in the social and political composition of Europe. Not a tradi tion, but a broad principle was sown in the American soil Charters were granted by English kings. But they did not create any special privileges for special localities, or bestow certain rights upon a small number of inhabit ants ; they related to the colony at large, embraced its whole population. The proprietors of certain large grants, as Baltimore, for example, followed by conviction or ne cessity the general impulse — as they would not have found settlers if privilege for some of them had been substituted for general democratic equality. Penn realized the purest conception of spiritual and social fraternity, and not out of such germs could grow and unfold the creeds of privilege. All aristocracies have germinated under royalties, which they have subsequently overthrown, stepping into their place. Such was the origin of almost all the repub lics of the old world. Warfare has been the life-giving ele ment of all societies ; it was the source, the nursery of aristocracies. The better armed man, the possessor of a horse, were the principal founders in Greece and Rome. Not for war and conquest, but for peace, agriculture, in dustry and commerce, did the primitive settlers, the colo nists, provide themselves with arms. War and strifes with Indians, or the warring in the interests of the mother country, were accidental and accessory events, and not in view of them were founded and organized the various co lonial communities. After the cities of Europe had be- 80 AMEEICA AJSD EUEOPE. come successively chartered, enfranchised, or had fought out their liberties, the mass of the people still remained in fetters. The immense majority of the European popula tion was deprived of rights, deprived of every pulsation of political existence. So the burghers formed a third or a' middle class between the nobility or aristocracy, and the villeins or the rural populations. Here in America, there was no above and no below, and thus no distinct invested or innate rights of one above the other. And for the same reasons that America at the start had not the germs of an aristocracy, there did not exist any elements to constitute a genuine political middle class, burghers or bourgeoisie ; a class so preponderating and influential in the historical throes of Europe. On the contrary, if an eminence could in any way have been given to a special pursuit or to a special position in the community, it must have been to that of the agriculturists, the farmers, who constituted the villages, those cradles of American society, and whose axe and plough hewed out its solid foundations. Even the temporary bondmen, after having served out their time, became equal to the other colonists in the en joyment of political rights. The ancient monarchies and republics, as well as those of modern Europe generally, received their organization, their laws from one, either a hero, a founder, a king, or a lawgiver. Historians, political philosophers, with remark- i able obstinacy draw therefrom the conclusion, that no j spontaneity can be ascribed to the masses at large, to hu- | manity itself If a whole nation gives up its former settle ments in search for new lands, in the opinion of annalists, of philosophers and poets, it is some hero, who, to illus trate his race, starts and founds a new empire. If new manners, new customs are established, it is some legislator who initiates them ; his fellow-citizens forming only more DEMOCRACY. 81 or less malleable materials for the thoughts and the con ceptions of one man. But to discover, to explain who in reality created a new institution, or even a new enterprise, it is necessary to consider who were the persons that wanted it. To them belongs the first suggestive idea, the deter mination to act, the power of evocation, the largest share in the execution. Is fecit cui prodest, is -an axiom admis sible in history, as it is in justice. The social beginning, as well as the successive development and history of this country, reintegrates spontaneity to the masses. The first regulations and rules for the settlers, upon their organizing into a body politic, were the result of mu tual deliberation and consent. Afterwards all colonial laws had the same common popular origin, and the same spirit acts now. The initiative comes always from the people. Not a chief or leader called the first Puritans together, and established here the first free communities. Washington, who for the sublimity and equipoise of his character, stands alone and unrivalled in history, Wash ington did not call the nation into life ; he did not evoke the events ; but the colonists arose ; the events brought Washington on their waves ; independence was asserted ; a nation was born. Washington in his civil career was an adviser, a tutor, but not a legislator. Laws in America had been hitherto evoked by a necessity felt by the people, and were framed in view of such a demand by the people themselves. Contrary to all the organic legislations of the old, of the European world, laws were not made in American communities to correct the abuses of a power, to stop oppression exercised by a single ruler, or a class over the rest of the nation. Laws were not enacted here, evoked by the necessity to limit, circumscribe, or curtail the abuses which were called the rights and privileges of a portion of the community and State ; laws were not made 4* 82 AMERICA AND EUROPE. here to protect one class, and are not directed against another. They were not imposed either by a class legis lating for its special use and advantage, nor by tribunes or Solons, acting in the defence of oppressed masses. The laws here have the common consent, because they are framed by the common will, urged, evoked by common necessity. They did not originate in the attempt to crush one class for the benefit of another, and thug they have not been looked on or accepted with distrust and hatred, as have been most of the laws of the ancient and of the modern European world. The primitive social and organic seeds of American communities were of the purest democratic nature and origin. These communities were born democratic ; Euro- peati nations gravitate across hardships, toils, frustrated at tempts, towards democracy. For Europe it is a question of a social transformation from an antecedent opposite state, into a new one. But transformation necessitates the dispossession, the annihilation, or destruction of a pre viously existing social form or state. A cardinal differ ence therefore marks and separates the two democracies, — the American and the European. The American was at the outset, and still remains, constructive ; the European, by the force and combination of events, is reduced pre eminently to a destructive action. European democracy, in order to breathe freely, to come to daylight, to acquire and enjoy rights, was of old, in Greece or Rome, as well as in modern times, forced to uplift, to pierce and break through a thick and heavy social crust pressing over it. European democracy must question, at tack, break down and destroy her masters and oppressors, whatever their name, or their influence. So it was of old, so it is now. The space, the soil, as well as the moral convictions have been and are occupied by the enemies of DEMOCRACY. 83 her existence, of her principles. Democracy to get air must necessarily destroy the superincumbent structures, clear away the rubbish, and thus only is she enabled to act freely, and to generate a new social organism. Thus Eu ropean democracy is absolutely, exclusively militant in idea, in conception and in action ; in order to be, she must be aggressive, or she is nothing. Imperatively, she must be born in revolutions. Her present existence and action is a whirlwind. She has no clear insight, no clear conception of the future. Destruction of what exists, what presses upon her, what crowds her out of life, is and can only be her fixed purpose. The actual European de mocracy can only prepare the soil for the future ; but what structure, what social form shall become inaugura ted, is an enigma to be solved by time. In America the democratic elements are normal, and no other ever existed or exist now in society. American democracy was not born from a social struggle ; it is the growth of an original social germination. In America a man is born a democrat, and from childhood breathes demo cratic air and sucks in invigorating, constructive democratic ideas. In Europe democracy must be taught to the peo ple ; from a theory it must be transformed into a fact. Its principles and notions must be explained to those most interested ; they must be admonished, aroused from slum ber. The genuine people must be told and taught that i they are men ; that they have primitive, imprescriptible rights ; that they ought to claim and conquer them. Thus — in strict appreciation — in Europe the impulse to eman cipate, to inspire self-consciousness into the democratic so cial element, this impulse always comes from above. Ideas are to be inoculated, instilled by certain inspired and de voted personalities, originally separated from the masses by their education, their pursuits, their mode of life, and 84 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. who as leaders try to penetrate the masses with their ideas to raise them, to become one with them. Contrary to what prevails in America, democracy in Europe does not find its true comprehension within the people, — at the ut most, is only latent. The immense majority of European populations are not accustomed to act freely by themselves, scarcely even to think about objects intimately connected with the sphere, the action of a government. In emer gencies they look right and left for personification, for leaders mostly beyond their class, from whom they are to receive direction, intuition. The masses must be concen trated, governed in the strictest application of this term, even if it is in the name of the democratic principle. Events different in their origin and nature, from their hav ing been engendered in America, events having their causes in a variously combined and complicated past, these preside over the destinies of European democracy. At present it cannot and ought not to be compared, judged, or a verdict issued, according to the strict American standard. As has been already stated, American democracy was not born amidst the convulsions of a social struggle ; she came neither violently, nor painfully and laboriously to life, amidst the death rattle of castes, social classes, or po litical parties, warring for opposite and deadly antagonis tic interests. The conditions of its political and social existence and activity do not depend on the violent de pression or subjugation of an irreconcilable social enemy. The European political writers and statesmen seem not clearly to comprehend this primordial character of Ameri can democracy. They seem to confound the purely polit ical nature of internal parties, and their influence on the legislative and administrative action and play. For them the names of whigs and democrats seem to represent two hostile social parties, bent upon the destruction of one DEMOCEAOY. 85 another.' The European publicists do not comprehend their issues. The whigs in their judgment represent an aristocracy or a conservative party, similar to the same party in European States. The party calling itself demo cratic, has alone in their judgment the character of democ racy like that of the European or philosophical concep tion. But neither the question of State rights, nor that of strengthening the federal power, nor that of free trade or protection, of internal improvements, and others of the same purport, on which the two parties differ, have the ef fect of changing or deteriorating the constructive demo cratic principle which is common to both. If the strict construction of State rights, as claimed by the democratic party, may appear to be more in harmony with the pure democratic idea, it is only in the form and not in the substance itself, for since the organization of these politi cal parties and issues, the so-called whig States have been and are more progressive, more absolutely devoted to the principles of equality, more averse to arbitrary power, to slavery, to all oppression and lawlessness, than are those enrolled under the political denomination of democracy. All this seems to be misunderstood by European publi cists, and above all by those of France, even by those gen erally belonging to the democratic creed. They cannot discriminate between democracy, as the name of a politi cal party, and democracy as the only social constructive element in American communities. Those well-inten tioned writers repeatedly implore and exclaim. Might de mocracy only not be oppressive of ihe minority. In their appreciation, this presumed minority is the relic of a caste or of a class dispossessed of power, averse and hos tile to democratic elements, to democratic institutions. They suppose, therefore, that the party which holds the reins of legislative and administrative power, has nothing Ob AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. so much at heart as to legally oppress the minority^ to avenge ancient social wrongs, to disable the dispossessed from doing any mischief in the future. But as there does not exist in the American social state any such stratum to be absorbed, destroyed, or even to be hemmed in, the enacted laws cannot under any circumstances have such a coercive and personal aim. The laws are made for gen eral needs and interests, without any reference to par ties, and democrats and whigs are equally bound by them. Finally, if a legislative oppression has followed and results from the struggles and frictions of the two political parties, it was by the force of a well concentrated organization, that the democratic or slavery-sustaining minority enacted laws distasteful, repulsive to the humane, honest and generous feelings of the immense majority of the American people. In general, the application of the name of democratic to the political party known under that term in America, is a monstrous misnomer. The divergencies between the modes of the European and American democracies are cardinal, — divergencies re sulting from different circumstances and events. Although the essence is alike, and the aims to secure the happiness and the enjoyment of inborn rights to every individual are the same, they differ now, and . very likely will differ in the future, with regard to the methods which the Euro pean democracy will be obliged to adopt and try succes sively, previous to becoming a fixed social fact. It is amidst the revolutions and changes to be effected in the foundation of society, that the democracy in Europe can alone make its way. She must assail, and the assailed will make, step by step, the sturdiest resistance. The Eu ropean democracy is and will be opposed in the field of facts and in the region of ideas, of convictions. She must meet physical, mental and moral enemies with at least DEMOCEAOY. 87 equal if not superior weapons. The struggle of revolution out of which the American nation was born, was of a dif ferent character, as was, is, and will be that of European revolutions. Comparisons are continually made, between the American war of independence and the French revo lution, as the representative of all European revolutions ; but when impartially examined, the terms of both those events are to such an extent of a different kind, that in justice such comparisons ought not to be started. A whole social order was to be unhinged in France, as it is to be unhinged in Europe. The American colonies rose principally against administrative oppression, and the injustice of a royal government, incited, supported by the parliamentary pride and the omnipotence of the mother country, unwilling to concede to the colonists certain po litical rights which bore principally on their participation in the internal administration of the finances and the right of taxation. It was a contest between nearly the whole colonial population and a government denying to it certain rights that were enjoyed by the rest of the English nation. It ended not in changing the internal social state of the col onies, but in constituting them an externally independent na tion. It was not an upheaval from below, a rising against domestic oppression, exercised by castes armed cap-4-pie, in privileges and exemptions. The colonists took up arms, not for the purpose of overthrowing such a privileged class, or avenging hereditary wrongs, which had crushed them for long centuries. George III., after all, was the ex pression and the agent of the majority of parliament, without which his government would have been unable to enact the stamp duties, or levy war on the colonies. There existed in the colonies no obnoxious aristocracy, whose head was the king. Democracy was already socially and le gally established in the colonies, when the war burst forth. 88 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. It was the normal state. With the exception of the finan cial questions, the colonies enjoyed the benefits of self- government. The American tories who preferred depend ence on the mother country, to forming a distinct nation, did not enjoy any distinct social position which raised them above the rest of the citizens. When the colonies became a nation, the democratic principle, which was in herent in them, acquired more fulness and expansion. It acquired space to manifest its miraculous, creative, or ganizing and constitutive qualities, but it was not the re sult of the revolutionary war. The pre-existent demo cratic institutions alone secured the final success of the war, and without their pre-existence, most probably a new nation would not have risen on the horizon of history. In one word, the American revolution was made to pre serve, secure, sustain, to give more air and space to a democratic element which was already active, and not to evoke it from nothingness to life. France was externally an independent nation. Inter nally it was subdivided into social classes, and the genuine people, the masses were crushed by those centennial super positions. The people were to be disenthralled, reinte- ¦ grated in its imprescriptible rights. Castes and privi leges were to be destroyed and disappear. ^The problem was to erect a new social structure on the spot occupied by the ancient one. Democracy, that is, the people, was to assert its social and political rights and existence. It could not do this otherwise than by breaking the massive superpositions which pressed it down. The king was at tacked and destroyed, not for any special arbitrary meas ure or vexation, but as representing an odious principle, as being the keystone of an edifice, the head of a social order, against which were directed the efforts of the dem ocratic element. Ruins and rubbish were to be cleared DEMOCEAOY. 89 away, as impeding the new organization. Centuries had accumulated these structures and privileges, beneath which lay compressed a mass of explosive forces. They strug gled for life and daylight until the moment of explosion came. The ideas which prepared the French revolution, were already in fermentation for a long time previous to the American revolution. The ideas of the 18th century, of which France was the principal laboratory, acted even on the colonies, on the principal men of the American revolu tionary epoch, stimulated their ardor, and gave, to a cer tain degree, a consecration to the democratic ideas already transformed into facts in the colonies. Revolutionary ideas had been brooding in France, in the public mind-, in philosophy, in literature, previous to any revolutionary manifestations in America. And this must have been so, as all these ideas were directed against social oppression, against castes and classes, evils of which the colonists could not complain. Rousseau was the boldest and most earnest revealer of the new era, and his voice resounded in the minds, in the hearts of the masses of the people. The American struggle and success laid the sparks to the mine, accelerated explosion ; but undoubtedly the explo sion would have occurred even without the previous eman cipation of the country. The declaration of rights made by the American Congress, to be sure, will remain for ever in the history of humanity, as the most luminous and sublime inauguration of a new era ; as the first social as sertion of Christian civilization. It vibrated in France, because the people were partly, at least, prepared for the work of regeneration. The impediments to overpowering their enemies which the two revolutions had to combat, were likewise of a dif ferent kind. The struggle, the energy, the exasperation. 90 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. the mode of destroying their enemies, must have necessa rily differed in the two countries. In America, the whole contest was almost entirely reduced to a purely military strife. It was an invading enemy which was to be repelled. In France the object was to upturn a whole existing social order, which 'had been taking root for centuries. The French revolution therefore must have taken a bloody and destructive course. In America, the enemy was only on the battle-flelds. Arrayed as an army in France, he was in the pre-existing institutions ; he had hold of all the po sitions ; he covered the land ; he possessed physical and mental power and influence. He was to be ferreted out in all his windings, and destroyed. If the English sol dier, representing the power of England, was justly shot, destroyed as the tool of oppression, as an impediment in the way of national development, how much more danger ous to the French people were royalty, nobility and priest hood ! Their existence rendered any new social order im possible ; their destruction was therefore a fatal necessity. The mode of warfare must therefore have been different in America and in France, as it will be iu every European nation which shall strike for regeneration. Hence the comparison between the mildness of the American revo lution, and the bloody violence of the French is not just. They had different enemies to destroy, and were obliged to make use of different means and weapons. What in America was the rifle, in France was the guillotine. The purport of the American revolution was at the out set misunderstood in Europe. No social danger, at least no immediate one, for the old order of things, for roy alty and aristocracy, was anticipated by those who were the most interested in the event. Kings and aristocrats throughout nearly the whole of Europe, applauded heartily the efforts of the colonists. They saw therein only the DEMOCRACY. 9-1 means to weaken, to reduce the overbearing English na tion. But at the flrst move in France, old Europe was shaken. The news of the convocation of notables in 1787, was received with rage by all those who rejoiced at the proclamation of American independence. Previous to the war of independence, the American communities had already begun to develope within them selves the absolute principles of a superior social organi zation, and in this respect they had surpassed the English, then the only European nation enjoying liberal institu tions. If the germs of such institutions were brought by the colonists to America, they became refreshed in the democratic essence which filled the minds of the Puritans. They grew vigorously, and with more fulness than they ever could have done in the old world. No historical asso ciations adulterated them ; no social privileged excrescences impeded or distorted their growth. The Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, was rather the offspring of oppressed and injured interests, and by no means an assertion of ab solute rights. It was made to correct certain abuses, and to render their repetition difficult or impossible. The Magna Charta is a transaction between king and nation, evoked by previous acts of arbitrary power ; it was called out by grievances, and thus may be considered to a certain extent as accidental in its nature, since, without grievances, there could not have been a Magna Charta. This acci dental character is preserved in the successive development of the English constitution throughout centuries. The initiative comes not from a broad principle, but from a wrong previously experienced, to prevent which for the future, is the aim of the constitution. It is an uninter rupted compromising with various interests, a strain of concessions, compacts and checks. In America, at the outset, with the first cry of life 92 AMERICA AND EUROPE. by the colonies, the broad, absolute principle was asserted, and from it the laws, the institutions, the legal and politi cal habits were deduced and developed. The body of lib erties for Massachusetts, as the mould wherein have been successively cast all the institutions and constitutions of the American states and communities, and of the Ameri can nation ; this body of liberty ascends immediately to the fountain head of social life. In 1641 the colonists enact for the fruition of such liberties, immunities and privileges as humanity, civilization and Christianity regard as due to every man, etc. The English Magna Charta does not embrace the people, but speaks of kings, lords, bishops, knights, commons, leaving the mass of the people without laws or security. The colonial body of liberties asserts the principle of freedom and equality in every man. The Magna Charta and the English consti tution is rather a pact concluded in a business-like man ner, and for special purposes. The Massachusetts biU treats all the business objects as deriving from principles. And thus the colonists led the van before England, in many special enactments and measures concerning the per sonal liberties of individuals, and the private interests of the community. Thus the liberation of heritages and lands from fiines and from all governmental exactions, as wardships, liveries, etc., was established twenty years be fore the like was done in England under Charles II. The right of petition and remonstrance was guaranteed in America nearly half a century before it was thought of in England. The guarantee of personal liberty, as embodied in the habeas corpus, this highest pride and costliest jewel of free institutions, was established in America forty years before the act was promulgated in England. The right of a person charged with a capital offence, to have counsel aside from the simple discussion of points of law, was re- DEMOCRACY. 93 cognized to the accused in New England more than a cen tury before it was admitted into English courts. Various ameliorations respecting juries were introduced independently of the influence of the mother country. More than two centuries ago the position of the wife, of the widow was secured by the law ; the wife was sheltered from domestic tyranny, while the English law scarcely be gins even now to humanize its statutes in this respect. So also were recognized the rights and claims of children. The German, Saxon, English and feudal right of primogeni ture was eliminated at the outset in the colonial legisla tions ; and aristocratic longings — if there were any — were nipped in the bud. Daughters inherit with the sons as copartners, while the English law scarcely and exception ally preserves them a parcel only in the inheritance. All these rights and guarantees, constituting a supe rior social and legislative organization, emanated exclu sively from the spirit which at that time already animated the colonists. This spirit descended upon them, not from their connection with the mother country, not from affinity of blood, but from the essence of absolute social truth. Animated by it, the colonies, previous to becoming a na tion — above all, those of New England — elaborated higher solutions to great social and legislative problems. The above-mentioned guarantees and laws are therefore of gen uine American origin. They evolved from new and purer conceptions, new events, new combinations. At that time England did not give, but received the impulse from the colonies, where the rights of man were recognized as being the paramount social agencies. The English constitu tional laws, born out of special exigencies and complica tions, were mostly framed and conceived by statesmen, clergy, legists ; the colonial domestic rules were made chiefly by simple-hearted men, inexperienced, unlearned 94 AMERICA AND EUROPE. in legislation or statesmanship, but whose minds and hearts had been warmed by pure humanity and civilization. Men who deduced rights not from precedents and parchments, but from the ever-pouring fountain of the better human nature. Only true democracy developes in man those transcendent and vigorous mental capacities and qualities, on which depend the progressive destinies of communities, of nations and of the human race. The colonies became a nation. Democracy, which lighted and warmed their domestic hearth, became a lu minous phenomenon in the world's history. Independence gave it a new impulse, opened a broader horizon, and se cured henceforth its untrammelled and full action in all directions. Independence completed and perfected the primitive elementary condition. What was germinating in secluded and quiet domesti city, became developed in mighty social and political in stitutions. A new and complete polity — ^the child of new events — and hitherto unparalleled in history, began to ex pand outwardly. By the assertion and establishment of democracy in substance and in definitive governmental forms, the comprehension of the relations of men to each other, of the individual to the state — the comprehension of his social standing and rights, of his political rights and duties, acquired a clearness and vastness hitherto unpre cedented. In the states of antiquity, in those of Christian Europe, the individual was considered as existing exclu sively for the benefit of the state, or for that of the power or powers which held and embodied it ; in America, for the first time, a state and states were formed for securing the happiness of the individuals. The colonies struck for independence, because nearly all the previously existing conditions of their existence were endangered. Charters and privileges that had been DEMOCRACY. 95 once granted by the royal power, and were now violated or annulled, together with certain guarantees of the mode of the internal government, embraced and secured the main conditions of colonial existence. The colonies, principally, nay exclusively, pivoted on labor. The whole colonial population was in principle and in fact a productive one. Assiduous application to labor, to enterprise, to industry, to business of every nature, and security for what was thus acquired, formed the essential and paramount terms which constituted the individual as well as the integral existence in the colonies. Labor was the only way of be ing useful to oneself and to the community. Privileged social drones could not subsist in communities, which started in life in the manner of the American colonies. It was therefore not the privilege of unproductive con sumption, of useless unoccupied existence, which was to be defended against the encroachments of power. It was the emancipation of labor and of its products from fiscal and arbitrary control, from lawless oppression and political disregard, which necessarily formed one of the principal purposes in the rising for independence. It can therefore be asserted, that the condition of labor was at the bottom of the various causes of the revolution. Mental and physical labor became finally and positively ennobled. All who took up arms were exclusively laborers of various kinds, and the revolution was to emancipate labor. This aim was the natural result of pre-existent causes ; it was contained in their essence. Labor is the soul of a democ racy ; it is the cardinal agency of progress and civiliza tion ; it is the most binding cement of every solid and ra tional social structure. The principles laid down by the American people at the foundation of their political systems and constitutions are for the most part simple and therefore elastic and all-em- 9b AMERICA AND EUROPE. bracing. Such also are human rights ; they are one and the same for the whole human family. The American constitutions do not take cognizance of artificial rights and positions, and do not need them for their practical opera tion. They are not based on certain interests at war with certain others, all of which are to be perpetually adjusted, equilibrated, kept in check, and which continually threaten to encroach upon, to overboil, or to break through the artificial boundaries surrounding them. American con stitutions do not recognize or relate to abuses or privileges embodied in a few, and thus they neither create nor con firm abnormal situations, antagonistic to the interests of the majority of the population. For nearly half a century, several European nations have attempted and still attempt to implant, acclimatize, and adapt the English constitution, considered as the model for every European liberal gov ernment. All those attempts have ended and still end in failures. This is as it ought to be. The English Consti tution is a special home-grown product. In order to pros per, it needs certain special conditions of the soil. It cannot operate with ease, without certain distinct, separate social bodies or classes ; it must have at least three springs or social powers, acting on, attracting, and at times repelling each other. The Constitution is rooted in the life, iu the notions, in the habits of the English people, of whom an immense majority, for instance, look with as much pride on royalty, and above all on the parks, the castles and their inmates, as could possibly be done by the lords themselves. The Constitution grew up line by line, step by step with the nation and its various evolutions ; it forms therefore a necessary complement in the existence of every English man. It is an edifice to whose erection each century contributed bricks and mortar, whose partitions were built one by one according to the exigencies of the moment, in DEMOCRACY. 97 whose windings generations grow up, and every Englishman finds himself at ease. But for other nations such circum stances and conditions no longer exist. The internal con ditions are different, and the English frame never can be adjusted to them. At times too narrow, at times too loose, this frame hurts here and there, and neither royalties, aris tocracies, nor the common people which compose the Con tinental nations, understand how to move and operate therein. Moreover, the spirit of a new age breathes over the European nations. Their dim aspirations are for a future, wholly unconnected with the past, their efforts are directed to getting rid of those centurial encumbrances. The European nations are every where undermining the ancient structure, with its compounds of royalty and aris tocracy. These exist as material facts, but they have lost all hold over ideas, convictions. Royalty, aristocracy have no faith in themselves but only in brute force. They are rotten, decayed to the core. And such is the substance of the two principal ingredients which are expected to give vitality to the Anglo-European constitutional system. On the other hand, the American constitutions, simple and uncomplicated as are vigor and health, can be safely imitated in substance, and applied to every nation. They embrace uniformly all social conditions, and do not need artificial supports. Every individual, rich or poor, can live with ease, imtrammelled in his pursuits, according to his inward impulses, his nature and his choice. Democra cy does not deny to any body his human inborn rights ; all enjoy them equally, all are amenable to the same equal laws. The American constitutions procure and bestow the greatest possible freedom and space to each individu ality. The American people, the American democrat, the American citizen enjoys individually more freedom, secu rity and power than is possible in the best fenced aristoc- 5 yo AMEEICA AUD EUEOPE. racy, which, on account of its abnormal condition, and of its constituent privileges, must always be on the alert, al ways on the defensive, always prepared to repel an assault, or to carry one out. " For the first time in history, the democratic principle, m full growth and purity, became embodied in the Ameri can commonwealth. For the first time society and states were born, became developed, and exist and operate with uniform, simple and normal social elements. A past did not transmit to them any dusty relics, but only those eter nal, indestructible ideas which constitute the moral life, the civilization, the progress and the happiness of men. All the ancient and European republics, when compared with the American, can be considered only as outbursts, as at tempts on behalf of social and political freedom, as indi cations that the democratic principle is at the bottom of the destinies of the human race. The ancient republics at the best were only the forerunners of a new and com plete initiation. Not even the brilliant Athenian democ racy was a pure realization of the principle. Its origin was already adulterated. The Athenian democracy wrested life and power from the aristocracy, which re mained among the constitutive elements of the republic, with the exclusive tendency to destroy democracy. The origin of all Christian republic's was similar to that of the republics of classical times. Nowhere were republics be gotten by democracy. The so-called Florentine democ racy was born and operated under conditions similar to those of the Athenians. It came not from the people ; it started in opposition to a pre-existent power, and was amalgamated, and even directed, organized by the Guelfs, who were no less nobles than the Ghibellins. All the past republics limited the exercise of political rights by privilege and exclusion. Liberty in Europe had never DEMOCEAOY. 99 equality for her parent, was always surrounded with grad uations and modifications. The use of political rights was always only a privilege ; in America for the first time it was an inborn right, a social duty. The privilege was lodged in cities, and then in corpora tions and guilds. Cities established republics over the world, and as such ruled over the land or country. Who ever was outside of the walls of the municipality, did not participate in the privilege of exercising political rights, enjoyed no sovereignty. In America at the outset, liberty was a right settled in the individual, not in the locality. The rights accompanied the man. Wherever he put his foot, he bestowed them on the soil ; carried and spread them over the land ; and equal rights dwelt in a log cabin, as well as within the walls of a city. The American re publics have no privileged central power to rule over the rest ; wherever the people meet for deliberating and de ciding, there was and is the centre. As has been often mentioned, the cities began the movement for emancipation in Europe. It was therefore a privileged spot, a privileged class that acted, and not a whole people. Cities and corporations led in the war, and bore the principal brunt of the struggle. The three prim itive cantons of Swiss, Uri, Schwytz, Unterwalden, make an exception. In all the other cantons, the cities represented the republican power. In Holland, the cities struggled against the bloody tyranny of Philip II. And only cities in the past were enabled to rise. They were the only reg ularly constituted organic bodies, when the country, the peasantry was iu vassalage, serfdom and dependence, with out any rights, without any means of combination. No where existed a democracy, and the popular element was seldom and feebly represented in cities. In the Dutch Republic the supreme power was not in the people at 100 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. large, not in the States General, nor in any kind of Congress ; nor in the legislatures of states or provinces, but in cities. And again, in those cities the power was not in the whole community, but in the hands of a local, closely corporated supreme aristocracy. These condi tions were the consequences of historical causes, of a spe cial concourse of events. The cities conquered fran chises and certain political liberties, principally by strug gles with the knighted aristocracy or nobility. After hav ing subdued the nobles, the burghers imitated their laws and habits. Liberty was not based on natural primitive rights, but only a part took possession by force and en joyed it. The rural populations, the laborers, the work ing men were regarded by the burghers with nearly as much pride and disdain, as they were once regarded by the nobles. The burghers never thought of sharing politi cal and social rights equally with the people. It can be said that all these republics were a modified feudality. Against those privileges of the burgher class, the people, who were excluded therefrom, revolted. Thus in Holland, under the son of William the Silent, and in Switzerland, in the course of the present century. With all his civic virtues Barnavelt of Holland was the champion of the burgher class, of the burgher privileges. Humanity and democracy are one and the same con ception. If man is the image of God, then the divine emanation animates not a certain few, but all ; thus men are equal, and have absolutely equal rights, equal destinies. In whatever way their functions may differ, in the all- embracing association and combination of various activities and interests, their virtual condition, their dignity and rights as men are not thereby affected or altered. In the whole creation every thing is submitted to general laws ; their various combinations constitute certain differences, but no- DEMOCRACY. 101 where is to be found a privilege raising any created being above the action of general laws. Nothing privileged ex ists in nature, and all its forces, essences and elements are for the use of all her creatures, according to the special conditions of their existence. The inspirations of genius, that sublime force which raises the mind and opens the se crets of the creation, these inspirations or discoveries are beneficial, and become the property of the whole race of mankind. Genius does not limit its creative action to the benefit of some privileged few, and thus its pure na ture is therefore democratic or all-embracing. The history of the culture of our race bears evidence of the unrivalled superiority of the workings of democ racy. Democratic was the social and political organiza tion of the Hebrew tribe, and it accordingly overrode time. The Hebrew law still exists. Among the ruins of forty centuries it still has life. No other social organization re lating to things, castes and classes, has reached us so vital and indestructible. Athens eternizes the blossom of the Grecian civili zation. Without Athens, Greece would have been over powered and subdued by Persian kings. She would have been ruled by satraps or dynasts, as were the Grecian cities in Asia. Not the spirit of oligarchical Sparta, but that of democratic Athens saved Greece. Democratic Athens gave the lofty and unlimited expansion to the Greek mind ; it enkindled a light which shall radiate for eternities. The Athenian democracy, during its brief ex istence, works more in the development of the spirit of our race, than the most dazzling reigns of monarchy, than all the monuments erected by them — dead stones in the path of nations. What remains from the conquests and victories of Rome ? The gigantic republic, the more gigantic empire, 102 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. is a heap of mould and dust. But the Roman civil law is still a living fountain of jurisprudence. And the Roman law is the product, not of the rugged, inflexible and nar row spirit of the patricians, but its clearness, its omniper- cipience are due to the accession of the plebeian or the democratic element, to the full citizenship of Rome. All-embracing, all-elevating Christianity can only re ceive its completion in democracy. Christ teaches that all are equal before God. The Gospel is spiritual democ racy. But the spirit realizes itself in social forms. These must be of an adequate kind. There ought not to subsist an antagonism between the outward world and the spirit ual one. If Christ left untouched the political and posi tive social relations, it was because he was to regenerate the internal, the spiritual man. This accomplished, the regeneration of social relations was to be made by man himself, in harmony with the moral truth, which had been revealed to him. Among the greatest deeds in history, we must count those in which a whole people or populations, exalted by terrible emergencies, have risen to action, repelled inva sions, or in the defence of the domestic hearth, of a country or city, in defence of conscientious convictions or of faith, have cheerfully sacrificed life, families and earthly goods. The people, generally deprived of their rights, and not enjoying any privileges, have more than once in history saved their rulers, their oppressors, who appealed to them imploringly. And these oppressed masses every where constitute the unadulterated democratic element, redeem ing the faults of their oppressors. Europe, however slowly, gravitates towards democracy. No cavils and objections can arrest the movement. The Anglo-European constitutional forms of government, with all their deficiencies and shortcomings, are after all the DEMOCEAOY. 103 first initiatory steps. These constitutional governments continually raise the bolts and admit more and more from the people to the enjoyment of political rights. Popular education, although in a wretched state among the im mense majority of European populations, nevertheless stirs up the mind and creates longings for the amelioration of the political organism. The increase and the more equal distribution of material prosperity, awakens self-conscious ness in the masses. Large communities and nations slowly but uninterruptedly become more and ¦ more intelligent. And even Aristotle, not at all friendly to democracy, who witnessed the decay of the Athenian one, nevertheless concluded that when communities become very large, it is perhaps difficult for any other than a democratic commu nity to exist. Lord Brougham prophesied that the Eng lish monarchy must end in democracy and a republic. Enemies pay homage to democracy, dreading its advent, and nevertheless recognize its all-powerful, creative vital ity. So does Guizot, Thiers, Montalembert, Balmes, and others ; even so do the kings, who set themselves up as representatives and defenders of the rights of the people. The freshest and most recent despotism, that of Na poleon III., is in its way a recognition of the democratic principle as paramount to all others. Louis Napoleon recognizes and tells to the French people, that he holds the power, not by legitimacy, not by the grace of God, but by the popular choice, by the popular will. Thus, not withstanding the political oppression, the chaining of all kinds of liberties — of which the masses of the people en joyed less than the burgher class — these masses become accustomed to consider themselves as the source of power, as the social kernel. This is what is principally wanting, and hence, even this degrading despotism can after all be considered as a social and democratic progress. It is a 104 AMERICA AJJD EUEOPE. mental schooling of the people at large, and however vi cious and defective it may be, it is better than nothing. So in learning the rudiments of reading, even a bad schoolmaster is preferable to none, and a vicious spelling is more satisfactory than total ignorance. At any rate the idea is stirred up, the impulse is given, and the people at large become familiar with the regular operation of the in stitution, even in its present falsified state. The people will no more be dispossessed of the notion, and a short time will teach them to handle the power more thoroughly and normally, and hence more efficaciously. Thus in Europe democracy is a rising tide. It rises slowly but uninterruptedly. It overflows, carrying away, one after another, the barriers and impediments erected to arrest or suppress it. It is not organized, not construc tive ; it tears every thing down ; it has hitherto been a black tornado, approaching nearer and nearer, but its final out burst will be terrific. The fears, as well as the concessions of its most inveterate enemies are the best evidences of the all-powerful working of the democratic principle, of its eternal right, of its incontestable supremacy. Rulers and partisans of the right divine, of exemptions and priv ileges, speak continually of the just claims of the people, of necessary concessions to the spirit of the age, and other similar objects — all of them satisfactions given to the dem ocratic principle. All this is a first vacillating step, but by the invariable laws of logic and dynamics, the next must follow. Customs, manners, social pursuits, level conditions, bring men together and mix them continually. The means of mental development and culture are daily enlarged in Europe, and are accessible without distinction. Not difference of birth, but poverty shuts any person out from using and being benefited by them. True it is that notwithstanding all this, the past with most of its niches, DEMOCEAOY. 105 hooks, social compartments, stands there upright, over shadows and impedes a healthy, normal growth. But this past no longer fructifies European life, and its representa tives are useless to themselves and to society. So the centennial oak of the forest, eaten up at the heart, barren and leafless, overtops the new and vigorous vegetation. But its branches, its roots are dead, storms break them away, and finally the giant falls, uprooted and prostrate. For ages democracy has been variously assailed as a principle, as a civilizing and social agency, as a political and governmental institution. No cavils have been spared against her. All social evils are attributed to her. Since the establishment of the American commonwealth, the old flaws are diligently reproduced, and large telescopes and highly powerful microscopes are directed for the purpose of discovering new ones. These accusations are as diver sified as the human passions, and the perpetrators of them now as in all times, in all epochs, belong to the class or political party dispossessed of power by the democracy. Among the foremost reproaches brought against de mocracy, is that of instability in political and social institu tions ; instability in aims, workings, and ways. Democracy is represented as destitute of all respect or veneration for time-hallowed axioms, theories, institutions. But insta bility and not veneration of the past, not deference to opinions, to facts, and to results of different conditions : instability is the principal agency and condition of pro gress and of development. Nature is an eternal creation, life and motion. The embryo, the kernel, throw away their first shapes and forms, put on another, and are unin terruptedly in a process of transformation. What logical or moral reason or right has the past which is a corpse, to fetter the life, the motion, the activity of the present ? What right have defunct generations which lived, moved, 5* 106 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. acted, amidst certain different circumstances, impulses and exigences, to tie and enchain those succeeding them, and placed or thrown in conditions new and diverse ? Nearly every scientific progress or discovery is made under the law of instability. If the existing conceptions on all sci entific subjects had been religiously upheld and maintained, all the immense developments which have so rapidly suc ceeded each other, would have become utterly impossible. Why should social and political institutions and forms alone constitute an exception ? or by what obligations are the successors made to wear forcibly the gear of those who lived before them ? America shows in its rapid progress, in its wonderful development, that man can successfully upturn and erect, destroy and construct, and that mate rially and socially, new edifices, as new institutions adapt themselves easier to men, assure his power over nature, develope the resources of the soil, and render it more fit for the comfortable support of life. Every generation has the right to build up its own dwelling. Old edifices and castles are admirable to look at, but generally uncomforta ble to live in. They do not answer to a changed or modi fied condition of life, to new notions, habits, occupations. Modern existence, modern generations require air and light in streams. In the same way it is more considerate, from the financial and economical stand-point to invest less capital in walls, and not construct them for centuries. A house, an edifice might be constructed at 'the cost of one hundred or fifty dollars, and be equally suitable, substan tial, and adapted to the principal purpose. The one might last centuries, the other a few decades. But the surplus of the cost economized on the second building, can be in vested in a productive way, and enable the next successor to build with it a suitable new house. That built up for centuries, deteriorates, loses in value, impoverishes the DEMOCEAOY. 107 owner, and does not in reality contribute to private or public comfort or good. The same to a certain degree is the case with social and political institutions. Not that every conception, idea or structure of the past should be absolutely pushed aside, condemned and declared to be useless. There is an uninterrupted chain of mental and physical transmission running through and cementing gen erations. But the living one has unlimited power to se lect, to make its own choice, to preserve and reject what it judges and recognizes as proper or useless, to live accord ing to its own chances, will and decision. When a life- giving, all-embracing and fruitful principle reposes at the bottom, when in its development and free action it shapes out society, embraces it and penetrates it in all its fibres, then the instability on the surface is neither dangerous nor destructive. Instability is the manifestation of health and vigor — stimulates man's creative powers. In new mental, social and material productions, man constantly attempts to reach higher regions, to give more perfect solutions ; to improve, embellish his existence, his social and domestic relations. Besides, a man born in 1856 is chronologically and arithmetically older than one born one thousand or two thousand years before him. To call the past the older time is logically a misnomer. The present is older than the past and wiser too ; it inherits the experience, the dis coveries, the sum of activity of bygone times. Bacon, the great utterer of axioms for the concerns of practical and every day life, was the first who, with his wonted clearness, assigned in this respect to the past its true relation with the present. As the result of instability, destructiveness is largely put to the account of democracies. It is de clared to be innate with them. So democracies are ac cused of having by intestine discords accelerated the 108 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. downfall of Athens, Thebes, and other smaller Greek re publics, and in Christian times, of having been the occa sion of the destruction of the Florentine republic. It has already been mentioned who are the accusers. The storms, the dissensions which beat thus furiously on the ancient republics always originated with the aristocratic parties attempting to reseize the power. Democracies once in normal political motion, that is. when no violent, treacherous impediments are thrown in their way, are nei ther vindictive nor aggressive, but elastic, confiding, un suspicious, good-tempered, that is to say, aiming and wishing to enjoy life, and let others do likewise. Democ racies in their normal state are the everlasting youth of humanity. Such was the Athenian democracy after the Persian war, and for years under Pericles. Such to a great extent was the Theban under Pelopidas and Epam- inondas, and the. Florentine without their Medici and their Palleschi. Every where the aristocracies conspired, cre ated internal convulsions, stirred up discontent, calum niated, threw all kinds of impediments in the way of the regular functions of the republic, betrayed, invoked for eign intervention or infiuence. Such was the case in Greece during the Peloponnesian wars. Democracies have never, not on a single occasion, betrayed a country. Cor ruptions have been almost a specialty of oligarchies and i aristocracies, from Sparta down to our own times. Aris tocracies, not democracies, join invaders and foreign ene mies. Aristocracies create anarchy and bring final de struction. Not the plebeians, but the patricians of Rome received gold from Jugurtha, and so it has always been in history. Aristocracies have formed and still form always egotisti cal, unsubmissive minorities, usually preferring the destruc tion of the state rather than to submit to the general rule, DEMOCEAOY. 109 to submit to laws equal for all. Because aristocracies, when wielding power, did it for special aims, always prom inently legislating for the good of their class, always di viding the state, the nation, in various antagonistic and violently opposed interests. Egotism has been the moving soul of monarchies as well as of oligarchic and aristocratic communities. Whatever may have been the dark spots, the true or artificially projected shadows on democratic commu nities, their political nature makes it impossible to enact exclusive special laws for one part of the population, and directed against another. Internal disorders and even in testine wars were always provoked by aristocracies, whose haughty unprincipled members, always ready to violate the laws, to show their contempt for existing power, to tread down public and private morality, studiously invoked popular animadversion. Such was the case in Athens and Greece, such was the case in Rome. Whatever could hu miliate or exasperate the people, was always perpetrated by the patricians, by the Tarquins, as well as by a son or grandson of Cincinnatus. Sylla, not Marius, provoked domestic war. The same was the case in the Italian re publics ; so in France with the jeune&se doree. In pri vate as well as in public matters, offence, provocation, open or surreptitious contempt or violation of general laws, have nearly always been perpetrated by aristocracies. It is generally asserted that all democracies have a pe culiar tendency to identify themselves with a single indi vidual, and thus to become tools in the hands of ambitious schemers and intriguers. This is considered as one of the most dangerous breakers for the existence of democratic states or communities. True it is that to a certain degree history justifies these assertions. The few democracies which have appeared on the horizon, have been always headed by one man, instead of acting self-consciously. But 110 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. in substance, not even the thus movable democracy of Athens submitted wholly to the leadership of Pericles, one among the greatest and purest patriots and statesmen on the records of our race. Besides, the origin, as well as the character of the few democracies of the past, have been such as to lead necessarily to such-like personifica tions. Born from internal tempests, generally with the help of some prominent individual, their existence was continu ally tempestuous. A single spot, a single city, agglome rated the whole democratic element; there was the centre of the system. There it performed its functions, always in the public place. Attacked, teased, or exasperated by the lawlessness, the taunts, the uninterrupted opposition of the aristocracy, their deadliest enemies, these democra cies of the past were nearly always in a feverish state. In a perpetual and violent struggle for existence, it was diffi cult to reason with calmness, to consider the most vital questions in all their relations. Leaders easily got hold of a people who felt the necessity of being commanded, for the sake of resisting an external enemy, or a still more dan gerous domestic one. There was no public press to bring important topics under debate, to enlighten and cool the judgment of the masses, concerning the characters and the value of leading personages. In modern democracies, especially in that of France, the masses of the people form a " rudis indigestaque moles." They have no self-con sciousness, no distinct comprehension of their position, of their needs, of their future. For this reason, they submit to be headed or embodied in one, whom they trust, as knowing their feelings and their wants. They require some one to think for them, to act in their behalf, to defend them from their enemies. The masses are not accustomed to exercise self-government, this most important comple tion of democracy. As was the case with Athens and the DEMOCEAOY. Ill other ancient democracies, the modern democratic attempts in Europe likewise find it necessary to have nurses and tutors, to facilitate the first steps on an agitated soil. But the American democracy, being of a normal and natural self-growth, exercising its functions regularly, covering the whole land, and not concentrated in cities, cannot run out into an individualization, as did its forerunners. Already the press forms a powerful panacea against it. In one word, none of the conditions which in other democracies either facilitated, or even rendered unavoidable the person ification of democracy in some leader, have existed in the American commonwealth. Doubtless, even for the most regulated action based on the concurrence and combination of such various functions, a kind of head is imperatively necessary. Such a standard-bearer — as he is very prop erly named in America — serves rather to rally the various scattering forces, but is neither the initiator nor the leader. He receives inspiration, impulse, direction, for good or bad, from those grouped around him. In other democra cies the ductile masses were animated, vivified, electrified, or stimulated by the ideas, and still more by the personal forensic influence, by the voice of a passionate patriot, or of a daring, gifted, but mischief-brewing politician. So Pericles or Demosthenes could move them as quickly in a moment of excitement, as could an Alcibiades. Criti cism, discussion, on the broadest scale, are the cardinal substances of American public life, and hence sham he roes, and hero worship must in the long run become impos sible. Ingratitude is freely ascribed to republics, above all to democracies, to the people. The American common wealth is not exempted from this reproach. But in the commonly accepted signification of gratitude and ingrati tude, history shows that monarchies and monarchs are no 112 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. more grateful than republics. Moreover, in sound philo sophical criticism, the influence of individuals on the des tinies of the world is general, and accordingly does not preponderate, as is commonly believed and asserted, on those of states and people. The great majority of rulers, and of other great and influential men, merely co-operate in a movement, which would have probably pursued its pre-appointed task as rapidly and as completely as if they had never existed. Their work is more or less well done, but if they had not been on hand, then it would have been carried out by some one else. A few prominent men, whose genius, talent and energy have been aided by fortune, have been able perceptibly to accelerate or to retard the progress of events. If, for instance, Cesar had sided with the pa tricians, the Roman republic would have lasted until his death. Feudality would have taken deep root, would have covered Europe, and would even have finally organized society without Charlemange. The greatest service ren dered by Napoleon, was the promulgation of the Code, which undoubtedly would have been promulgated by some one else. The principles of it were fixed in the national life, were fructified by the French revolution. Humanity generally has far fewer benefactors among great historical individuals, than among the great explorers in the limit less field of science, among the men who tear rrom nature its secrets, who unveil the scientific, the moral, the social laws. Generally the services rendered to republics are re warded according to prevailing habits and notions, besides that the individual is surrounded spontaneously by respect and gratitude. Rare are the examples to the contrary. The example of Miltiades is held up as a reproach to the Athenian demos. But Miltiades, divinized as the victor over the Persians, was punished because his subsequent life DEMOCRACY. 113 and actions were such as endangered and offended his fel low-citizens. Past good actions do not compensate for new mischief-brewing ones. The ostracism of Aristides stands there alone without justification. Glory crowns the heroes in the end, whatever may have been the conduct of citizens and contemporaries, and unfrequent are the cases of decided and direct injustice. Society gravitates more and more towards a state, where heroes and benefactors will be use less. At the utmost, their task, their mission has been needed in primitive, unsettled societies ; as soon as the movement becomes regulated, and society settled on a firm basis, the time of heroes passes away. The obligations between those who render the so-called services, and the served, are wholly reciprocal. The one is scarcely more bound by it than the other ; and a man who in any way serves his country fulfils only his duty towards the community. The country proffers and procures to him occasion and space to unfold his qualities and ca pacities, to give them higher scope and full play, to rises over others, to win name and consideration. Without this pedestal, this space, the greatest names which resound through centuries would never have emerged from nothing ness. Even the great and justly revered name of Wash ington, would not have acquired the eternal glory which surrounds it without the revolution, without the sufferings, the sacrifices borne by the people. Without this, Wash ington would have disappeared in the smooth current of common, daily life. The American commonwealth or people is upbraided by foreign and domestic political sentimentalists for not electing its most eminent men to the presidency. Such an election is considered as the last aim of an honorable and legitimate ambition, and as a gift always at the dis posal of the people, for the crowning recompense of a 114 AMEEICA AND EUROPE. faithful servant by the highest civic distinction. It is, however, not intrinsically the fault of the people at large, if such men are not elected, but it results rather from cer tain complicated wheelworks in the process of election, by whose handling and shifting, in each political party, emi nent men, out of jealousy, neutralize and defeat each other. The organization of parties often acts on and overpowers the will, the better impulse of the masses. Further, the succession of mediocrities, heading the governmental ma chinery of the United States, has served to prove em phatically the perfection of the system, which can easily be overlooked, directed and taken care of, even by the most inferior mediocrities. Truly, it is neither a rotten nor a faulty system which resisted, and was not broken or disordered in the hands of a Pierce, the lowest in the lad der of thorough incapacities. After all, the presidential dignity ought not to be con sidered as a reward to be bestowed by the people for cer tain past services rendered to the commonwealth. There is no reason why a general successful on battle-fields, should be equally fit to direct the governmental machinery. The example of Jackson cannot establish a law. The great leaders of political parties, who for years in speeches, par liamentary and stump debates, move, excite and carry with them the public opinion ; those men necessarily acquire certain habits of mind, contract certain passionate, impe rious dispositions, which unfit them for the methodical and regular functions of national affairs. In extraordinary emergencies, an iron will, based on pure convictions, might be necessary at the head of the national chariot. But in the normal ordinary current of affairs, such so-called emi nent men might become, if not dangerous, at least inju rious, as very likely for the love of glory and immortality, or by concert, they would be bent on carrying out their DEMOCRACY. 115 special whims or conceptions, despite the exigencies of the moment, or contrary to the real interests of the nation. Honesty, strong common sense, thorough knowledge of the principles on which reposes the governmental structure, are the cardinal needs in a president for ordinary times. Institutions of the nature, character and composition of those of the American republic, can only prosper and op erate orderly in normal conditions. Not by jerks and shocks, not among extraordinary combinations, not in the heated atmosphere of passion, can the American institutions unfold and blossom. Reason, calmness, regularity, fore thought, and the equitable adjustment of various seemingly antagonistic interests, form the prominent conditions for the prosperous and healthy working of the American body politic. Such conditions can only be secured in normal, undisturbed times, in an air not charged with inflammable or explosive gases. And it is not such a serene atmos phere which propitiates the growth, or evokes to action those personages, whom history usually loves to surround with the halo of greatness. The enemies of American democracy throw at its head the disorders occasionally perpetrated by unruly mobs, and attempt therefrom to infer that, loosening the strong iron bridle of the government, democracy unavoidably generates violence and lawlessness. Such disorders occur principally, if not exclusively in large cities, those recep tacles and shelters of the most degraded characters. The immense majority of such tumultuous agglomerations, is composed of individuals who never received a genuine democratic training and education, who have not grown and lived in a genuine democratic atmosphere. This mov ing population is composed of discordant and heteroge neous elements, poured out from the old world, destitute of any notion of right and self-control, but always accus- 116 AMERICA AND EUROPE. tomed to feel over them the heavy hand of governmental police. For them liberty is not order and harmony, not an association and deliberate submission to established ani equal laws ; but a struggle with existing society. Those men were born and brought up in conditions in which law and right were synonymous in meaning and in application with injustice, oppression and exactions ; and they cannot at once comprehend the difference which prevails here. Democratic America absorbs uninterruptedly masses of human beings, who are destitute of any feeling, or spark of manhood ; without any comprehension of mutual rela tions of duties and rights. Morally and physically de pressed, embruted, they must be washed, cleansed in body and mind, and restored to humanity. Their moral and social education is to be begun and completed. The scales must be torn from their mind's eyes. They must see and learn that freedom and equality are not an opposition to oppression, but a normal, healthy, social condition. They are to learn and to experience that true, genuine democ racy is not a battering ram to crush and destroy, but a constructive and cementing element. They are to com prehend that the consciousness, the assertion of individu ality does not consist in encroaching in any way on that of another, but in peacefully combining both, for the real ization of social, orderly aims. For men who never had a true mastership over their persons, nor over their no tions, the flrst steps on such a path are often difficult ; the way of progress remains for a long time unintelligible. For the first time they become seemingly uncontrolled masters, and their time, their labor are enjoyments un known to them in Europe. What wonder if persons like these, so long unmanned, violently abuse the blessings be stowed upon them by American democracy ? In free action alone, man acquires the consciousness of DEMOCRACY. 117 his inborn dignity, of his elevated destinies, of his moral manhood. Democracy alone can secure to him this con dition of his higher, purer life. In free action, man re cognizes that he has inward powers and various resources. Here man becomes unfettered mentally and physically. Large numbers, nay millions, doomed to servitude, to ig norance, to darkness, become redeemed. This process of social purification and of the inoculation of manhood, is unprecedented in the world's history. It is a special and constituent element of American democracy, and marks its superiority over the republics of the past and of the modern world. Hitherto democracies have been shortlived, and there are not wanting prophets who forebode a like fate to the American republic. But all other democracies were bom and lived in abnormal conditions. All of them had a powerful enemy inside, gnawing at the root. This was the aristocracy, always and every where pre-existent to democracy. The reverse has been the case in this country. The American commonwealth cannot therefore run out into aristocratical institutions, become cramped with aris tocratical governmental forms, and see a genuine, powerful aristocracy emerge from the actual social organism. Never \ were aristocracies begotten by democracies. It is an im- : possibility, historical as well as logical. Aristocracy has for its source and foundation the originally uncontested possession of power ; she fills the space, possesses the soil, the land, the localities. All those advantages, acquired beforehand by conquest, or pre-occupancy, have received the consecration of time and usage. Aristocracy must be built up simultaneously with the first boundaries of states, or with the first tracing out of cities. Those who with Romulus dug the earth for the first walls on the Latin hills, were the founders of Rome, were the kernel of the Ro- 118 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. man patriciate. Those who first took possession and made their abode in the Venetian lagunes, laid the corner-stones of the Venetian aristocracy. No aristocracy was engen dered in America, either by the possession of power, or on battle-fields, or by the primitive erection of cabins, log houses, and villages. Now it is too late. Wealth alone is not the source of a powerful political aristocracy. The pos session of hereditary power, the possession of land, secured by exemption and privilege, by law as well as by usage, are the vital conditions of aristocracy. In America, laws as well as customs, convictions as well as habits, do not fa vor or procure a single particle of nutriment for an aris tocracy. There is no solidity in the soil, no stability in the power of wealth. All is moving on sand, wherein will be always engulfed any attempted aristocratic structure. No dykes can arrest the rapid democratic current, which undermines, dissolves and carries away whatever may be thrown into it, for the sake of obstructing its course. Should there be the seeds and embryonic elements — ^which in reality is not the case — for such an excrescence, they will be destroyed, dissolved before taking root, before be ing able to give signs of existence. Nowhere could be found even the rudiments for such a structure, aristocracy being antagonistic to the institutions, the notions, the feel ings of the immense majority, nay even to the habits of life of those who attempt to play that childish and ridicu lous game. Aristocracies must be created by primordial events. Aristocrats must be born with faith in their pre destined superiority. Aristocrats cannot be formed from one day to another by grants and parchments. They must be born to command, to assert their right as rulers, over arch the state, and the people underneath must be so de graded as to believe that they are born to crawl and obey. Nothing of this kind has existed here, and such relations DEMOCEAOY. 119 and conditions can neither be reproduced nor created. It can be said that God's omnipotence would be insufficient to give the sanction of the dust of time, wherein consists the true value of aristocracy. God's omnipotence could not now create in America such a social and political, priv ileged, all-powerful body. There appear on the surface, here and there, bubbles, which short-sighted observers consider as atoms, wherefrom in future an aristocracy is to aggregate. But these transient sham existences have no substance whatever, no hold upon the people, no influ ence upon the run of affairs ; their existence is more fac titious and shorter than that of those brilliant insects, whom one summer day sees appear, flutter and die. Those aristocracies which ruled, oppressed, betrayed and de stroyed states and republics, were not the creations of par lors, drawing-rooms, and church pews. Before they re moved into castles and palaces, they literally put the hand to the erection of cities and empires. But no power what ever, no combination of events can be imagined that is able to carve out aristocracy from the American social and political conditions. Whatever therefore may be the breakers ahead, or which surround democracy here, aristoc racies cannot be counted amongst them. Anarchy, dissolution and the consequent despotism of an individual, are pointed out as the necessary terms of popular governments. Rome ended in this manner. Not the plebeians, however, but the patricians, were the most demoralized and dissolute, and their factious combinations rendered the further existence of the republic impossible. The Greek republics, whatever might have been the in ternal anarchy which distracted them, did not die in do mestic discords. No Athenian, Spartan, or Theban despot seized the power and overthrew the republics. Philip of Macedon was a foreign conqueror. The Roman republic 120 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. excepted, almost all others succumbed to foreign conquest, and not — as the enemies of popular power assert — to do mestic anarchy. Florence was overpowered by the pope and the emperor. The ambition of the Medici and of other nobles, and- the hatred of a popular form by Charles v., sealed the doom of the democracy and freedom. Hol land, Genoa, Venice, albeit not one of them was consti tuted by democratic elements, ceased to exist by subjec tion to a foreign conqueror. Not their domestic dissen sions, but the overwhelming power of France, facilitated the conquest. The American commonwealth has no such conquering neighbor, and never can such a one exist. No European power could in any circumstances whatever, in the most distant future, dream or attempt the conquest of America, even if an intestine war should rage on her soil. Such speculations on improbable probabilities, are beyond the limits of sound reasoning, beyond the deductions au thorized by common sense. A domestic despot, a Caesar or a Napoleon might emerge, and put an end to the democracy, to the Ameri can republic. Such are the forebodings of those who, from one or two historical facts, deduce an absolute doctrine for all times and for all nations. But they forget the abso lute dissimilarity existing in the constitutive elements and principles, in the organism of the government, in its offi cial functions, in the political habits and customs, in the character of the people of Rome, France, and of the Uni ted States. In both cases the political and governmental centralization facilitated the work. Rome and Paris were the head, the heart of the two republics. Any one who seized the power there, paralyzed the nation. The people, accustomed to receive impulse and direction from those centres, opposed a doubtful resistance, if any, to the new and violently established power. Caesar, Octavius, in se- DEMOCEAOY. 121 curing Rome, had already a powerful prestige in their fa vor, secured a pivot, a centre, when their enemies, on the contrary, were wandering about the earth, dispirited and scattered. In France the possession of the capital, with all its centralized, political and administrative powers, together with the command of the army, secures by a sin gle well-aimed blow any political change. The people, the nation is beheaded or stabbed in the heart in Paris, and submit more or less reluctantly to their fate. The same is and will be nearly always the case with all other European states. Every where, even in England, feeble as it is, cerftralization deprives the rest of the nation of the energy necessary to resist any usurper of the supreme power. In America every such move and attempt will meet insurmountable political, social, governmental and geographical hindrances. It can be said, that time and space will be against such a usurper. The American commonwealth, it can be said, has comparatively no standing army. Should a kind of anarchy, precursory to despotism and usurpation, con tribute to give force and consistency to a military power, a military leader could never acquire the same influence over the minds and the devotion of the soldiery, that was pos sessed bythe military chiefs of the ancient and European world. The elements of which such an army could be com posed here, must be perfectly different from those of the old nations. The men who might enlist under this banner, originally independent citizens, would always have within them a moral repulsion, an undisciplined spirit, which must oppose the absolute will of the leader. Armies identify themselves with their captains by long years of warfare, by the recollections of conquest, glory, and of hardships. But here no such conquest, no such recollec tions can render possible this incarnation of the spirit of 6 122 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. the chief in the whole army. All the European states, monarchies as well as republics, Rome or France, even of 1794 or 1799, have been essentially and traditionally for centuries, a kind of military and militant societies. The American republics have not this character ; it is not en grafted in the institutions, in the spirit of the people, and never can be. The man of the people, the masses wUl fight themselves, but will not submit to have armies of hirelings. But admitting even at the worst that such an army could exist with an ambitious leader, having in him the stuff for a traitor to liberty. He seizes upon the capital, as is Washington, he corrupts the members of Congress, and brings them over to his side, or seizes, imprisons and dis perses them. In either of these cases, having possession of the capital, he has only in his hands a city, wherefrom no threads or administrative nets extend over the country. Having in his hand the members of Congress, he will have some individuals only, but not personages, whose de cisions or doom could in any way influence and seal that of the various States. Each state, each district, nay nearly each township and village must have been filled with par tisans of the usurper, must have been separately and lit erally conquered. The independent self-government of states, the self-government of the people must have been eradicated, abolished previous to the establishment of the power of an usurper. From Washington, or any other like centre, no strong governmental rays could carry his biddings, and find or enforce submission to them. Such an administrative current of electricity does not exist in America, and the utmost anarchy is the last way to create and foster it. Each separate state, with its well-ordered administrative and legislative wheelworks, will at once oppose without effort the acts of the usurper, DEMOCEAOY. 123 or those of a Congress siding with him. Parliamentary omnipotence is not among the recognized principles of the constitution of the American political structure, and still less is it ingrained in the notions or habits of the people. In Rome, as in France, there prevailed and still prevails an inborn subserviency, a mental and political servitude in the provinces, the country, in their relations with the capital. The "European capitals are in reality not only administrative and governmental centres, but the great and almost exclusive foci of light, and the dispensers of culture for the whole nation. Thus it is natural that the people should follow whatever impulse comes therefrom. But the capital of the American federation is not such a centre for mental culture, or for administrative power. To facilitate the work of usurpation, it would be neces sary that an extensive conspiracy should extend its meshes over the whole country, entangling not only individuals, but the temporary holders of the administrative power. Such a supposition, impossible in itself, could not even then advance the work, the aim of an usurper. The threads would break on account of their extension. In one word, considered from whatever point of view, the usurpation of power by one — according to the occurrences and the experience of past times — ^has no tools to work for it here, no chances in the existing facts and in the ma terial means, and can obtain no possible hold of the country over the minds of the people. A wholly new combination of moral and material events would be necessary to facilitate the course, and bring forth an usurpation. A protracted intestine war, destroying the prosperity, the institutions of the country, destroying whole generations, and breeding in their;place new ones, embruted, debased, wholly disconnected with the spirit, with the notions of the past ; such is the only possible way to prepare and accomplish the overthrow of the 124 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. republic. By such a war alone the path for an usurper could be cleared. Such a fearful combination of events lies beyond human forethought, beyond logical probability. It would be the victory of evil over good, of the spirit of darkness over light. Such an event, if evoked at all, would be not the work, not the result of the democracy, but that of the most hideous and treacherous aristocracy that ever darkened and blotted the pages of history, or endangered the free and normal onward inarch of society. The poison, the anarchy, tjie curse of America is in the slavery-breeding, slavery-sustaining States, and in their accomplices among the free States. It is not only difficult but wholly impossible to admit, that a people like that of the American free communities, inheriting for generations the enjoyment of its rights, in a fulness unprecedented in history ; that such a people could give them up under any circumstances and combinations whatever. No European people ever existed in the same social conditions, or possessed an equal degree of culture and of political independence, and thus never lost what in reality it did not possess. Inferences from the stages traversed by the ancient or modern European nations and governments, can in no manner be applied to Amer ica. Here every individual exercises spontaneously his judgment and his powers, and thus millions of free, un trammelled forces are at work for .the well comprehended individual good, and therefore for the public good. The democratic development of America realizes what in Eu rope was, and is still, considered as a speculation or a Uto pia. It shows distinctly that humanity henceforth is not a word but a reality, a force in constant action. It shows that the fullest and brightest manifestations of the spirit which animates our race are not concentrated in the few, and that the destinies of masses are the best worked out DEMOCEAOY. 125 by themselves. Such a state of society cannot run into anarchy, and be consumed by despotism. Where a people is accustomed to watch over its own interests, and to han dle them practically, the power and the right can never be wrested out of its hands. The beginning, the origin, the growth, the develop ment of the American society and body politic, in all their cardinal phases, is wholly of a different character from those of other nations and states, as well as re publics, whether oligarchical, aristocratic, or democratic. Whatever may be the destinies reserved for America, their course and flnal issue must unavoidably differ from those catastrophes which marked the existence and the doom of other states. The social and political birth, growth, and progress of America refute all the established axioms, that are deduced from the history of pre-existing societies. American society cannot move in the circle to which philosophers have hitherto limited the destinies of the race. Whether Hobbes or De^ Maistre, Bossuet or Vico, Herder, Lessing, Rousseau, or Haller, Ballanche, Hegel, or Comte, they have all seen only this circular or bit, and assigned to the course of society in its mental, moral, and political march, the same or similar phases for the future. Authority under various manifestations or characters, but always the authority of one, be it patri arch or king, lawgiver or hierophant, is said to have been the starting point, and whatever forms society may have successively run through and lived, it is to return to ab solute or modifled, but always to a superior authority, or by decay and anarchy, even to despotism. American so ciety, the American nation was neither engendered nor brought into action by the authority, by the influence of a supreme moral, mental, or political leader ; it is the off spring of a principle. Admitting therefore even the value 126 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. of the established axioms, they cannot be applied to Amer ica — and she is not to run out into monarchy, anarchy, and despotism. Sociology, with all its various theorems, is at fault, and Ainerica does not adjust itself to its frames. All societies began in a synthesis, religious, mental, phi losophical, as well as in a social or political unity or au thority ; and after traversing various phases of activity and development, they run out into the epoch of analysis, subdivision, research, science, and criticism. America, re ligiously or philosophically considered, is the creation of analysis, and accordingly of that phasis in which other socie ties have terminated ; politically and socially, America per sonifies the combination of free individuality with associa tion, in a self-conscious democracy — a combination hith erto unknown in the history of nations. The problem be fore America is therefore different from those which other societies had to solve. She has therefore emphatically to reconstruct a new and higher synthesis, out of the nega tion, criticism, and analysis, which generated and gave her birth. America, it may be, is destined to lead the ascen sion on the spiral, and by her example relieve society from the vicious circle in which it has. hitherto been im prisoned. And as in the dialectic process, a lower, infe rior term dissolves in one of a higher and more general order ; of the same ascending character ought to be the solutions which are evolved from the social existence and functions of a genuine democracy. The present state of America is considered an experimental one. Be it so. To a successful experiment succeeds generalization. SELF-GOVEENMENT. 127 CHAPTEE IV. SELF-GOVEENMENT, Self-government is the absolute and necessary comple ment of democracy. Together they constitute the highest term of social development and organization, in fellowship and equality. They reciprocally fulfil the ultimate train ing of man as a social and moral being. Self-government, as conceived, understood, and real ized in America, excludes emphatically a priori, and an nihilates that notion of government which has hitherto been considered as among the cardinal constitutive ele ments, as well as cements of a well-organized and well- developed society. Self-government is the negation of au thority, of initiative, of direction to be exercised from above, under any title of supremacy based on grounds as sumed, artificial, and delusive. Self-government confirms the emancipation of reason, judgment, and will in the in dividual, from subjection to any kind of moral and physi cal compulsion, to the reason, judgment and will of anoth er. It is the practical consecration and realization of the indestructible rights of man. It is limited only by vol untary association, with the aim of securing the general welfare of the whole, at the least possible sacrifice of in dividual freedom. 128 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. Authority, as the founder of society, and its consequent exclusive intiatory, directing, or governing power, was inherent iu all ancient and European nations. Even the freest among them always recognized in some conception, form or manifestation, such an authority lodged above the mass of the people ; authority as aristocracy, patriarchate, etc., giving a moral or positive legal sanction to the exer cise by the people of political rights, incompletely as those rights were enjoyed. Such rights were wrested out or conceded. Thus the idea and the fact of the existence of a supreme authority vested in one or several individu als, became almost indestructible. The partial self-gov ernment in ancient societies, was always intermixed in some way or other with such authoritative interference from above. In European republics there were always castes or classes, guilds or corporations, exercising au thority over the mass of the population ; of which, even in those republics, only a small part enjoyed political rights, or was occasionally consulted — but did not decide — about the internal management and husbandry of do mestic daily concerns. Communal institutions and sub divisions, as partially enjoyed in Italy, Germany, Spain or France, relating to administrative objects, always acted under the sanction, the direction of a distinct, superior centralized governmental authority, encircling and pene trating society, whatever might be its form or name. In France and Germany, the mayors of the communes are nominated by the government. Absolute, constitutional monarchy, republic, all equally as states and governments, encircle and penetrate, with their anaconda-like folds, the most minute and distant recesses of the governed.^ Jn., England, authority from above lies at the basis of the con stitutional liberties and institutions. The government concentrated in royalty has the major right of initiative, SELF-GOVEENMENT. 129 of direction, and interference, has the creative attribute. Out of the three elements composing the political society, two of them, the royalty and the lords, are inborn, supe rior authorities and privileged powers, the lords being the creation of royalty, and only the house represents, and up to this time represents only in part — the English people. Thus in this tripartite compound, two are direct negations of self-government, and the third is only its imperfect as sertion. Communal institutions, to be sure, have been de veloped for centuries in England, in a fulness unknown to the European continent. But they do not repose on uni versality of rights and duties, even as regards the admin istration of their internal concerns, they do not expand as freely in all directions, as in America. However slightly, there is always present and felt the action of a government above them, a centralization overhauls them. And finally in the functions of these communal institu tions in the country, if not in cities, there is always felt the moral or de facto influence and the presence of a distinct social class. The nobility, the gentry, thg squires personally and by their patronage, exercise a direct action on the smallest commune. Centralization is an unavoidable corollary of a power, which is exercised by an authority from above. Decen tralization goes hand in hand with all the evolutions and ramifications of self-government. The European popula tions are so thoroughly penetrated and imbued with deferen tial respect for centralization, they have been so thoroughly trained and drilled for ages of their existence, by sover eign authority, acting from a centre in all directions ; that whatever might be the transition to a new order, they would be unable to go through the one or enter the other, without centralization and a superior direction. The present state of Europe may be regarded as a symptom of the 130 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. epoch of an exhausted political evolution. A higher social order is to succeed. Such inauguration will and must be prompted, accomplished by the ancient governmental pro cess, by an action from above — and not by a spontaneous impulse of the people. The community, composed of free and equal men, was the fountain-head, the comer-.stone of American society. Self-government lay therefore as the exclusive kernel of a future development. The township was the primitive state from which the start was made. The township there fore still remains in its function, the generating power, the foundation, the nursery of self-government and of American social order. On the self-government of town ships reposes the freedom of the state, and from it is evolved in wider and wider, all-embracing circles, the whole exist ing political structure. A township forms in itself a free and independent state, perfectly organized for all purpo ses. It legislates for taxes itself, and executes its own enactments, without any interference or sanction of the so-called general government. It is connected with simi lar embryonic states, by the cement of the law ; is amena ble only to the courts of justice, and these laws the asso ciated townships frame and enact by legislatures, repre senting the whole people moving in these social cradles. Although originally these communal habits and no tions were brought here by the settlers from the mother country ; events and new conditions gave to them a vigor ous and complete, and hence almost a new expansion. The first settlements in America, and especially those of New England, being private individual undertakings, were not under any immediate authoritative, governmental di rection. The flrst colony formed a community of equals, who deliberated upon and decided all necessary ques tions and measures. All these objects were of more vital SELF-GOVEENMENT. 131 importance for the new colony than any events occurring in the mother country. Almost daily new emergencies occurred, and the topics for debate and decision ac quired more significance. Here at once all the cares of a regularly acting government devolved upon the set tlers. So the first settlement or community realized at once self-government in its plenitude. With the increase of the population, new townships and villages, or cities, were raised by men enjoying equal rights, and were thus in dependent in their action of any direction or submission to any superimposed power, which might have been invested in any privileged locality, in an individual, or in a corpo ration. Thus decentralization grew out of every step of the extending colony. Every individual participated in the deliberation, ap prentices and servants — the last few in number, and rarely met with— excepted. The decisions became enacted into obligatory laws. The individuals chosen for their admin istration, were only delegates of the power, which resided originally and uninterruptedly in every one of the members of the community. The persons elected were there to ful fil not their own will, nor that of any superior independ ent authority of government ; but to fulfil the will of their constituents, the people. It can" be said that no other human society, nation or state has had a similar or igin. This constitutive and absolute character of self- government remained unaltered. It was the main spirit which penetrated the whole body politic, in all the forma tions of separate states, and which now prevails in the po litical union of these distinct and independent bodies. The governors of the colonies,/originally named by the English government, served as a kind of administrative liidic between the two countries, but had no power to organize, to direct, or exercise any authoritative and inde- 132 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. pendent supremacy. Different was the power of the Ro man proconsuls and governors, and of those who, in the name of European monarchies or republics, ruled over ci ties, provinces, districts or other dependencies. It was almost as absolute as the supreme authority which dele gated it. The governors of the colonies had no right of initiative, but only of suggestion to the deliberative bodies, which under various names were chosen directly by the colonies. The governors administered and executed the laws and regulations that were enacted by the colonists. Thus at the start, even in the colonial state, self-govern ment, equality and decentralization operated in America with a completeness unknown in the mother country. The minds as well as the habits of the Americans, wer£ thus daily schooled in the art of self-government, at every step in their social life. The revolution, the con quest of independence and nationality did not create self- government, but only gave to it a broader sphere, and pruned away certain impediments in its normal function and development. Decentralization, which already existed before the revolution, was no hinderance in resisting the aggressions of the mother country. Not the example of cities, forming capitals and centres, as is the case in Eu rope, inflamed and drew into action the rest of the coun try. The consciousness, the knowledge of political rights animated every cottage, plantation, hut, and equally in New England as in the Carolinas, inspired every individual to resist arbitrary outrages. Boston, in its resistance to stamp and tea duties, was cheered and encouraged by the population of the whole State. Centralization is inherent in every European nation. All England in case of emergency will look to London, to the omnipotent parliament, for impulse and decision. America has not now, and never did have such a centre, pre- SELF-GOVERNMENT. 133 vious to or during the revolution. Centralization in Eu rope is, however, a two-edged sword. If it concentrates in the hands of the monarchs an immense power of action and defence, it facilitates likewise the work of revolutions. If the revolution succeeds in the centre, if it seizes the power, then as a general rule success is assured. Any movements on the circumference will always prove unsuc cessful. The people, accustomed to being directed, governed, feels no power of initiative within itself, but is always ready to receive an impulse. In one word, although cen tralization forms the safest stronghold of despotism, it like wise forms the most efficient battering-ram for its destruc tion. The new social organizations which are to be erected on the ruins of the pre-existent powers, must be aided in their action by centralization, using authority as a princi pal cement and constitutive element. Self-government, as it operates in America, could not be inaugurated at pres ent in any European nation whatever. Difficult, almost impossible it is to eradicate what ages have consecrated, to change the current of ideas, conceptions, and social habits^ which have changed and deteriorated human nature. Few if any European political philosophers or social reformers have placed self-government and decentralization at the bottom of their theories. Few if any of those who make the institutions of this country the special object of their studies, comprehend to what an extent decentraliza tion and self-government are positive, orderly realities, forming the nutritive elements, as well as the nerves and the muscles of the American political organization and ex istence. In the American republics the constituted powers, em anating directly from the people, remain with it, and no delegated body or individual is in any way fully intrusted with the supreme power. The people never divests itself 134 AMERICA AND EUROPE. of all its rights, by transferring them to the hands of its delegates, under whatever name those delegates may act, according to the commonly adopted theory of European representative governments, even of those attempted by republican and democratic reformers. What in Europe is represented and acts as government, with more or less complete attributes of direction, author ity and initiative, in strict construction does not exist at all in the American organism: The American Union, the American States are not governed, but only administered in the same way as every township and village. The elective chief of the State, or Governor, and the President of the United States, are only chief administrators. Nei ther the Governor of a State, nor the President of the Union, possesses the power of initiative." He executes laws framed by the legislative bodies, with or without his ad vice, with or without his assent, as the veto opposed by him disappears before two-thirds of the legislative votes. The executive of the Union watches over the execution of the laws, and over the general security and the relations with foreign states as well. The power invested in Governors or in the President, of vetoing the laws enacted by the legislative bodies, is derived from a principle wholly at variance with that in which it is exercised by a monarch. In the king it is the last echo of his supreme authority deriving from above, from God ; it is the remains of his once unlimited power, of his function as the fountain-head of right and law, the dispenser of justice, the absolute and uncontrolled ruler of the nation. In the American republics, the veto is exercised by an immediate offshoot of the people, elected for the purpose of wielding for a certain period the power of the people, and as the expression of its supreme choice. The checks imposed upon the principal branch of the ex- SELF-GOVERNMENT. 135 ecutive, that is, the Governor of a State or the President of the Union, differ in their nature, origin and action from those which surround the constitutional powers in Europe. Roy alty, upper and lower houses, whatever may be their denom ination, represent different and antagonistic social elements and social interests. They derive their origin either from social and politic excrescences, or from fictions. Royalty, upper houses or senates repose on privilege, represent indi vidual interests, which, under the newly created name of con servatism, are to act in opposition to the rapid and all-em bracing movement and interests of the people at large. As if in a well-ordained and healthy society or nation, there could or ought to exist certain separated interests, directly opposing the interests, the well-being, the progress of the masses. The checks imposed Upon the constituted powers in American republics, are destined to arrest the abuse ofthe delegated power contrary to the interests of the people. All these bodies have one and the same origin. It is a demo cratic self-governing people, administering its general or special affairs through delegates. The President of the Union and one of the houses of Congress are the direct ema nations of universal suffrage. The Senate is not a corpo ration, is not a separated body, but likewise mediately is sues from the self-governing people. All these functions stand there, unprecedented and unequalled in the political history of nations. The Senate of the respective States is elected by the people on the same principles as the House of Representatives, only by larger colleges or dis tricts. The Senate of the United States is neither an aris tocratic nor conservative body. The Senate represents a higher principle, and occupies a position far superior to that of the senators of Rome, of the councils of Venice, of the houses of lords, or of any upper houses in Euro pean governments. The Roman senators represented a 136 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. social class and caste, represented families, but not the people, and not the whole Roman republic. The same is the case with all hereditary modern constitutional bodies. The Senate of the United States represents independent sovereignties, watching through the senators over those rights which the people of the sovereignties give up par tially for the sake of association and of general welfare. It is a position far more elevated than that of the patres conscripii, or of modern lords. The Senate confirming all the principal nominations made by the President, for va rious offices, shares with him the supreme attributes of sovereignty, and by confirming the treaties concluded by the President with foreign countries, it also preserves and represents in the Union the supreme sovereignty of each of the confederated States. In each of the supreme branches administering the separate republics and the Union, there is always omni present, not only the abstractly recognized sovereignty of the people — as for instance in England — ^but the self-gov erning people itself through its delegates. All these con stituted powers reflect the kernel of society, the internal organization of the commune or of the township, an organi zation widening according to exigencies, but unchangeable in its nature. This fountain-head of the political organi zation of the American commonwealth, seems to have es caped the observation of European writers ; to such an extent is it new, unwonted, contrary to all received and current ideas. European publicists have also hitherto generally mis understood the character of the Union, and the nature of the power of the President, formations opposite to all past political and governmental conceptions. Events combined with the generating principle of American society, gave birth to these political organizations and subdivisions of SELF-GOVERNMENT. 137 power, all of which bear the stamp of originality and self- creation. These institutions emerged from the American soil, fr'uctifled by equality and liberty. These institu tions alone constitute a real progress of the human race, while all the European constitutions are only, under va rious forms, consecrations of the privileges of a few, against the rights of the many. The American institutions have no precedents in history. Not to Greece or Rome, not to England, not to past European republics can we look for comparisons and for a measuring scale. The township, the State, the Union have nothing in common with what existed in the past, whose authority is not ap plicable to America. The intrinsic character of the United States is that of an aggregated nation ; . in its existence a nation com posed out of a triad, never previously known or realized in history, namely, the separate States, the whole people, and the United States. The third is the last born, and the two first are its generators. The United States have no abso lutely imperative conditions of existence, but only those which are secondary, incidental, and derivative. The Uni ted States emerged out of the concourse of events. Pre vious to a certain positive chronological epoch, as the end of the revolutionary war — or as more definitively consti tuted in 1789 — there existed no such complex nation as the United States. They were formed, together with their constitution, for certain positive ends. The ele ments of their formation were the concession and the abandonment of certain, well-defined and specified sover eign rights, inherent in the individuals, in the people in general, and in the separate States. The people, as so many sovereign individuals or units, accepted the consti tution which gave birth to the United States. In the log ical and moral development of the principle of self-gov- 138 AMERICA AKD EUEOPE. emment, the origin of power and the spirit animating the constitution therefore reside in the parents, and not in their offspring. Certain rights not conceded, and equally sovereign in their nature with those given up and abscirbed in the United States, for the sake of association, remained with the people and with each State. Those State rights consecrate and preserve the sovereign right of the people, and are the surest guarantee of independence, the firmest barrier against centralization, that deadliest enemy of self- government. They are thus inherent in the poUtieal de velopment of America, so normal in their nature and ac tion, that every attempt to strengthen the central or fed eral power at the cost of State rights, and the consequent diminution of the rights of the people have £uled, a= an tagonistic to the fundamental principle, and therefore il logical and inadmissible. The Congress can only legislate upon objects distinctly defined in the constitution, but not upon those, by far more numerous and important, which the people of each sepa rate State has reserved for itself The Congress can in no way interfere with the municipal rights of States and lo calities. The Congress has no parliamentary omnipotence, like the parliament of England and the legislative bodies of European states, modelled on English constitutions. In the whole of this political and federative structure there runs a broad and luminous line, which marks the difference between the institutions of the past and those of the American commonwealtL It can be asserted that if Greece, or in Christian times, if the cities and small republics of Italy, among others the cities of the Lom bard league, could have realized such a kind of associa tion, based on logical combination and compromise of rights and interests, Philip and Alexander would not hare disorganized and subdued Greece, and Italy would have BELF-GOVZENMEXT. 139 been cenraries ago a free nation, undcsecrated by kings, popes and foreign oppression. Jealousies between states dug the grave of Greece and Italy. The combination which produced tie United States, prevents the germinaticn of similar jealousies. No one special state is tiie head and the leader, but aU are united on rights and prerogatives cij^ual in principle. No one state exercijes any special supreme pcwer or in fluence, as did Sparta, Athens and Thebes, or for acquiring which contended with each other, the Italian, the Lom bard cities. Jealousy against each o&er armed G^enoa, Pisa, Sienna, Florence. And again, neither Congress nor the President, even in the name of the Union, is invested with powers and rights, which lessen or endanger those of each state. Thus fbe President, wliile wielding the su preme executive povrer of the collective people, has no offi cial influence over the executives of the separate States. Neither has Congress any right to legislate for the internal affiuis of the .States. A decentralization of powers pre serves the general independence. The President is the medium through which foreign conntries enter into legal of ficial intercourse with the United States as a whole, each single .State having given np this rii^t of intercourse. The Swiss republics, although confederated, could each eon- tract separate treaties with foreign powers, as can be done by the members of the German confederation. Except the cases enumerated in the fundamental con stitution, and relating to rights conceded to the Union, the central power wielded in the name of the whole people, by the President and Congress, does not press as such on a part of the people, who form a separate .State. So the individuality as a State preserves its rights, as it is sacred in every member of the community. As previous to the organization of the Union, the people and the respective 140 AMERICA AND EUEOriil. States exercised full attributes of sovereignty, and the com bined mass accordingly could never press on a part ; so after the construction of the Union the parts remained protected against the abuse of an undue interference of a combined majority. In all the political structures existing in Europe, ei ther absolutist or constitutional, there is recognized a su preme, an executive, legislative centre and authority. Even the socialist schools, in their projects and theories, uphold the idea of a central organizing power, absorbing all others, and legislating for all. In America a vital dif ference exists between the purport of laws enacted by Congress, and their bearing on the immediate social con dition of the people, and that of the laws enacted by special State legislatures. The laws enacted by Congress are general in their bearing, and relate only to certain general governmental administrative questions, as well as those of external policy. The action of the State legisla tures bears directly on social developments. All the questions of vital importance to society, all the radical re forms in legislation, jurisprudence, those connected with domestic life, with the morals of the people, form the ex clusive objects of State legislatures. Thus slavery, tem perance, the relations and the state of property, the posi tion and relations, the rights and duties of the family, all the great principles on which society is based, are all in the domain of State legislatures. Their action therefore is the mainspring of all social evolutions, and on them really depends the democratic and self-governing progress, the future of America. The State legislatures represent the degree of the morality of the people, as they represent the immediate needs, tendencies, and culture of the popula tions. The practical, physical, and mental necessities and interests, by which communities act and develop them- SELF-GOVEENMENT. 141 selves, find their expression and satisfaction in these legis latures. Congress deals with political, the State legisla tures with radical social questions and solutions. In Eu rope the importance and the influence of these legislatures on the condition of American progress is neither under stood nor even conjectured. Like every single individual, the constituted bodies, wielding the delegated power in their variously complica ted actions, may encroach upon, may come in various ways in conflict with each other. It is therefore of supreme importance to observe and to know what a people — in the almost unbounded exercise of its individuality and rights — recognizes and fixes as limitations on the reciprocal en joyment of freedom. These rights are marked out and guaranteed, and the manifold private and political rela tions between persons, between communities and the State, as well as between the separate States themselves, are de termined and put under an efficient safeguard. It was and is of the utmost importance for a society founded on self- government, to secure a regular untrammelled action in all its parts and branches, to secure each from wilful en croachments and violations. All the powers and rights, those inherent in each individual, as well as those delega ted and intrusted for the advantage of the association, are to be so regulated and controlled that one cannot expand at the cost of the other. The nature of this supreme controlling authority, its moral comprehension and its positive action and interposition in society, is of the great est significance in the constitutive organism of a self-gov erning people. In ancient societies and states, the people in the forum or in comitias — or oligarchical and aristocratical councils, under various denominations, but with supreme attributes — royalty, personally, or by its lieutenants — and in limited 142 AMERICA AND EUROPE. or constitutional monarchies, the omnipotent parliament exercised a supreme regulating power over the laws, and over social guarantees, as well as over the rights of whole bodies, and over individual liberties. If not in the high est executive, as the sovereign, then in the political bo dies was invested the supreme power. In America this supremacy is intrusted by the people to the existing law, and to the judiciary as its presumed faithful and conscientious administrators. The supremacy of the law has been nowhere recognized to such an extent and with such a plenitude as by this self-governing people. At every step, in every emergency, in every collision, pri vate or political, in every action of single individuals, communities and political bodies, of legislative and ex ecutive branches, every thing is subjected absolutely to the law and to its decisions. The judicial courts in many respects are paramount to all other constituted and ex isting powers. The judiciary decides in the last resort, when either the executive of the Union or the government of States has transcended the constitutional limits, and de clares all such proceedings void. Thus the judiciary ar rests the arms of either government, when it would over step the prescribed boundaries, and encroach upon the precincts of another. The Supreme Court of the United States decides disputes between the various powers and States, and can annul any law of Congress by declaring its unconstitutionality. A similar power is exercised by the supreme courts of each State over the respective legisla tures and administration. All matters concerning dis puted jurisdiction between the various branches of the ad ministration are decided in the judicial courts. The law is the supreme authority. It interposes its decisive ac tion in all questions, binding together and regulating the motion of all the social particles, the smallest as well as SELF-GOVERNMENT. 143 the largest. No conflict whatever can arise which could not be settled by the courts. The decisions of the court can often solve knots which were left unsolved by the elec tive action of the people. The English courts would not dare to question the constitutionality of a law enacted by the parliament. Nor could this be done by the supreme court in France. In European states administrative conflicts are decided by the executive. The councils of state which surround the monarchies in Europe, are executive and administrative wheels in the governmental machinery. Neither the su preme will of a parliament in England or on the continent, however oppressive it might prove for political parties, ad ministrative branches or single individuals ; nor the per sonal will of a sovereign, however arbitrary might be its action, could flnd a curb in the judicial powers. In the historical records, of pure monarchical states especially, rarely do we find the evidences of respect for laws given by the master, and of the confidence of the subject in the integrity of their distribution, like that shown by the mil ler of Potsdam, who answered Frederick the Great, that there are judges in Berlin against royal whims ; an an swer which remains as the purest ray of glory in the reign of this philosophical absolutist. The efficacy of the judicial power, which in its nature is rather moral than physical, reposes on the inherent re spect of each individual for the law and its decisions. In some exceptional cases the law might be pushed aside in the momentary fermentation of passion, or when its ad ministration was wilfully desecrated ; but the immense majority of the population submits to the enforcement of judicial decisions, with a confidence and ease unknown and unthought of in Europe. Every truly free man here re cognizes without hesitation, the judicial power as the su- 144 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. preme regulator of society. The American communities, ( the American self-governing people, in their homage to the law, stand unique in history. The voluntary recognition of the supremacy of verdicts issued in the name of reason, justice and equity, is the highest manifestation of social culture which society could attain in its present stage. It evidences the deliberate effort of a free people, legislating for itself — and not receiving the law from a founder, a sovereign or an individual legislator, in order to defend it self against outbursts of excited or virulent passions. The judge who speaks, is presumed not to speak under the inspiration of his individual will, but to utter the words of a positive existing law ; he is enlightened by its cool and discriminating spirit. The supremacy conceded to the judge over the legislator, has a psychological charac ter, and results from the supposition that legislative as semblies might act under the impulse or the pressure of violent excitement ; that the spirit of party, or momen tary enthusiasm for a notion or a reform, might carry them too far, cloud their appreciative faculties, and result in enactments at variance with previous laws, and with bind ing constitutional compacts. The judicial courts, as the constituted guardians of the existing laws, represent the sober second thought, the purified conscience of the com munity. In many cases, experience has shown that the supre macy accorded to the law, and to its organ, the judge, is wise and salutary. It is one of the noblest features of the system. It is the highest homage rendered to the power of reason. Often, where in Europe brute arbitrary or military force intervenes and settles disputes in blood, in America the calm, fearless decision of the law deter mines irrevocably, tranquillizes passions, prevents violent conflicts among powers, as well as among individuals, and SELF-GOVERNMENT. 145 is intended even to rectify or to arrest the influence of passion in the legislators themselves. But this subordination of the legislator to the judge, or in other words, of the ever-living spirit to the dead let ter, has its dark shadows. Judges as well as legislators, can take an active part in the interests of life by which they are surrounded, can be acted on and carried away by passions. In such cases their decisions clash with the bet ter, generous tendencies of the people, of the majority. The judges act in the name of the past, they sustain the past to the detriment of new conceptions, derived from new wants and conditions, from the moral progress and amelioration of the community. Often the judge, with Mosaic rigidity, adheres to the letter, excluding the spirit, which alone can reinvigorate society at whatever stage it may have reached. Thus in the temperance question, the people of various States legislated to protect itself against the temptation of crime. The majority of the courts overruled this noble attempt, annihilating by technicalities the inspirations of morality. Further, the omnipotence of the courts and judges, however conservative of society they may be considered, degenerates, like every kind of rigid, lifeless conservatism, into a kind of despotism. But despotism of whatever nature or name, exercised by a sovereign or by a judge, is antagonistic to regulated and healthy progress. The des potism of tyrants leaning on bayonets, or of judges abu sing the construction to be put upon laws, both demoral ize society. Courts and judges, overruling by their ver dicts the lawS which have been enacted by legislatures, and issuing directly from the people, substitute the will of the few for that of the many. The judge publishes his individual opinion, and- construes the law according to the comprehension of his individual intellect. So after all, a 7 146 AMERICA AND EUROPE. judge exercises in theory, as well as in certain contingen cies practically, as much of absolute power as can be ex ercised by a sovereign prince. It is true, that the judge acts within certain limitations and forms, but entrenched behind them his power is as irresponsible as that of any absolute ruler. Thus slavery-sustaining influences have more than once polluted the judiciary, and foiled the con fidence of society in the impartiality of the distributors of justice. An unprincipled judge becomes as remorseless as the most bloody despot. There is the most remarkable analogy between the conduct of Judge Kane, in the celebrated case of Wil liamson, who, according to existing laws, instructed a slave in his rights to freedom, and aided him in their legal re covery, and that of Francis I., of Austria, towards the Lombard patriots of 1822, who were imprisoned in Spiel berg. Maroncelli became sick ; Francis refused permission for the martyr to be visited by a skilful physician, reply ing to all entreaties, that the governor of the dungeon was to take care of the health of his prisoner, who finally paid by the amputation of a leg for the ferocity of the Hapsburg. So Judge Kane replied to all solicitations on account of his prisoner, that the United States marshal had to take care of the good health of Williamson. The pressure of public indignation forced the judge to open the dungeon, but he displayed as much ferocity as was allowed by the state of society wherein he lives. Francis I. was a despot, born and educated in the idea that his will was superior to the laws, and that he could deal with men ac cording to his pleasure. The American judge deliberately abused a power, freely intrusted to him by society, for its own well-being and security. Which of the two is the greater criminal ? Self-government developes self-consciousness in the SELF-GOVERNMENT. 147 private individual as well as in the whole people, or rather in spirit as in application, they act on, fructify and re ciprocally support each other. In this intimate relation ship and fusion, true self-government as the outward man ifestation, requires and is based internally on a higher and purer morality, than can be possessed by any people, na tion or community, submitted to a recognized superior power, tutored by the will of one or of a few, directed, ruled by kings or prophets. A blind faith is no faith at all, and not such a faith, but perception, reason, constitute manhood, make the man a moral and good being. Thus self-government is the highest assertion of the dignity of man ; it is the most powerful agency of human culture, is the most powerful stimulus of a productive, orderly ac tivity. The rapid, well-regulated progress and develop ment of American society in various directions, is the fruit of self-government and of its corollaries and comple ments. Those communities and States of the American commonwealth, in which self-government is operative in its normal conditions, are far superior in morality, in cul ture, in mental and material productiveness, in the spirit of order, to those communities where self-government, un der the baneful influence of slaveocracy, has degenerated into violent and reckless self-will, or dwindled down to a sham, to a social lie. As light and warmth generate higher productions and vegetation, so self-government and self-consciousness generate higher comprehension and ap preciation of mutual relations and duties. They melt down stupidity, evoke action, enterprise, stir up the ini tiatory creative powers of a people. They are the cardi nal conditions for individuals, as well as for a nation, of a vigorous, healthy, and thus of a superior activity. In no previous state and form of society, in no nation, has self-government constituted so fully as in America the 148 AMERICA AND EUROPE. cardinal element, the active spirit of political union. But even its imperfect application and the deficient attempts at its realization, made in European republics, have always evinced its superiority to the absolutely authoritative mode of conducting society. Notwithstanding all the de ficiencies and aberrations from the absolute principle of self-government, in republics ruled by oligarchies and aris tocracies, by corporations and guilds, the arts, mental and material culture, industry, commerce, evoked as by a spell, have taken an instantaneous start and growth ; while under the centralized power, where the tuition of the people ' has been carried out by the government, where authority, as the constitutive conception, prevails and rules, the pro cess of culture and of civilization is toilsome and slow, Free communities and states — in spite of all their imper fections — in general have accomplished an extensive pro gress in as many decades, as in the case of the other re quired centuries. Self-government, self-consciousness, necessitate a higher culture, and furnish motives for its spreading and expan sion. They are the healthiest incentives of the energies of the individual and of the people. They alone convey the various powers of intelligent activity to various and congenial channels. All the so-called paternal regimes, all the strong centralized governments, seizing and appro priating to themselves the right of initiative, often per vert the faculties, falsify their nature and tendencies, and divert them forcibly from normal developments and pur suits. All such governments are apt to decide rapidly on mischief, but are sluggish in introducing ameliorations, in initiating new conceptions, in carrying out beneficial meas ures. Thus when a government hesitates, and its hesita tion is occasioned by narrowmindedness, by conceit, by the spirit of envy, by the misunderstood tendency of self-preser- SELF-GOVERNMENT. 149 vation, by utter inability to disentangle itself from the meshes of ancient routine ; a self-governing people in vents, creates, acts, selects, applies, makes experiments, arrives at results and marches onward without respite. The initiative, as well as the execution, is in the brains, in the might, in the hands of every member of the com munity. A government watches and controls every pul sation of intellect, regulates and therefore hinders and cramps every spontaneity and impulse, throws impedi ments in the way of every enterprise. Governments re semble lamplighters who maintain through their lamp posts a scanty and limited, vacillating light ; in a self-gov erning people it pours out freely from the aggregate mass of intellect ; radiates warmth in all directions, making darkness recede and ignorance disappear. Every thing great, beneficial, useful in America, is ac complished without the action of the so-called government, notwithstanding even its popular, .self-governing character. Individual impulses, private enterprise, association, free activity, the initiative pouring everlastingly from within the people, are mostly substituted here for what in Euro pean societies and nations forms the task of governments. Governmental or legislative action in America is limited to giving, in required cases, the legal formalities to asso ciated or individual undertakings, or to using the pub lic resources and administrative wheelworks, for ends pointed out, demanded and ordered by the wiU of the peo ple. But by far the larger number of monuments, works and useful establishments, for industry, trade, for facilita ting and spreading tuition and mental culture, universi ties, schools and scientific establishments, are created and endowed by private enterprise, by private association, and by individual munificence. As there is no government in the strict European sense, or according to philosophical 150 AMERICA AND EUROPE. definitions, neither individuals separately, nor the aggre gated people look to the government for such creations ; private association and enterprise — those corollaries of self government — untrammelled by governmental action, have covered the land with railways and canals, and when under the most enlightened government of Europe, that of Napoleon I., the scientific academy of France rejected the discovery of Fulton, it was seized and realized by private enterprise in America. Private enterprise has constructed iron tracks, and covered the soU with their networks at a time when the governments of Europe scarcely dared to make some few trials of this new mode of communica tion. And all this was accomplished against heavy odds, in a country without sufficient hands to labor, with insuffi cient capital. Hands and capital were provided, imported by the unrelenting energy of private enterprise. All this could not have been miraculously carried out, if the Amer ican people had been accustomed to look to a government for the initiative, instead of taking it themselves. With out the self-governing impulse, America would be mate rially and socially a wilderness. The superiority of private enterprise over any so- called governmental centralizing action, is daily evidenced here. In many branches of administration the govern ment remains behind what an individual enterprise ful fils. Thus the carriage of letters and the whole branch ot postal administration, is successfully rivalled by private expresses. Many other administrative branches seem des tined in the course of time, to be superseded by private enterprise. A time may come, when even armaments and armies may be levied on the account of states, but by pri vate individuals. Armories and navy docks would to-day be better managed by private than they are by govern mental administration. Even external relations are bet- SELF-GOVEENMENT. 151 ter secured by the numberless threads of private inter ests, between America and Europe, which extend and cross each other, than by official representatives, or by the stipulations of treaties and conventions. Self-government harmonizes with one of the most sa lient and all-absorbing features of the popular character. Americans are spurred on by what may be called a devour ing mobility. Domestic ties, the affections of home and hearth, are powerless over the immense majority. Action carries them away, and they change with wonderful facil ity spots, abodes, regions, and states. Most individuals on starting in life, have no attachment to this or that place, and plunge into the wilderness and distant solitudes ; establish there homes and change them again. Without this restlessness, America would not have expanded and become peopled, nor would civilization, culture have been spread over primitive forests, over prairies and valleys. But only among a free, self-conscious, self-governing peo ple could this mobility, from beneath whose steps spring up communities and states, have had such beneficial signifi cance ; as it is only in self-government that such charac teristics of a people could find the adequate conditions for a free, untrammelled play. Mobility urges the American incessantly to work, to undertake, to spread, create, pro duce. He could not wait for the permission or sanction of those urgings by a government, or submit to receive ad vice, or move in the leading-strings of governmental di rections. All this is wholly incompatible with the nature of the American, with his mental habits, as 'well as with the combination of circumstances around him. Events urged the first settlers not to attach themselves to spots, not to be soldered to them, but to extend, spread uninter ruptedly farther and farther, to work and subdue lands and regions. Thus at the start was shaped out this fea- 1^2 AMEEICA AND EUROPE. ture of character, and it was strengthened more and more in each successive generation. Self-consciousness was the natural compass of this mobility; they are intimately blended ; and mobility, thus creative and productive, forms one of the most vital nerves of self-government. The constructive action of self-government, its living force, its self-organizing power, and its active spirit of po litical communion, its superiority in practical execution over theoretical-conceptions and schemes, were evidenced ./in the organization of California. Nearly contemporary events in Europe showed, that men schooled in the self- governing townships of America, possess more constructive aptitude for organizing society than the theorists, the re- \formers, the leaders of the European revolutions of 1848. The gold sands of California attracted at once the most reckless and adventurous characters from all parts of the globe. Auri sacra fames stirs up, even generates the worst passions. This incendiary, centrifugal conglomera tion, repulsive to all organization, became a body politic, formed a state, a constitution, enacted laws for jurispru dence and administration with the greatest ease, although /surrounded by various impediments and difficulties. The men who constructed and organized this new commonwealth, had been practically trained in their old states in this so cial architecture ; men mostly without names, unknown generally, and not- trained in what would be called in Eu rope, the higher statesmanship. In 1848 France and Ger many attempted a renovation, a reinvigoration of society. In both countries the people, called for the first time to use its rights of suffrage, selected all prominent capacities in different departments. In Germany, as m France, statesmen, politicians, savants, reformers, men represent ing the most advanced social conceptions and theories, were intrusted by the people with the task of erecting a SELF-GOVERNMENT. 153 new social and political structure. Learning, skill, expe rience and higher mental accomplishments were called out. To be sure, California was a virgin soil, on which any structure could have been easily raised, while in Europe various and antagonistic elements were thrown together, and the social soil was encumbered in many ways. But at the start, in the first days of these revolutions, memo rable for their miscarriage, the impediments were by no means so great ; the incapacity of the architects and build ers gave them time to grow, to increase, to extend. In the first moment, the panic-struck representatives of the past, the kings and their retinue in Germany, were ready to yield to every demand, even to give up their power, and an immense majority of the French and of the German people, was prepared to carry out sternly the decisions of their representatives. There was originally little if any resistance, little if any retrograde pulling, and it could easily have been overpowered by a prompt, constructive action. But the renovators of society at once lost them selves in a labyrinth of theorems and discussions, -losing precious time, and the prostrated enemy recovered spirits and strength. In France the masses slid out of the hands of the revolutionary leaders, because these showed an ut ter incapacity of satisfying their direct interests and aspi rations ; because they were unable to erect a new, social and political edifice, well adapted to the well-being of the masses. The same, to a far greater extent, was the case in Germany. And by the way, it may be observed,"^ that -the winnings of the men of 1848-49, in both coun tries, about treason by their opponents, WKre childish and ridiculous. Kings, absolutists, conservatives of every hue, Bonapartists, royalists remained true to their nature, and did not belie it. It was childish to expect from any of them to co-operate sincerely in a social or political renova- 1.54 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. tion. This they never could do. They were at war with the new and generous ideas, which were hateful to them ; they were on the defensive, and used all the tricks, strata gems and means in their power to crawl' upon, and then to crush, to strangle the enemy. The worse for the simple- minded, who trusted them, who rose to grapple with forces and events, while unequal to the task, destitute of prompt ness in conception, destitute of energy in action. Europe ¦'therefore was groping in indecision and in darkness. The Americans go directly to positive, fixed solutions, evolring from a broad, normal principle. This enables them to found communities, and erect states as easily as houses. Europe vacillates between various principles and theories, and does not possess a fixed mode for their execution ; but nations exist through positive solutions, and not through uncertainties. The American social and political world possesses in its self-government a mode of solving all future questions, whatever may be their purport, nature and complication. As the present political union was the creation of the self- government, so, by a new evolution, a new formation may evolve out of this fruitful principle. Political forms, so cial organizations, are progressive and perfectible, as is every thing belonging to the mental and intellectual man ifestations. The creative power of the human spirit is inexhaustible, and in freedom, self-action, self-conscious ness, man realizes himself in the outward world. Only the tendency to progress and perfectibility, is eternal and limitless in the race ; the scientific theories, the political forms and solutions are temporary, and subject to be al tered, rejected and made afresh. In the field of natural science, new discoveries enrich the human mind, increase the- human power and welfare, change and improve man's conditions of existence, remodel or create new bases for SELF-GOVEENMENT. 165 the scientific comprehension of the creation. Social sci ences are subject to like laws, and their solutions are not definite. What is considered as an ism in a century or rejected as such by a generation, becomes often a social or scientific truth, a theorem and fact for the following one. Christian Europe has more than once changed her political forms, her internal domestic social economy, her current of conceptions, of ideas. But all such changes, evolutions and transitions, were accomplished with more or less violent eruptions, commotions, and amid bloodshed and destruction. The normal and ordinary action of a ra tional self-government is sufficient to carry out and to ac complish in an orderly manner, any future changes and evolutions, marking the ascending social development and expansion of America. Social equality, the _facility to acquire by individual exertions a social standing, the public and political life, open and accessible to every one, whatever may be his situation, his precedents, or occupation — ^provided he suc ceeds in winning the confidence or the partiality of his fel low-citizens ; all this combined, in free communities, cre ates a powerful stimulus to personal ambition. Self-gov ernment more than any other political form, widens the horizon and smooths the path for ambitious longings. Moralists and philosophers have been of old wont to represent ambition as one of the cardinal sources of all the evils which spread over and gnaw at humanity. But this passion is primordial, generally innate in our na ture. It was and will remain one of the most powerful incentives of human action. It is indestructible, shoots out and reveals itself in various ways and modes. Only hypocrites can pass absolute condemnation upon what is intrinsically rooted in man. Society ought to be orga nized iu a manner not to debase and pervert, but to pu- 156 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. rify and regulate, to combine harmoniously and bring to an equipoise the innate passions which stimulate the di versified, all-absorbing activity of man. Society ought to procure ample scope for their normal expansion. Then ambition, as all other passions, innoxious in principle, will become beneficial and fniitful for social relations. In self-governing communities this balance and accord of cer tain passions, at least, if not all of them, is nearer approached than in any other political form. In them even that kind of distorted ambition, which forms the subject of accusa tions and complaints, is rendered less dangerous, less men acing, and less subversive. The organization of society makes it impossible for political ambition to crawl long in the dark, and approach its end by crooked ways, to seize by surprise upon the masses, to drag the people, the na tion forcibly, as an unconscious clump. Whatever efforts it may use to maintain secrecy , such an ambition is al ways detected. Daylight exposes it. It must act under the eyes of all, under the argus-eyed publicity. It is to meet public opinion face to face ; it is watched and controlled on every winding and by-way. When words and actions are appreciated, judged and scrutinized pub licly, and by all who are willing to do it, the power of ex- ercising blind attraction and sway is weakened and soon destroyed. Whatever may be the anthropological or social appreciation of the baneful or beneficial influence of the passions, unquestionably they are more easily regulated by expansion than by compression. Ambition in a free com munity necessarily moves in a purer air, and thus becomes less corrosive. Competition rubs off the venomous sting, hoUowness runs rapidly through its course, breaking in pieces by its own emptiness. Public Ufe — the possible lot of every one — evokes ambitions from all sides, and these check each other. The more openmgs for ambition, the SELF-GOVEENMENT. 157 easier the outlet, the less danger of violent explosions, or of dark, secret, corrupting dealings and designs. Ambition in itself, in its normal state is a lever and a ferment, whose action benefits humanity. Ambition and love are almost inseparable. Intense love of any object whatever, makes the individual bent on success, desirous of elevating this object above all others, makes him ambi tious. Love and ambition for science have inspired aU the great discoverers of the laws and of the forces of na ture. Ambition urged Columbus to penetrate into un known immensities of space. Love for the good, and am bition to be benefactors of their brethren, illuminated the moralists. Whoever has the consciousness of powers of whatever reach and nature, is ambitious to produce them, to make them creative and useful, to win acknowledgment. Whoever has faith in himself, in his convictions and prin ciples, has the ambition to make them prevail. Whoever feels himself capable of doing good, will have the . ambi tion to obtain assent, and by it the power to carry out his conceptions. Whoever acts and produces, aims unin terruptedly at reaching a superior degree, is ambitious of perfection, and thus of surpassing his equals, his competi tors. In a distorted social state, ambition, like most other passions, has its weak, shadowy and dark sides. It often takes root in an impure soil. When pouring out from a muddy fountain, then its course poisons or tarnishes. His tory bristles with evidences of those unscrupulous, ac cursed ambitions, which have so often imbrued her annals in blood. Such an ambition does not aim at winning con- rictions, but at depraring them ; it aims at subduing to its will the wUl of others. But in communities based on reason, on publicity, on culture, on self- consciousness and self-government, the subterranean furrowings of such ambi- 158 AMEEICA AND EUROPE. tions are less dangerous, and their final supremacy is to the utmost degree difficult, if not wholly impossible. Ambi tious but depraved politicians in republics, appeal to and stir up the most degraded passions and appetites ; they evoke to the surface, to action, what was slumbering or hidden under self-conscious shame. Thus they succeed. But their success is generally short. Their course runs rapidly through. The evil perpetrated by them prepares their fall. If the people becomes for a moment charme d by the con jurer, it soon recovers self-control. The better nature wins the upper hand, and the ambitious schemer preserves influence only over the refuse of the community. Such ambitions are sooner or later dissolved by the rays of light, in the crucible of publicity, among populations used to investigate, analyze and judge every member of society. In those republics which have been centralized in one single city or spot, an unprincipled, ambitious leader could seize at a stroke, and delude the masses in the forum, deciding in a state of excitement. So he could extort from them their assent, and involve the country in complications, overthrow the laws, change the form of the government. But in the thoroughly decentralized American common wealth, such surprise of the public conscience, such suc cess is mentally and materially impossible. The ambition of a despot, of a monarch, of ruling oligarchies and aris tocracies, have been always mischief-brewing, as action succeeded to secret decisions, without discussion. An ambitious adviser or minister can seize upon the willing ear of the monarch, and shake the corner-stones of his own and other countries for personal elevation, but not thus easy is the task of politicians, who are surrounded by publicity, and depend on the assent of many. In the American com munities, ambition must exclusively recur to the use of mental rather than material means. She must bribe by SELF-GOVEENMENT. 159 flattery, if not by conviction, rather than by material advantages. The ambitious must convince the intellect, or corrupt it, a work easy with few, but rather difficult with masses. Here ambition cannot reckon on the sup port of stupified tools, on that of brute force, on that of legionaries or bayonets. Even if the masses of people are momentarily carried away, intoxication evaporates, and self-interest restores the balance. A Pisistratus, a Csesar, a Napoleon, even a Cromwell could not succeed among the American centrifugal communities. Generally the eyes of the people, though they might be easily daz zled for a moment, see clear on a cloudy day. Self-government in its full action and development fosters ambition, nay, makes it necessary and unavoidable. But it possesses within itself the most efficient correc tives, neutralizing aberrations, stopping, levelling and dry ing up the devastating current. Various are the social and external influences which bear and press upon the holder of power, upon the government, and which share it directly or indirectly with the mon arch, limited or absolute. In oligarchical and aristocratic republics some famUies preponderate, and have generally divided between themselves the cares and advantages of supreme rule. The same elements surround the thrones, and they influence the supreme decisions, the adminis tration of enacted laws, and make their interests prevail supremely over that of the rest of the subjects. The landed or flnancial wealth of the country, that represented by commerce, industry, manufactures, all of them in some way or other group around the power, centre in the capi tal, as are attracted and absorbed by it, the various intel lects, those representatives of the mental expansion of the country. Thus the seat of government is surrounded by the most eminent and preponderating compounds of the 160 AMERICA AND EUROPE. nation, by various concentrated interests, and receives from them inspiration, impulsion. The European capi tals, forming the foci of the various resources and powers of the state, react on the government in the same propor tion as they in their turn are materiaUy and socially af fected by the personality of the sovereign, by that of the court, of the officials, of the aristocracy. The ingredi ents thus combined and fermenting surround, to a great degree, and control the decisions and actions of legisla tive bodies. The various interests concentrated in the capitals, use the centralization in the same way as the governments. Generally all of them, but above all the aristocratic and the financial, combine with and support each other. The elective franchise every where, even in England, is for the most part absorbed in or directed from the capital, by the like combinations. By various ways and means the decisions of the centre, of the capital, are conveyed to the country, the elective bodies receive the password, and elect individuals pointed out to them either by the government or by the opposition. In the formation as well as in the practical operation of the administration of the American commonwealth, and also in the formation of the legislative bodies, such influ ences, such modes of action are wholly impossible. Here the great cities are generally commercial emporiums, but often are not the capitals of the respective States, nor the seat of the government and of the legislatures. Those legislatures represent in immense majorities the country, its population, opinions and interests, and remain wholly independent of the pressure exercised by large cities, and by interests concentrated therein. Worldly social cote ries — as is the case in European capitals — cannot there fore seize upon the representatives, circumvent them, and make them subservient to special ends. The administra- SELF-GOVERNMENT. 161 tion and the legislature thus operate with more ease, are, so to speak, in a purer atmosphere, are not controlled and commanded as in Europe ; and generally the interests of the country, that is of the majority, of the genuine people or nation, are paramount in the governmental and legislative action, overruling in case of conflict, the spe cial interest of large cities. The public service is coveted by aristocratic, by rich and influential individuals in Europe, on account of its sta bility of influence, and of other material advantages as well as on accotmt of the social elevated distinction which it confers in societies, where the government and the ruling power form their keystone, their superior stratum. Public Ufe, official position satisfy the cravings of vanity, clear up the existing social or conventional inequalities, and procure access to the highest social circles. Thus many of those who by a successful and industrious activity, have become artisans of their fortune, and secured wealth and independ ence — or those who by mental productiveness have rendered their names Ulustrious in science, arts, literature, aspire finally to public life, considering it as the supreme con secration of their laborious career. Through it they ac quire influence, standing, ballast and consideration in a society still constituted out of aristocratic elements, still divided and classified according to certain positive, weU defined and formal distinctions. In America, where the mass of influence is scattered among the people, and not condensed in a caste, in a civil hierarchy, or in a class, in centives and attractions, similar to those which prevail in Europe, disappear. Decentralization operates beneficially again in this, preserving the administrative branches from many contaminating influences and contacts. The cities or capitals of States are thus brought more directly under the influence of the country, more into a social and socia- 162 AMERICA AND EUROPE. ble intercourse with it than with the great commercial metropolis. Thus even the city of New York, one of the greatest centres of the civilized and commercial world, influences very slightly, if at all, the government of the State, or the population. Government in the American re publics is not a power capable of conferring any stable so cial distinctions which do not exist in the political structure. Thus men who have acquired fortunes by commerce or in dustry, rarely take a direct and decided part in public affairs, although they participate actively in the general current of political life. They do not come before the public because they feel their incapacity for a new ca reer, and want those special gifts required to secure pop ularity with the masses. Thus, contrary to what takes place in Europe, American legislatures rarely count among their members those representatives of argyrocracy, the only real superiority in the social conditions and grada tions ; and these bodies are thus less easily vitiated than the representative houses in Europe. The general and various elements, interests and occupations are really rep resented by artisans, operatives, farmers and professional men, and this to the fullest extent — a case rare and almost exceptional in Europe, even in England, where the nobili ty and gentry still form in parliament a large dispropor tion over the other classes and positions. As in America only individuals residing in reality in the townships and districts can become elected to legis lative functions, the elections cannot fall into the hands of committees such as are generally formed in European capitals, and impose their choice on the choice of the people. The American law and mode presents, there fore, one more barrier against centralization, one more guarantee of self-government. Members thus elected rep resent really the various needs, opmions and interests of SELF-GOVERNMENT. 163 their constituents, who make their choice with full knowl edge of the elected, guided by their own judgment — for which in Europe is often substituted the bidding of a par- '¦ij, directing from one centre the popular decision. Thus the influence of a party, of a coterie, is often substituted for the free manifestation of the popular choice ; and the elected representatives often support the interests patro nizing them, instead of the true interests of the masses. Every one is familiar with the mode of proceeding and of vitiating the immediate expression of the popular will which is used by political parties in England. In France jven during the short democratic exaltation of 1848, the central influence over the suffrage of the people was not given up, and the centralization preserved its hold. The celebrated admonitory circular of Carnot, then minister of public instruction, advising the rural population to elect for the national assembly members immediately from among themselves, was received with general animadver sion by politicians and statesman, and was even condemned by the most decided reformers and apostles of the rights of the people. It was considered as a political crime, what in American communities is a natural result of de mocracy, decentralization, and of self-government. As the capitals of the various States are not composed of the same ingredients as those of Europe, in the same way the capital of the Union, Washington, the seat of the Federal Government, bears no resemblance to the capi tals of European states. It exists and depends wholly upon the Union, that is upon Congress, and thus receives materially and mentally its vitality from without. As a capital Washington is wholly subject to the influences which congregate there from all parts, and represent the opinions and social functions of the whole nation. The poUtical as well as the social tone is given by the national 164 AMERICA AND EUROPE. representatives, and not by caste grouped eternally around the ruling power. Wealth again is scarcely represented in Congress. The composition of Congress corresponds to that of the State legislatures, as those for the most part form the stepping-stone for the former. The various influences pointed out above as bearing upon the government in European states, are superseded in America — above aU around Congress — by that of the so-called politicians, a -plant of special growth, a sprout ing out principally from the fermentation of free insti tutions. These politicians are the levers, the channels, but as often the managers of the public spirit. They cor respond to the misused and common denomination of dem agogues. Their existence in the present operation of democratic institutions is however unavoidable. If evils they are, they are necessary evils, canvassers and convey ances of the public wishes, of public opinion, which often they stir up, awaken, stimulate, and as often falsify. They are the real or presumed leaders of opinion in townships, districts and States, but they again depend upon the opin ion, upon the good will, the confidence of those whom they lead. However baneful often may be their influence and doings, still the origin, the source, is democratic, and there fore unstable, and can be easily changed and overthrown, — and from this point of view the politicians can never demoralize or pervert a government or the people to the same extent, as can be done by the open or secret machi nations of a hereditary deep-rooted aristocracy, the bur rowing of the roots of absolute power, or the corrupting breath of the concentrated moneyed corporations, bankers, brokers and exchangers. The working of self-government is an uninterrupted trial. Over the deep and firm principle, the fluctuations of opinion rise on the surface. They are incessant, they SELF-GOVERNMENT. 165 seemingly change, modify or transform the surface, carry ing away individuals and masses. Stability reposes in public-mindedness. It is therefore the vital atmosphere ; without it self-government must dwindle and die out. And pubUc-mindedness and an intense interest in general affairs animates the masses, as well as the most of those whom the turn of fortune has elevated above the general level If even the immense majority of the men who possess wealth do not directly try to enter upon a public career, they nevertheless are interested more or less deeply in public policy, in general questions. The most eminent intellects, the most cultivated minds, not only do not keep aloof from the general current, but often contribute to throw light upon questions of general significance and in terest. The existing political biases are only poor, ex hausted, narrow-minded individuals, who, under this as sumed affectation of disgust or apathy, cover disappoint ment or mental deficiency. Some European writers seem to be under the impression that in general, political activ ity is abandoned^ by the so-caUed superior minds to turbulent,^ unprincipled, impure meddlers — that better men shrink in disgust from the doings of a popular govern ment. This state of apathy has not seized however upon spirits of real vitality and power. The immense majority throughout all the various social conditions, — rich and poor, — feel too well that states become truly great and powerful when each single individual considers himself a link and an active member in the great whole, and does not avoid or even hesitate to bear individually his part of the public burdens, to contribute in a special way to the work which aims at the good of the community. Nowhere in the political and governmental structure of the American commonwealth, any more than in social and mental development, are to be met the centres which 166 AMERICA AND EUROPE. attract and keep together the people by mental and mate rial chains and Unks, like those in other states and nations, directing, and giving impulsion, nay even absorbing the va rious activities of the population. Upon such centres de pended and stiU depend the societies of the European world; these centres have various names and functions ; they form the authoritative pivots on which turn and group the whole system of social forces. They are the foci of light, the hearts or the heads of the social bodies. Society and its phUosophers stUl firmly beUeve in their unavoidable ne cessity. It would seem therefore that the American com munities ought to dissolve, being continually under the centrifiigal action of those atoms of independent, individ ual sovereignty. But as attraction is the all-powerful, al beit invisible band of the sidereal and planetary creation ; so the free association and combination of forces, of inter ests, of rights and of duties, — and the generality of mental culture, those fruits of freedom — are the invisible cements of the American communities. Self-government is the healthy, everlasting maturity, is the fuU manhood of man in the social state. All facul ties and powers develope themselves therein to a vigorous activity. Youthful not senUe maturity is the cardinal condition of progress and growth in the mental as in the material world. On youthfiil maturity therefore depends the mental development, as well as the destinies of society. All the great actions in history, as weU as nearly all great ideas, conceptions, discoveries, the loftiest inspirations in arts and poetry, have been accompUshed in the prime of years, and before the turn, the approach to old age. Self- governing society alone can, so to say, arrest and perpetu ate the duration of this pithy and rich social and mental productirity ; an epoch for man as weU as for society, of lofty and generous impulses, of high creations and noble SELF-GOVERNMENT. 167 and salutary decisions. Senility in man or society pro duces diffidence and pusillanimity, conceit and inactivity, extinguishes faith in ideas and convictions, and attempts to arrest movement and progress, to bring the world of ideas and of creative productions, together with the social development, to a stand-still, to reduce all in nature to a routine. Senility alone despairs of the efficacy of self- government. The pliancy, elasticity and expansiveness of self-gov ernment render it eminently adapted to self-development and to higher progressive solutions. Thus already the new States growing up in the West, in many of their constitu tive structures and institutions, show a progress over their models in the East, adapting them to new combina tions and conditions. These Western States, the purest offshoots of national self-consciousness, assert their origin more boldly than their generators. They have up other traditions, no past, no historical connection with the colo nial state of dependency in political, any more than in mental and material relations. In the West, therefore, is to be given the fullest expression and solution of all the mental and social terms and combinations evoked, created by the inauguration of this new epoch of pure self-gov erning democracy. No definitive progress or ameliora tion hitherto marks any of the liberal European institu tions, modelled either on the English type or on that of the French era of 1793. And the reason may be, that those imitations are always introduced ready-made, and introduced authoritatively, either by kings or by social or political reformers and theorists, without direct participa tion of the people, of the public reason and sense. But each new constitution of a free self-governing State, framed by the direct action of the people, is generally a marked amelioration, and contains a broader conception of wants 168 AMERICA AND EUROPE. as weU as of conditions, than did the older preceding ones. Self-government therefore, in the succession of ages, considered as an effort of humanity for the advance ment and amelioration of her social structure and rela tions, is the highest product, soaring above all its preced ing forms ; forms more or less vital and inherent to society, and all which in given epochs served to facilitate or pro tect its growth and development. Self-government stands firmly the test of philosophical analysis, answers the most transcendent speculations. And if humanity is to be modelled according to abstract types, self-government is its present most perfect typical form. It stands the test and the trial of practical execution and appUcation, as well as that even of the most practical and direct availability. It may have its epochs of terrible and dangerous proba tion, of tension and even of crepitation ; but such menacing epochs — a common lot of vigor and life — wUl find in the principle itself the soothing cure. Its imperfections and deficiencies disappear when compared with the pre-existent social forms, and can only be found salient when compared with a new and higher standard, and thus for the time a relatively ideal one. All the other social constitutive ideas of the past are exhausted, effete, worn out, degene rated, disordered, honey-combed through and through, and finally powerless and unproductive. All of them look up from below to the American system, expecting from it a higher solution and salvation, all — ^whatever may be the conceit and the hypocrisy of their representatives and mouth-pieces — acknowledge that the American original self-governing system has already reached regions of higher purity and serenity, and accordingly more favorable to the health and development of the human race. SLAVERY. 169 CHAPTER Y. SLAVERY, It is the lot of the American Union to represent man in his highest and nearly typical social development, by the side of the most appalling degradation. It is the lot of American institutions to evince that the noblest realiza tion of freedom, the purest conoeptidh of manhood hitherto known, can be marred, distorted and prostituted. At the side of the highest solutions attainable by society in its present stage, as manifested in democracy, in self-govern ment, in the elevation and consecration of labor in its all- embracing sense, as the loftiest social function, there stands Slavery, with its degrading, agonizing contradic tions. There it stands, bidding defiance to the moral sense of humanity, to religious conceptions, to civilization, to social progress ; — bidding defiance to the universal condem nation transmitted by past ages, and repeated more and more loudly by the European, that is, by the civilized world. There it stands, perverting and debasing all the cardinal notions of American social and political associa tion; notions which alone constitute its intrinsic worth. There stands slavery, poisoning in the substance the prom ises anticipated by our race, from the fruition of seeds which have been here scattered broadcast by reason, conscience and freedom. I'rO AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. Slavery, as now maintained in the States of the Union, as it has eaten itself, not only into the political and muni cipal institutions, but into social, domestic and family Ufe, into the mind, the conscience, the judgment, the reason ings, the religion, the human and animal feelings, the com prehension of the rights, obligations, and duties of a man, of a citizen,, of a member of society, as it has permeated those devoted to its growth and preservation ; — in one word, this modern American slavery differs wholly from what, under a similar name, has prevailed during past ages in Asia or Europe. It bears no resemblance to the slavery of anti quity, nor to the slavery and serfdom known in Europe. From the legendary or historical origin of society in the remotest antiquity, from the primitive formation of nations and empires in the East, down to Greece, Rome and mod ern Europe, never has slavery been made the paramount condition and question of social structure, of political and domestic economy. Nowhere has slavery so fully over loaded and absorbed the political atmosphere as in the American Commonwealth. Nowhere does its hideous spectre face the investigator, the observer, on every step, in every political move, development or compUcation. Nowhere has slavery been the source, the reason or the occasion for struggles between states, friendly or inimical. Never has it formed the main attraction for obtaining the supreme power, or has it been the final object for the direction of the internal and external affairs of a nation. The conquerors of the past, from the mythical Nimrod to the last of the Roman Emperors, those who tower over the history of European nations, did not levy wars and imbrue the earth, did not overthrow empires, subduing nations and territories, for the sake of extending domes tic and municipal slavery. In all times, in all nations, in all religions, in all theories, slavery has been consid- SLAVEEY. 171 ered as a painful sore in the social body and organism ; for the first time in the history of the race, slavery is hailed as the substance of all human, social, and political relations. Not in the anti-slavery or abolitionist literature, not in the various anti-slavery utterances and manifestations, did I study and become acquainted with American slavery. That literature is wholly unknown to me, as are personally unknown the foremost leaders of the abolition party. I have scarcely ever been present at any abolition or even anti-slavery lecture, oration or meeting; and never has slavery formed a subject of my conversations with Theo dore Parker, Sumner, Phillips, or any rf the persons to whom I have been attracted by a congenial turn of mind and feeling, by similar convictions, studies and pursuits. Mr. Calhoun's Works and Speeches have been the object of my conscientious study. As far as possible I have tried to master the pro-slavery literature. Political speeches, statis tical, philosophical, historical, economical, pro-slavery dis quisitions, sermons, orations, tracts, reasonings, justifica tions, defences, explanations, are the sources in which I have studied American slavery. The legislative enact ments, the laws of the slavery States, the pro-slavery press South and North, the actions and tone of political men, have been for me the exponents of the working of slavery. Neither in any way do I intend to advocate an imme diate, direct, absolute emancipation of the enslaved race. Such a violent passage from a domestic state on which re poses the economic husbandry of the southern part of the Union, and with which agricultural and commercial in terests are thus variously intertwined and connected to gether, a passage without previous preparatory measures, without a gradual transition, would produce inexpressible evil, ruin and destruction. Even for the enjoyment of or- 172 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. derly liberty a previous apprenticeship ought to be made. The more so, when millions of men are to be reinstated in rights, after having been for generations systematically de graded to a condition scarcely above the brutes, which scarcely recognizes in them any human and social quali ties. But if the disorder is not at once curable, its corro sive character and influence ought the more to be exposed. Reason, religion, morality, knowledge, study, the sci ences, history, economy, the social, domestic and family relations, all converge to one focus. All are valued only so far as they authorize or justify slavery, in the conception and appreciation of its apostles, supporters, and disciples. Its corrosion ganws equally at the products of mental and material labor, and the intellectual domain is blighted by its theories in the same degree as the earth's surface. This mental distortion strikes not only individuals, but is chron- icaUy rooted in generations, and thus stretches far out into the future. The normal healthy state of reason on the subject of slavery is affected for long years to come. Thus logic, learning, conscience are twisted, put on the rack, to extort from them evidences in favor of slavery. UnwiUingly one touches and stirs this mental and intel lectual putrefaction. The African race is doomed to eternal slavery, main tain the theorists of bondage ; and this, they assert, is proved by the inferiority of that race, by its historical in significance throughout the whole existence, throughout the whole history of the human family. But the African kept in bondage in America, was not conquered by his present master on his own soil. The African was sold to the white man into slavery as a victim, as a prisoner of war, by another victorious African. In the same way slavery has been established and maintained throughout the world, from the remotest times. All the SLAVEEY. 173 races and tribes of Asia and Europe, for long centuries, have thus had their periods of slavery ; all were conquered, and the prisoners of war, nay often whole cities and dis tricts, were sold by the victors into slavery. And from these facts and partial events, which have occurred re peatedly, the conclusion might have been drawn that the white race, or some of its branches, have been at those re mote epochs likewise doomed by an absolute law to slavery. The destinies, the qualities, the mental capacities of the African race, in equity as well as in logic, cannot be comprehended, judged, and appreciated from the part of it which is kept in bondage, transformed into chattels on this continent. Those are debased by slavery, and thus find themselves not only in an abnormal state, but in one which ' at once destroys manhood and the mental capacities. Slavery forcibly reduces them to a condition far inferior to that of the animals. Not from crippled nature can be drawn the criteria of its power. If the absolute mental inferiority of the African race should be even an incontestable fact, established by the history of this branch of the human family, there are many reasons for which this inferiority ought to be considered as transient and not definite. ¦ Those who admit the aims and the direct interference of God in the management of human affairs, ought not to have left unobserved the fol lowing facts. According to their creed, God distributed men over the earth, and assigned to races, families, tribes, various and distinct continents and regions. In this dis tribution, he has given to the black race for their special use a great and rich continent. For uncounted ages the other races, above all the white one, either Semitic or Ja phetic, or Indo-European, have attempted to conquer and get hold of Africa, invading it on all sides ; and still this invasion remains limited mostly to the outskirts of that 174 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. part of the globe. Only in the northern strip have the invading races succeeded in getting a firm footing, in es tablishing themselves definitively. The European takes hold and domiciliates himself over the earth, penetrates and subsists in all climates, nearly under the poles and under the tropics, on the equatorial line of Asia and America ; — but hitherto Africa is his tomb. In the same latitudes he has subdued the aborigines of Asia and Amer ica ; but in Africa the natives as well as the soil resist him. Nature or providence seems to watch jealously over Africa and say to the European, "Do not penetrate here under pain of death." The aborigines of the American continent, the Australians, the Polynesians, and other primitive occupants of various points of the globe, disap pear, melt before the advancing European, before the white race. The African preserves and maintains his rights, his patrimony. If God therefore husbands the des tinies of races, then this impenetrability of Africa, this in destructibility of its inhabitants, is not accidental ; — it is the result of higher designs, inaccessible to man's penetra tion. Time will disclose them. Time will draw aside some of the folds of the curtain which veUs the future des tinies of the human family. History has in its recesses inexhaustible events and apparitions. Allusion has al ready been made to the cardinal historical law, that of the successive appearance and development of races, families, nations, and states. The future of the African race may be protected by that law. The blacks are now, and have been, as it is commonly maintained, for countless centuries brutes and savages. But what is this period even of forty centuries in the infinite course of the ages ? Thirty, and even twenty centuries ago, portions of the Celts, Germans, Scandinavians, Saxons, who made human sacrifices to their deities, were in a state not very different from that of the SLAVEEY. 175 Africans. They drank from the skulls of their enemies ; some Caledonian tribes were anthropophagi, and all of them were savages, murderers, enslaving each other, pi rates, and robbers. It may be doubted if the African tribes surpass all others in savagery, through which the human race passed, previous to appearing in history, pre vious to entering in part on a new and superior stage. Italy was once inhabited by anthropophagi. Two thou sand years ago darkness prevailed over Germany, over the north of Europe ; and two thousand years hence Africa may probably shine with civilization. Those who see in the Scriptures something more than a fragment of the oldest historical records, deduce from the progeny of Ham the whole African or black race. But the same scriptural records establish, and the primi tive legendary recollections of the East confirm the fact, that these descendants of Ham founded the first empires and cities, and thus, it can be said, originated polity and civilization. The Hamites or Cushites extended over Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, along the Persian Gulf to the Indian peninsula. So speak myths, analogy, and the roots of names of places and ancient cities, and the most remote traditions. Nimrod and his progeny were Hamites, and around the mouth of the Tigris, of the Euphrates, down to that of the Indus, originally dwelt the black, or, as now called, the African brotherhood. The Persian Gulf was called in remote antiquity the Ethiopian Sea. There the Cushite ruled over the whites and intermixed with them ; und the great Eastern foundei*of the first empire, whom the dim Eastern and Persian legends call Zohack, was in all probability at the utmost a mulatto, Semiramide, his mother, being of the white, then the subjugated stock. This immense empire was subsequently overthrown, con quered and superseded by men descending from the south- 1T6 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. ern slopes of the Paropamisian Range, now Hindoo-Rosh or Himmalaya, from the table-lands of Iran, and bringing with them in the conquered regions their Pehlvi and San scrit language, the mother of all European dialects. Those conquerors were the Indo-Europeans, the common ancestry of the European nations. In times so remote as hardly to be reached by positive chronology, this first conquest is to be discerned. These Arrians subdued nations living along the Euphrates and the Indus, nations already enjoying culture and civilization, while the invaders were savage hordes. The Chinese records mention this event, and their testimony confirms the physiological differences of the two races. They call the Indo-Europeans or Arrians horse-faced, on account of the oval form of their face. The Cushites who inhabited the slopes of Himmalaya along the Indus, and whom the Arrians invaded, are called by the Chinese the monkey-faced. The Mongolian or round-faced, or, as others call them, Turanians, aided the Arrians in their conquest. These Chinese records coin cide with the remotest Persian traditions. The Cushites were likewise the inhabitants of the Nile, as were the Ethiopians. The -ancient Egyptians were not of Semitic origin, nor does their language or civi lization connect them with any of the aboriginal Asiatic races. The descendants of the Egyptian colonists planted in Kolchis by Sesostris or Ramses, preserved for long generations the characteristics of the African race, dark complexion, and black, crisped hair. The kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasty have a decided negro type, as shown in the statues of Tutmes III. and Ameno- phis III. preserved in the British Museum in London. Besides, the testimony of Herodotus is paramount for me to all others, and every modern historical discovery and research always confirms the veracity, the authority of the SLAVEEY. 177 father of history. And Herodotus says " that the Egyp tians were black, and had short, crisped hair, and that the skulls of the Egyptians were by far thicker than those of the Persians ; that they could scarcely be broken by a big stone, while a Persian skull could be broken by a pebble." All these characteristics mark principally the African or the Negro race. Subsequently the continual influx of Asiatics and Europeans, as was observed by Volney, might have modified or changed the populations of Egypt, and produced a mongrel creation.* Under the Persian kings of the lineage of Achaemenes, blacks as ministers, sa traps, ruled and exercised a powerful influence over the great Persian empire. A black eunuch, Bagoas, put on the Persian throne Darius Codomannus, vanquished by Alexander. A black, Batis, governor of Gaza, was the only one who, by his military skill and courage, defeated some time and arrested the conquering career of Alexan der, the greatest military leader of past or modern times, f The predestination of the African race to eternal slavery is based in pro-slavery theories on the fact, that the African populations are enslaved on their own soil. But such has been the lot at various epochs of nearly all * Ntunbers of Jews have the greatest resemblance to the American mulattoes. SaUow carnation complexion, thick lips, crisped black hair. Of all the Jewish population scattered oyer the globe, one fourth dwells in ancient Poland. I am therefore well acquainted with their features. On my arrival in this country I took every light-co lored mulatto for a Jew. Could not these Jewish mulattoes have de scended from some crossing between the Jews and the Egyptians at a time previous to the Exodus ? + Alexander was superior even to Napoleon in foresight, as well as in having won not only pitched battles, but taken by siege cities whose fortifications were by nature and art the strongest known, of their kind. Napoleon, with the exception of Toulon, never directed the siege of a fortress. 8* 178 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. the other races on the earth, and above all in Europe. They likewise, as are now the Negro tribes, were for gene rations and centuries kept in bondage by rulers and masters of their own kind, or by others conquering and subduing them. So, after the overthrow of the Roman Empire, the populations of Italy, Gallia, Spain, were enslaved by the conquerors. Slavery existed among the German races, among the Anglo-Saxons before and after they conquered Britain. Very likely the greatest part of the ancestry of the settlers and actual slaveholders were once slaves, and wore for generations the iron collar, with the name of their Saxon — kindred in blood — masters ; or as boors and villeins were treated with the same cruel contempt by the Norman conquerors, as the blacks are treated here by those descendants of once oppressed serfs. History does not generally sustain the pretensions of the southern oli garchs to their descent from Cavaliers. For centuries the nobility of all the European nations considered as impure and contaminating the blood, any connection or alliance with burghers or peasants, to whom, according to Euro pean classifications, belong the white inhabitants of the United States. A southerner cannot feel more repul sion to alliance with a black, than was felt once by a haughty nobleman, careful of his purity of blood, to an affinity or connection with an ignoble family. There still exist many aristocratical families in Europe who nourish this prejudice. The African despots sell their subjects or their pri.son- ers into slavery. But, as has been already mentioned, such was the custom from uncounted ages in the ancient and in the modern European world. The Elector of Hesse sold to England his subjects to fight against America. Is it to be inferred that Hessians are predestined to eternal bondage ? SLAVEEY. 179 To the enslaved race on this continent are denied the higher faculties of the mind and of the soul, which are common to the other inhabitants of the globe. If it should be really so — which however is not the case — it is the bondage which has crushed, rooted out or nipped in the bud all the germs of those faculties. The mental inferi ority of the African does not differ much from the inferior ity in which groped and lingered all the other races and families, before their turn came to issue from darkness. The African has latent all the powers with which man is endowed. If those germs are not active, or are inferior in intensity and expansion, nevertheless they exist. The African speaks, thinks, believes, loves, hates, reasons, com prehends, and therefore he is capable of being initiated into a higher life. However distant the hour of initiation may be, strike it will for the African race. Impartial scientific men, who do not theorize for the support or justi fication of slavery, who have investigated and observed the African race on its own ground — all these thinkers, physi ologists and pysohologists, recognize in the blacks the germs of all the faculties of mind and heart, only differently proportioned from those in the Caucasian. Some recog nize in them a greater intensity of affection than in the white race. Not one classifies them on that account — as is done in pro-slavery science — as an intermediate link be tween brutes and man. Even in their degradation by American slavery, the Negroes alone modify to a certain degree the gloominess of the country. The Negroes alone have minstrelsy and melodies of peculiar intonation and beauty. They alone re-echo American original songs, which are adopted as national by the white race.* * When a foreigner asks and inquires about national melodies, he is unanimously directed to hear the so called negro melodies. 180 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. Further, like the white man, the African loves his native land, fights for its independence, resists as he can invasion — although fearful odds are against him. The African, degraded and enslaved, loves liberty, understands how to conquer it, as was shown at St. Domingo. The transition to a better social state on that island is seem ingly slow. But it ought not to be forgotten from what a state of slavish abjection the black race there emerged ; that scarcely a second generation is in possession of human rights ; that after the conquest of independence, the eman cipated have to make a thorough and jnost detailed ap prenticeship in order to become men again ; that their con tact with civilization was and is difficult, and often im possible ; and finally that Europe, for centuries the hearth and laboratory of civilization, has still in its bosom masses that are nearly as ignorant and degraded as the Haytians. Slow and toilsome is the work of humanization. In the English West Indies the work of emancipation was not the result of violence, bloodshed and destruction, but was brought forth in an orderly way, by tuition. The internal economy of these islands became recast, large plantations were divided into small farms. - Very naturally this trans formation for a few years must have reacted on the culture of the soil, and lessened its production. The emancipated were to make the mental and material apprenticeship for their new condition. No apprenticeship whatever is im mediately productive. But already the new generation, grown under liberty, compensates for the lost time and for the losses occasioned by the economical revulsion. Recent reports and statistics show that the culture and the productivity of the British West Indies are contin ually on the increase, as is the prosperity of the newly formed free, and therefore laborious men. Carelessness, heedlessness, want of foresight, laziness, SLAVEEY. 181 disposition to lie, and all the like vices, attributed to the black race in America, even theft, are not inherent in the African nature, but their germs are to be found in human ity fti general. Slavery, degradation, developes them; they are the rich manure which propitiates an exuberant growth; and the like vices have been and are common to the white slaves and ^erfs, and to otherwise degraded, al though even free and independent, but corrupted mem bers of the best cultivated society. The principal psychological inferiority attributed to the African race is based on the assertion that it never could elevate itself to a spiritual conception of Deity, and that fetichism prevails in Africa. But fetichism under various kinds was more or less known to other races, even to families of the Caucasian race. In primitive races, fetichism is always the forerunner of polytheism and of the worship of nature. And have not for centuries the most spiritual religious conceptions been debased and stained by fetichism in the midst of Europe ? The physiological differences, brought forward by pro-slavery science, as conclusive of the absolute infe riority of the African race, are not sustained by truly scientific and disinterested men. Owen, Flourens, Pritch- ard. Miller, Bachmann, Humboldt, and a host of other genuine savants, find in the physical conformation and structure of the negro as well as in the laws of hybrid- ity, quite different phenomena, and no such cardinal con trasts to the white man, as the pro-slavery physiologists assert. The same researches, observations and analogies give, therefore, different results, according as they serve impartial science, or become diverted for a peculiar pur pose. The naturalist, St. Hilaire, maintains that the white man, equaUy with the negro, in the animal ascend ing concatenation, proceeds from the ape. But even the 182 AMERICA AND EUROPE. sense-sharpening instruments seem to work diversely in Europe and in America. Thus the microscope represents different minuti» there and here. In the United States the microscope discovers that the negro is covered with wool, while the lens of a Haenle, the founder of micro scopical anatomy, shows beyond doubt that the hair of the white man and that of the negro is of one and the same kind. The pro-slavery microscope distorts or changes the form of the cellular tissues of the muscles, the epidermis of the blacks, while the truly scientific instrument shows that the black and white tissues are alike. Here it is decided that the pigment which darkens the skin of the African is a speciality to him; but Simon, a celebrated microscopic anatomist in Europe, together with other men of science, demonstrates beyond doubt, that the dark circle surround ing the nipple of a white woman contains precisely the same pigment which universally colors the skin of the negro. The physical as well as psychological differences which exist, are not of such weight as to fatally reduce the Afri can race to an irredeemable inferiority. But should even this be the case ; on no human, moral, or social grounds can it be justifiable to depress the race still more ; to de base it ; to deprive it, by slavery and by unparalleled sys tematic oppression, of the feebler attributes of manhood which it has received from nature. If even the negro should be unable to use his powers with the same vigor as the white man, he is not therefore to be transformed into a chattel. But these statements and assertions remain unsustain- ed by science or by history, which shows that the branches of the Hamitic race were the first founders of states, of polity, and of cities, and thus the first inventors of useful and mechanic arts, without which no culture of the soil. SLAVERY. 183 no construction of walls and dwellings, was possible. The cardinal distinction and pre-eminence of the Caucasian, Indo-European, or Japhetian race, consists not thus abso lutely in the power of invention, or initiation. This fac ulty is the lot of the Asiatics among the descendants of Shem and of Ham, by whom the Japhetian, the Arrian, was initiated into the rudiments of material and mental civilization. The peculiarity of the European consists primarily in the boundless power of expansion, in the im pulse, the inclination to sow to the right and to the left, to scatter and implant his ideas, to extend his activity in all directions. Easily impressible, and urged by inward impulse as well as by external events, more sensitive to their action than the other members of the human family, the European became the anima movens of the globe. But he disavows those of his race who on this superiority base the right to transform into eternal brutism their less fortunate, or even their apparently less endowed fellow- creatures. The absolute necessity in America of maintaining the colored population in bondage is supported by an axiom, very unskilfully twisted out of general history. It is as serted that whenever a superior race comes in contact with an inferior one, the second must inevitably become enslaved by the former. Never was a greater fallacy brought forward. Its concoctors are bound above all to clearly establish wherein genuine superiority consists. Whether it is civility, advanced culture, and diversified mental and material development, that constitute a superiority, or only daring, physical force, warlike propensities, military or ganization and discipline. Nearly all the conquests, and thus the contacts, of different races recorded in history, were made by nations inferior in civility, by mere barba rians, over others more developed. The Medes and Per- 184 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. sians of Cyrus were far inferior in every kind of culture to the Lydians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and all the other flourishing states of Asia Minor. These states were sub dued. The prisoners of war, the populations of cities taken by storm, became transformed or were sold into slavery; but nowhere have whole races or nations been subjected to domestic bondage. The Macedonians of Philip and Alexander were thorough barbarians, when they subdued Greece, and they did not enslave the Greeks, but on the contrary, they were civilized, grecised, by them. Nei ther were the Romans of the first centuries after the found ing of the city superior in culture to the Samnites, the Etrurians, and the Greek population of Italy. Having extended their domination over the peninsula, the Romans did not make chattels of the Italiots by the wholesale. The Roman conquest in Gaul, as over the world as then known, was not for establishing domestic bondage over all the various subdued races. The number of slaves increas ed principally by the warlike process above pointed out. When the races of the North overran and destroyed the Roman Empire, they were barbarians. These invad ers to be sure enslaved the populations on whose necks they established their dominion, more generally than any for mer conquerors recorded in history. As a race, the Ger mans issued from one and the same root as those whom they enslaved. They had the same origin, whether con sidered as descendants of the Japhetians, of the Caucasians, or of the Indo-Europeans. The enslavement was the re sult of events, and not of any absolute law ruling and reg ulating the destinies of the human kind. And, as it has been pointed our in another chapter, all these northern conquerors in the course of time became humanized, civil ized, absorbed, assimilated, recast by those among whom they settled, and over whom they ruled. The character SLAVEEY. 185 of the French, Spaniards, and Italians, has no traits in common with that of the Germans. The Normans con quered the Anglo-Saxons, and partly enslaved them, al though both Normans and Saxons descended originally from the Scandinavians. And the original character of these sea-rovers was almost completely changed by contact with the civility of France, and with the nations among whom they settled. These Normans, although considered by some as forming a superior race, and appeared as such in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, mixed, blended, and assimilated with peculiar facility with the populations among which they established themselves; and thus in new conditions and conjunctures soon changed their origi nal character. What a difference between the English and French Norman ! The nobility of Sicily and Naples descending from Tancred, Robert Guiscard, and their followers, in the next generations lost nearly all traits of resemblance to the Normans of France, and to those of England under the Plantagenets. The fierce Arab-Ma hometans were modified bythe Syrians in Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus, etc., as well as by the Moors in Africa. The Tartars,, as conquerors, were absorbed by the Chinese ; and, as races, both belong to the Mongolian stock. Few, very few, are the contrary examples, where the barbarian conqueror resisted the absorbing influence of the more civilized conquered, and preserved over him the ab solute sway of physical force. And in such cases oppres sion was never transformed into absolute domestic slavery. The Turks are the most salient illustrations of this in their relations with the Greeks, Slavi, Armenians, and other Christian populations. But will any one maintain that the Turkomans are a superior race to the others ? The religious hostility of the Moslems to Christianity 186 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. alone placed an insurmountable barrier, and prevented amalgamation and relaxation of oppression. Should the historical evidences be all in favor of the pro-slavery axiom, even then they could have no bearing whatever on the relations of the white with the colored man in the United States. The European came in con tact on this continent not with the African, but with the Indian. It is therefore the Indian who was to be enslaved, if that fallacious axiom has any meaning. The African was imported here by stealth, by robbery, by a most infa mous traffic, not as a nation, but as an individual, already a victim of brute force. To justify and logically confirm their theory, the advocates of this axiom, as well as the sup porters of American slavery, ought to fit out a great ex pedition and make a descent upon Africa, meet the negro face to face, conquer him, and establish their beloved slavery in his native land. In our epoch the conquests made by European nations over really or apparently inferior races or tribes, and the establishment of European dominion over them, is not followed by domestic slavery, or even by any kind of serf dom or villanage. France does not enslave the Arabs and Bedouins, but raises them to civilized life, confers upon them equal civil rights with Frenchmen. England, notwithstanding the bloody fiscal pressure upon the Hin doos, does not deprive them of civil rights nor of culture, but propagates amongst them civilization, erects schools, and treats them as human beings. England does not enslave the Australians or the Papuans, nor deprive them of hu man and civil rights. Russia, although serfdom prevails in her bosom, does not extend it over the conquered tribes, whether settled or nomadic, pastoral or roving. And thus, by an extraordinary anomaly, those weaker, inferior popu- SLAVEEY. 187 lations enjoy more human rights than even the immense majority of the domineering race. In this sacrilegious way the annals of our race are ransacked to bear evidence of the necessity or of the bless edness of slavery, although they teach on every page that the ancient slavery was different in origin and in principle from the American bondage. It was not based on any physical or psychological inferiority or difference in one race that was doomed to serve another, but it resulted from one paramount fact, war and conquest. The Spar tans, those fierce oligarchs of the Grecian world, who cul tivated no arts whatever, conquered the Helots, the de scendants of the Pelasgi, the first civilizers of Southern Europe, and not at all an inferior race to the Dorians. They brutalized their victims deUberately and purposely by every vice and crime, and above all by fostering intem perance among the Helots, to keep them enslaved more easily. In great dangers the Spartans bestowed on the Helots the right of citizenship. Often cognate and mostly kindred races, tribes of the same family and language, enslaved each other. The slaves mentioned in the Scrip tures and possessed by the Jews, were of the same Semitic race as the Hebrews. So were mostly all the slaves of the ancient nations, often their previous neighbors. So Greeks possessed Greeks as slaves. Plato was once sold into slavery. Philip of Macedon destroyed thirty- two Chalkidic cities, and sold their inhabitants into slavery. Alexander, after destroying Thebes, sold all the population into slavery, and the purchasers were mostly other Beotians, kindred of the Thebans. So Romans made slaves when at war with other kindred Italiot populations. At one time Roman citizens could be sold into slavery by their credi tors. And yet slavery among the Romans and its influence 188 AMEEICA AND EUROPE. on the fate of the Roman republic, form the principal pivots on which American slavery is theoretically propped. / The power of the Roman master was absolute, was that of life and death. It was pitilessly and cruelly exercised. But absolute and tyrannical was the power of the Roman father over his wife and over his children. The Roman moral tone in all conditions and relations, was in general stern and cruel. The Romans did not consider slavery as a social corner-stone, without which liberty could not exist. The Roman legist who resumed in short sentences the antique sense of morality and justice, calls slavery em phatically a state contrary to nature — contra naiuram, as did before him Aristotle, Plato, and others. How different from our southern Papinians and Tribonians ! The ser vile origin of the manumitted disappeared at the farthest in the third generation. But in the South the stain is eternal. The material interests of a slave, his earnings or peculium, were under the protection of the Roman pra3- tor. Adrian, the Antonines legislated for the protection of the slaves. The Roman law punished with death any one who unlawfully enslaved a freeman. Slaves in anti quity were not grown, bred specially for the market, as is the case in Virginia ; the masculine by far outnumbering the feminine slaves. The children of slaves were in structed in schools, in arts and sciences. Slaves have been architects, physicians, authors, actors. Nearly all the monuments which have survived the destructive force of time, had slaves for architects, for constructors. Ac cording to some historians, Vitruvius, whose 'architectural writings are still authority, was a slave. Many Greek rhetoricians, grammarians, philosophers, were Roman slaves. The purest moralist of antiquity, Epictetus, Uved many years the slave of a bad Roman master. And shall any body assert that the Greeks were an inferior race ? SLAVERY. 189 History teaches that in proportion as slavery increased, the spirit of ancient Rome became faint. With the ex tension of slavery, the free yeomanry was either destroyed or reduced to a degraded social state, like that of the southern free-white laborers and small cultivators. Not slaves but Cincinnatus himself ploughed his farm, when the deputies brought him the news of his election by his fellow- citizens to the dignity of a dictator. When in the course of time the soil of Rome was owned by wealthy patricians, and worked all over with slaves, Rome had no more the Fabii, the Horatii Codes, the ScaevolaB. Roman virtue vanished before slavery, and Roman demoralization went hand in hand with its increase. In the first centuries of the republic — the blossoming period of Roman virtue — slaves were made in war alone ; and if the prisoners were not ransomed, then hereditary birth in bondage constituted the status of a slave. In the age of the degeneration of the republic — in those of the dissolution of the spirit and laxity of the laws, the husbandry of estates by slave labor was carried out by systematic hunting for men. What for America was Africa, for Rome at that time was Asia Minor. Pirates or slave-traders, principally from the island of Crete and from CiUcia, stole men in the Greek Archipelago and around the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. It is said that at the great slave-mart of Delos (the American New-Orleans), on one day ten thousand slaves were bought and sold. In the pagan world, divines, moralists, philosophers and statesmen did not exalt slavery. No one represented it as an idyllic state of society, or sang its praise and blessed ness. Orations and speeches were not made to the Roman or Greek people to exalt bondage. Pliny, Seneca, Plu tarch spoke of it in mild and extenuating language. 1 The Roman world fell. The destruction was not oc- 190 AMERICA AND EUROPE. casioned by the relaxation of slavery — a favorite assertion of the American pro-slavery philosophers. On the con trary, the extension of slavery was an efficient and primary cause, among many secondary causes, of the downfall of Rome. Slavery deprived Italy of vigorous, devoted, intelU- gent, energetic and active citizens. Large estates worked by slaves, deteriorating the soil and its culture, reduced the population. Poverty, misery was at the basis, and above it hovered the wealthy, effeminate, debased, immoral and luxurious slaveholder. The amor pairim had been long consumed to cold ashes. The most unbounded and sordid egotism filled the mind and the heart of the people. The Roman world fell because a new light rose upon mankind, a light which the ancient pagan religious and social institutions could not stand. Because the material ized conception of God and man was to give way before a higher, spiritual one. The time of the pagan civilization, with all its religious and social ideas, was accomplished. The human race received a new password ; it was to be impregnated with a purer and subtler essence. A new and loftier order was to prevail. Higher aspirations were to inspire man, and the past was to be blotted out or changed. The past was doomed to destruction. The idolatrous worship of the living Csesar could not exist by the side of the worship of the crucified Christ. Rome fell because the civis Bomanus, the highest human dignity at that time, was superseded by the higher one of civis Ghris- tianus, which signified brotherhood, love and self-denial. The Roman world fell, because mankind was to be ini tiated into union, and could not move further, as it was forcibly encompassed in material unity. The individualism of the ancient world was to make place for humanity. Slavery survived the Roman world, maintains south- em philosophical science, and European Christian nations SLAVERY. 191 based their existence upon it. The most superficial in sight into history shows that feudal slavery was in no way considered as a social constructive element. The inhabitants of the Roman Empire, slaves or free, became enslaved by the new conquerors. The conquered remained attached to the soil, which they cultivated for themselves and for their masters. Villanage went hand in hand with bondage. They could not be detached from the earth. They also preserved the right of family, and famUies were not separated. At the commencement of the mediaeval epoch, therefore, slavery did not possess this fierce feature which it has in America. The con quered were not sold in markets, neither could the master carry his slaves into any other region or land, as is done by the American planter in his migrations in search of a better and virgin soil. The slave-trade and slave-markets existed at that epoch in various spots of Europe, — in France, above all in Lyons ; in various cities of Italy, especially in Venice and Rome ; and in some cities on the Baltic. But the market able slaves were exclusively prisoners of war, or persons carried away by depredatory invasions of the Normans, Berbers and others. In the South and the West of Europe the slave-trade was principaUy supplied by prison ers taken from the Moors in Spain and other Mahomedans of the Mediterranean shores, and in the East and North, by those made by the Germans among various Sclavic tribes living between the Baltic and the Adriatic Seas. In the thirteenth century this traffic in slaves wholly disap peared from Europe. Since that epoch serfdom, villanage likewise, became successively softened. In royal domains the serfs were put under the jurisdiction of common tri bunals. In general the serfs could acquire property, liti gate, appear as witnesses in civil and criminal cases, even 192 AMERICA AND EUROPE. against their own masters. Thus Western Europe- suc cessively relieved itself from this curse, and history teaches that, in proportion as serfdom, villanage, was modified and destroyed, European nations emerged out of darkness ; culture, arts, industry, commerce, prosperity, extended in wider and wider circles. Not in slavery was concentrated the patriotism, the honor of the chivalry, of the feudal knights. In the epochs of the most direful feudal op pression, the master hunting an escaped serf was scorned and nicknamed a man-hunter. The fugitive serf, if he was not caught in the lapse of a year and one day, acquired his liberty. In Italy, aud above all in Germany, the free cities scattered over the land served as a secure refuge for the fugitives. For these cities, as well as for a nobleman, to deliver up one of these fugitives was an infamy. Knights combated rather than commit such a felonious action. Many were the bloody feuds between cities and barons that were occasioned by the refusal of delivery. Nay, if a fugitive, once admitted into the refuge of a city, was caught in some way by his previous master, the city considered it as a violation of her rights and made it an occasion for war. The free city likewise considered it as a violation of her territory and of her rights, and avenged it, if a fugitive serf was in any way molested within her limits. Woe to a nobleman who fell into the hands of the offended burghers. In the city of Reval, in Estonia, a city once belonging to the Hanseatic associa tion, there is still preserved the sword with which one of the mightiest barons of the province was beheaded, for hav ing carried away his fugitive serf from under the walls of Reval. The misery, the degradation and the ignorance of the European proletariat is held up in comparison by the de fenders and upholders of slavery, with what they call the SLAVERY. 1 93 happy and prosperous condition of the slaves. True it is ¦ that the masses of the daily laborers in Europe drag out an existence full of desolation. True it is that pauperism gnaws at the core of European society. The original source of this evil was social. It dates from the times when slavery, serfdom, villanage, oppressed the masses. Nowa days, however, the cause is purely economical. It results from the distorted organization and combination of labor and capital It results from the disproportion in remu neration and in the share of profits, due to the original and immediate creator of wealth ; it results from a faulty and imperfect co-ordination of man, and of his intrinsic powers, faculties and propensities. True it is likewise, that this deeply rooted disorder is powerfully alimented by the di vision of society for ages into castes and classes, in virtue of which there are accumulated in the upper social strata various dead-weights and drones, turning the scales on one side, absorbing the results of the labor- of the mass of the people, and rendering difficult its free ascension and nor mal expansion. But the proletariat is not a distinct race, decreed by those above it to an eternal degradation and servitude in idea and in fact, or retained therein by laws as well as by brutal force. A noble or any other once prosperous person, when impoverished and destitute, merges in the proletariat ; he wades into the mire of pauperism. The proletariat reposes not on the principle that it is an indelible stain, an unchangeable condition excluding social and civil rights. In all the European nations, however slowly, there continually emerge from the proletariat, from among the poor, individuals who ascend, acquire com parative wealth, position, and all the advantages of the world are thrown open to them. The proletariat, the poor, their progeny, are not surrounded, like the man of color — slave or free — by an insurmountable barrier sepa- 9 194 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. rating them from civilization. The so-called middle classes, the wealthy, the aristocracy, was and is recruited from that mass. English aristocracy is in the major part composed of what once was an impure, a villain blood. The poor of Europe are not deprived by laws and observ ances of the right of religious worship and association, nor of marital rights, nor of family protection and ties, all of which the master of slaves severs according to his own will and pleasure. The civil rights of the proletaries, of the poor, are absolutely equal to those of any other member of society. The slave has none, and the free-colored man scarcely the shadow of any in any State, Louisiana alone excepted — and there only as the remains of ancient French and Spanish supremacy. In Europe political rights de pend upon material property ; and if the poor can acquire it, he enjoys political rights in all their plenitude. In the European nations there are different codes for the different social compounds. The life, the domestic occupations, the domestic hearth, the time, the labor of the proletariat, are not at the discretion and will of masters and owners. The proletariat, the poor, are adequately protected by the same laws with all other members of the community or of the State. The poor man has the right of litigation against every body. The criminal code is the same for the man of the so-called superior class, as for the proleta ry, the poor. In Russia, where nobles have real privi leges, where serfdom exists, the criminal code is even more severe towards a noble, on account of his social superi ority, immunities, and advantages. In the slave States, justice, crime, and its penalties, vary in their tenor, defi nition, application, according to their bearing on the slave, the man of color, the white man, or the master. What the moral sense, as well as the laws, of every civUized and humane society condemn and stamp as a crime, as " maim- SLAVEEY. 195 ing," " killing in undue heat," or " undue correction," in the criminal legislation of the South is scarcely considered as an offence. Laws and regulations exclude not the poor, the proletariat, from " mental instruction," as is done by the laws of the slave States. No government or law of any European country imprisons and fines a teacher for teaching the children of the poor ; while the laws of the Carolinas, of Georgia, of Virginia, and of all the other Slave States, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware excepted, prohibit under heavy penalties the teaching of the colored race, enslaved or free. Neither the sovereigns nor the aristocracies of Europe consider the preservation of misery, ignorance and degra dation among the masses as a social necessity. The unin terrupted tendency and efforts of European rulers, of the European superior classes, of legislation and administra tion, tend towards assuaging the evils of pauperism, to les sen it, to educate the poor, to open to them issues, to sof ten the misery, to alleviate the social burden pressing on their necks. Governments establish schools, and desire to instruct and enlighten. European rulers and the so cially privileged of every class, do not prize the blessings of pauperism, but redden in shame or shudder at it. The legislation of the slave States increases from year to year in stringency, ferocity, and contempt for the claims of hu manity. They aim uninterruptedly at making darkness darker, the yoke heavier, the chains tighter, the oppression more shocking, bondage and chattelhood more inhuman and indestructible. The aim of their legislatures is to destroy all the germs of human feeling and capacity in the slaves. For this the equitable foundation of human relations is legally, authoritatively Subverted. Severance of families, disruption of ties, laceration of affections. 196 AMEEICA AND EUROPE. which are common even to animals, are sanctioned by their legislation. To compensate for all these curses, it is asserted that the slaves are better fed and clothed than the proletaries, the daily laborers, living in freedom ; that their physical wants and necessities are cared for ; that diseases and hunger are averted or healed by the attention of their mas ters. It is probable and even well-nigh certain, that planta tions can be found scattered over the region of slavery, in which the chattels are treated more carefully, in which some allowance is made for their human origin. Undoubtedly, likewise, the majority of masters try to avoid tyranny and harshness as far as possible, or as far as their own interest requires it. But the majority of slave owners cannot spend their material resources in procuring to the slaves — even on a small scale, comparatively — a real, material prosperity. According to the avowal of the slave owners, slave labor in itself is expensive, and in the smaller es tates, by far more numerous than the larger ones, scarcely covers the cost. The owner has barely enough to sat isfy decently his own wants and those of his family, and no one will refuse any thing to himself and to his children, for the sake of his chattels. Those are kept just above starvation ; the physical forces are alimented enough to en able them to fulfil their daily tasks. The desolated huts — those abodes of slaves, according to impartial witnesses, in an immense majority over the South, do not give an idea of sheltered, prosperous, and well-kept inmates. For one working chattel, well-fed and tolerably dressed, there are necessarily hundreds and hundreds covered with rags, fed on the scantiest and coarsest aUowance. Like causes every where produce like effects. In certain general out lines human nature is the same all over the world ; as an SLAVEEY. 1 97 ancient adage says : naiura humana semper sibi consona ; and slavery or serfdom in husbandry, in economy, in house hold administration, works now in the same way, shows the same phenomena that marked it among the Romans, that marked it over Europe, that marks it still, however mitiga ted it may be, in those European countries where serfdom prevails, or where, although serfdom being abolished in principle, custom, habits, tradition, idleness and degrada tion surround the large land owner, the once master, the nobleman with numerous burdensome retainers, if not chattels. Such was the case for a long time among the Irish and Scotch clans ; so it is in Sicily, in the kingdom of Naples, in Hungary, in the Slavonias, in the Danubian Principalities, in numerous households of Poland and of Russia. Every where and always such retainers are often worse treated than favorite animals, as horses and dogs. But admitting that the physical condition of the en slaved population in America is really as prosperous as it is represented, that all slaves or the majority of them are fat, weU-nourished and decently clad ; this after all would be nothing more than what is done by every sensible hus bandman for his cattle and domestic animals, which must be nourished and weU-cared for, on account of the labor which they perform. Every good husbandman attends to and cures his crippled or diseased oxen or horses, and so does the owner of the slave, who after all is the most ex pensive domestic animal, and one that is renewed or pro cured with the greatest difficulty. The apologists of slavery, reducing this question to that of food, of physical maintenance, as forming a compensation for all the de struction of manliness in their victims, prove how under the influence of slavery the comprehension, the feeling of manhood is lowered in the master himself. Finally the question between a well-fed slave and a 198 AMEEICA AJSD EUEOPE. lean freeman was settled about eighteen centuries ago, by the celebrated Roman fabulist Phsedrus, in the fable Lu pus and Canis, beginning with the words — QvMm dulcis sii libertas breviter proloquar ; to which I refer the par tisans of slavery. Neither is it true that the enslaved populations are satisfied, and cheerfully support their bondage. Even if it were so, it would justify once more an ancient ax iom, and one confirmed by all ancient and modern observ ers of human nature, that oppression, slavery, destroys manhood to that extent, which makes the slave insensible to the highest good, to freedom. Thus we often meet with hardened criminals, to whom virtue, honesty, honor become totally incomprehensible. So a distorted organ ism often rejects the efforts to bring it back to a normal condition. How often an individual affected with an in ternal chronic disease, or with some external excrescence, dreads the cure, refuses to submit to it, and prefers in firmity to health and vigor. But innumerable and various facts give the lie to the assertion that the American slave loves slavery. He sub mits to it, as says AMeri of all oppressed : — servi siam' si ; Ma servi ognor frementi. If the chattels are thus satisfied 'with their condition, what necessity evokes the almost daily framing of violent, ferocious laws, to defend, preserve and strengthen bon dage, to make the chain more indestructible ? If the chat tels are so fond of bondage, whence comes the dread of the masters to see them run away ? What urgent neces sity was there for the atrocious fugitive slave law f How is it that the Southern papers from all the States contain repeated advertisement's of runaway slaves, with rewards SLAVEEY. 199 for their delivery, alive or dead ? Why is it that others of these papers, from time to time announce that pos sessors of bloodhounds are ready to hire them out, and hunt the fugitives for twenty-five dollars the job ? Strange evidences of the felicity and satisfaction of the oppressed. What need of the cudgel, the whip, the gag, the thumb screw, the bell, and various other implements of refined torture, which stock the household armories of the plan tations ? Must the devotion of the chattels be shored up with terror ? All this so much trumpeted kindness of the masters notwithstanding, thousands and thousands of these human chattels often envy the treatment, the nour ishment of the favorite dogs of their owners ! And those murdered in their attempts to recover liberty, the mothers destroying their offspring, rather than to see them slaves, redeem the atrocious aspersion on the colored population, as if it were blunted to the sense of liberty. Vainly is it maintained that such cases of utter despair are few and isolated. Few and isolated are the self-devoted martyrs of any oppressed people, but the blood and deeds of the martyrs bear evidence against the tyrants. Slavery as practised in the States of the Union, civil izes, ennobles the colored race, raises it above its kindred in Africa. These nefarious assertions are uttered as the crowning justification. The coarse varnish of tameness with which slavery glosses over its victims is not culture ; servility is not civilization. This varnish, corrosive in its action, eats up, destroys in the slave the dignity of man hood, which makes the savage superior to the enslaved. Civilization is then only genuine and beneficial when she preserves, nourishes, developes, purifies and raises higher and higher the manly germs implanted by nature in the breast, in the mind of man. Such civilization alone en nobles, but such is not the lot of the slave. Such is not 200 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. within the range of slavery. The taming of the black or the mulatto to serve the wants, to fulfil the biddings and the whims of the white man, is a desecration of the essence, of the principle, of the name of civilization. The colored race is not alone degraded by slavery. Fate in its equitable retaliation blights the white man with the deleterious exhalations. Nearly three-fourths of the white population in the Slave States do not own any prop erty in man. The condition of the immense majority thereof, according to the accounts published by the de fenders of slavery, is most deplorable. This population is subject to material, intellectual and moral privations, is reduced to the most miserable degradation. And this state, according to the same source of information, is yearly growing worse. The younger portion is less educated, less industrious, more wretched, physically and morally, and the evil increases uninterruptedly. The habits of appli cation to close labor is lost among them, and they " while away existence in a state but one step in advance of the Indian of the forest.'' They grow up without mental and moral instruction, as without any apprenticeship in me chanic and operative skill. Slavery shuts against them all issues. Slaveholders possess the best lands, and slavery is not creative or propitious to the arts, industry or me chanical skill. The whites find no demand, no employment for their labor, nothing spurs them to order, to regulated activity, to progress, and the development of their faculties. The South does not possess towns, villages, and townships like those which compose the Free States, and above all New England, the first among the civilized countries of the Christian world. The germs of liberty, of culture, of progress, of comprehension and firm adhesion to human rights, of their regulated reasonable exercises, are nursed and brought forth in these villages. On them prominently SLAVEEY. 201 reposes the prosperity, the freedom, the future of Ameri can destinies. These villages are so many foci of light and morality, of intelligent, orderly activity. Out of these villages and townships, pours forth uninterruptedly the radiant stream of life, whose innumerable rivulets carry and spread civilization over America, whose halo corus cates brilliantly in the history of our race. All is darkness and desolation in the Slavery States. The reports and messages of their Governors resound with complaints of poverty, exhaustion, record the decreasing productivity of the land, the increasing ignorance among the mass of the white population. According to those of ficial reports and messages, there are scores and scores of thousands who can neither read nor write in each State. Schools are rare and are maintained with difficulty. Townships often belong to some few of the wealthier plant ers, who have no interest in taxing themselves for a com munal free public school, for the general good. Those planters educate their children under the care of private tutors, in private boarding schools, in colleges, or send them to the North. Teachers of both sexes are im ported from New England, as such intellectual produce does not germinate and blossom in the slaveholding States. Moreover, it is an inborn instinct of oligarchies, to hate light and civilization, to prevent them in any manner whatever from penetrating to the masses. The Southern oligarchies abhor culture of mind in the white population, no less than in their chattels. They scorn the intelligent operatives, mechanics, artisans, of the North. The enlight ened white masses would cease to be the tools of the slave owners, and slavery would be undermined, and then ex plode. It would take volumes to collect the contemptuous utterances of Southern so-called statesmen, orators, theo- 202 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. rists, stigmatizing enlightened industry and its progress, uni ted with the intellectual progress of working populations. Never did the most feudal, aristocratic, and benighted times in Europe witness such a hatred towards indepen dent, industrial populations and communities, as is mani fested by the Southern slave-masters. Not from these rulers of the destinies of the South, nor its laboring classes — of whatever color — is to be expected the fostering of culture, or any step for mental amelioration, and the ma terial improvement so closely connected with it. Not in this way act the Governments, the superior classes in Eu rope. And in face of this thorough degradation of the white population of their own kindred, of the descendants of those who fought the battles of independence, the up holders of slavery dare to upbraid the civilization of those whom they call the " greasy mechanics " of the North, scrutinize the condition of the proletariat in Europe, and represent slavery as the only guarantee of prosperity to the masses. Freedom, under whatever shape it manifests itself, is and always was repulsive to oligarchies. The Southern oligarchy hates its name and its substance, abhorring free labor, free schools, and men of every color who are ele vated by them. History fully proves that oligarchies are more fatal to society than even the most unlimited power of one man. Still more so must be an oligarchy founded exclusively on the most atrocious social abuse. Oligarchies based on a certain traditional right, on the possession and exercise of power, have had in their behalf the same traditional feel ing in the masses, accustomed to be ruled for generations, accustomed to consider their rulers as exercising a legiti mate power over them. But the slavery oligarchy is in principle and political relations not superior to the rest of SLAVERY. 203 the white population. It is only by using its wealth and influence for systematically debasing the whites, and re taining them in poverty and degradation, that the slave holder can maintain over them his baneful preponderance. Facts and not fiction prove how slavery denaturalizes, distorts the great principle laid down broadly and exclu sively at the foundation of American society. Facts and not fiction evidence how directly it is opposed to the ten dencies of the free civilized part of the American Union, as well as to those of Europe. The efforts of reason, of culture, of social morality, are directed towards generaliz ing, among the masses, self-respect, good breeding, honor able pride of labor, generous, elevated feelings, polish of manners; in one word, towards elevating the social level, the social tone ; and thus towards diminishing even to its total disappearance the aristocratic, social and political distinctions. Slavery constrains itself to build up what is distanced, abandoned by the spirit of our age. But her productions are shams ; her aristocracy is a counterfeit ; her social polish only a coarse gloss. Slavery is a curse more fatal to the master than to the victim. It deteriorates the mind, hardens the heart, and makes the slave-breeder perpetually false to the better im pulses of human nature. A slave-owner is a good master, kind-hearted, patient, full of forbearance and care as long as the slave is abject, fawning, crawling, and submissive, — as long as he licks his chains, and the hand which forges them. But the slightest breath of manhood raises the an ger of that kind master, in whose opinion the slave de serves condescension, good treatment, as long only as he acquiesces in being a brute, but becomes highly condem- nable and is to be ferociously repressed as soon as he feels himself to be a man. To the planter as a child, and afterwards as a grown up 204 AMERICA AND EUROPE. man, in his daily domestic life, is wanting in his relation with the slave that which exclusively curbs and regulates the exuberance and the original force of human passions. It is the early, calm, omnipotent influence of a genuine moral culture, softening the savage impulses of our nature. He grows up upon the plantation surrounded by beings whom he is accustomed to consider below him morally and mental ly, as forming a medium between man and brute, existing there to obey his bidding, to satisfy his will and pleasure. As a child, as a boy, he sees and hears instances of sever ity, nay of cruelty, modified mostly by the material inter est for not weakening and disabling a necessary and costly tool. So he reaches the age of manhood, and the soften ing influences of reason, of the world without, begin to work on his mind, only when the first impressions are already deeply stamped, when they have penetrated his whole frame, and then may arise within his bosom a strug gle between his better nature, and this falsehood of his condition in his domestic relations — at war with his posi tion, his relations with the world without. In such mo ments sincere men among the slaveholders have condemned and deprecated slavery. But misunderstood self-interest, prejudices, false pride, generally maintain the upper hand. Men enjoying immunities must necessarily have prejudices, and prejudices pervert and overpower the mind. The slaveholder carries them within him, they bear heavily on all the relations of life, of a man, a citizen, a republican, a politician, a divine, a lover of study and science, or whatever other pursuits in life he may choose. And so slavery, originating on the American soil by an accident, in a mer cantile speculation, about half a century ago, considered as an evil by the most patriotic men of the South, is up held now as an offensive weapon against the moral sense of our age, against the general outcry of civilization. It is SLAVERY. 205 no longer an economical availability, and still less a social evil, but a high moral obligation, a social law, a nursery of freedom, an agency of culture. Few minds or hearts can resist such an unnatural tension. They lose elasticity, become incapable of any loftier impulse, whatever might be the otherwise generous propensities of those laboring tmder this mental disorder. Beyond the regions blighted with slavery, the slave holder comes in contact with a different social state, with other notions and convictions, with men more or less strongly condemning what he is bound to uphold. This necessity makes him uneasy. He feels that he carries a burden of moral and social condemnation ; the best among them are always on the defensive, or in a state of a bane ful, unwholsome mental irritation. Some of them speak then of slavery as of an evil inherited, which they are un able to avert, to change, or to modify. If such are their true convictions, then how can they harmonize with the dig nity of manhood the upholding by their political vote, or even by silent acquiescence, those who proclaim slavery a good, a blessing, and who drag the legislative action of the States to strengthen and make the evil irremediable, or who direct intensely the efforts of the States, of the South ern populations, towards extending it over lands hitherto not blighted with the curse ? If conscience speaks loudly in them, and they stifle it off through false shame, interest, or the spirit of party, then they wUlingly degrade them selves. Or if their manifestations of regret are insincere, if they are made only for the sake of appearances, to avert from themselves the disgust of others, to be taken for en lightened or humane, then they have no claim on respect and consideration. Either way, therefore, the best of them are forcibly dragged by slavery into hypocrisy, into a strug gle with the better longings of human reason and nature. 206 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. Others again bear up against the accusations of the out ward civUized world, and in their false pride harden their hearts, poison and corrupt their reason, their judg ment. For these and similar causes, slaveholders are inimical to the ideas of the age, are inimical to the loftier activity of civilization. They in general deny its usefulness, its necessity, and above all dread its general diffusion, not only in their own land, but even in other regions of the world, — prosperity, progress, onward march, diffusion of knowledge being their loudest condemnation. Scattered among the mass of slaveholders there are men and women of culture and refinement, whose social qualities raise them to a level with the best of any society, whose feelings of morality and genuine honor elevate them above the muddy current into which fate has thrown their existence. Such persons inspire a deep sorrow, to see their noble faculties and impulses depressed or blighted by the emanations of a social and political state which sooner or later must unavoidably tarnish them. Such do not give the tone, either in social or political relations, to the im mense majority of their fellow-citizens. Their influence or action does not come to daylight, nor manifest itself in legislative enactments, or other public utterances. They are subdued or overawed — and ^ ome of them end by howl ing with the wolves. At the family hearth, slavery loosens and desecrates the family ties, the relations by blood ; lust and lewdness display themselves unbridled. In those unchecked rela tions, matrimonial fldelity wholly disappears. The great numbers of mulattoes are Uving evidences thereof Among the ancients, concubinage was not condemned either by religion, ethics, customs, manners or laws, as it is in Chris tian society. Then the traffic in slaves was not a business SLAVEEY. 207 organized in the manner in which it exists now in the Southern States. By this organization the produce of blood is here brought into the market. Fathers thus sell their children ; or at the best, brothers, sisters, sell the offspring of their common parent, and thus the trafficking extends among the nearest connections by blood. The external manifestations of the influence of slavery on the slaveholders must be judged by the tone, the cus toms, actions, and the degree of mental culture, of the great mass. Where public education is generally neglected, the members of a community possessing limited means, soon sink into a state of mental torpor. The small planter is secluded from the world, from social and civil softening influences. A domestic despotism, recklessness and self- will, become for him the attributes of self-government. The means of sustaining the feeble sparks of culture — if he has received any — are beyond his reach, and thus aban doned, he necessarily becomes imbruted. His habits and manners become fierce, brute force is substituted for law. Accustomed to subdue by violence every opposition of his chattels to his will, he carries into civility, into contact with society, the same indoinitable and injurious vehe mence. Thus are bred the perpetrators of those bloody assaults, of lynching and burning, deeds of which accounts are to be found continually in the Southern press. These men use bloodhounds. Honor in their comprehension becomes brutality, assassination and murder the manifes tation of courage. Each of them carries the decision of law, the sword of justice, in his own hands, and deals blows at pleasure. In their brutaUty, their prejudice, their pride, they treat the laws with contempt, and thus justify the complaints of those more humanized among the South ern inhabitants, about the degradation of the public sense 208 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. of morality, rendering impossible by juries and judges the conviction of criminals. This .great slaveholding mass produces and elects those legislators, for their States or for Congress, whose enact ments — ^by their worship of ignorance and of darkness, and by their ferocity — outrage the comprehension, dese crate the name of law. These enactments, making bondage daily and daily more stringent and pitiless, or attempting its extension, are the best evidences of the moral ruin into which slavery drags its white victims. Before the tribu nal of morality, of reason, of justice, and of history, the one who enacts such laws is lower in the scale of human beings than those against whom such laws are directed. Humanity must condemn any society which can only be maintained by increasing legislative, and therefore cool- blooded violence. Where the immense majority of the population is en slaved, the one portion by law, the other by ignorance, where labor and industry are regarded with contempt, there agriculture principally absorbs the productive activ ity. The South, by the nature of its products, considers itself as a region exclusively predestined for agriculture. But slavery prevents the agricultural interest from keep ing pace with the material improvements in that branch of industry. Generally, the ancient routine is preserved, the immense majority of plantations squander labor and time in using the worthless, old-fashioned implements of husbandry. Thus slavery is compelled to reject inventions which would make agriculture profitable. The lands in old and new States become quickly unproductive, exhaust ed by coarse, irrational husbandry. This is the general lamentation echoed in official and non-official documents. But nevertheless the planters, and the merchants who grow fat on the former, proclaim that the South ought only to SLAVEEY. 209 base its prosperity on the exports of its crude products, that free trade is the only natural, economical policy of that region. The Southern planter foj-gets, or rather does not comprehend, that all the industries are blended, and pro gress hand in hand, that to exclude one blights most as suredly the other. The most industrious countries and regions of Europe, England, Belgium, parts of Germany, Normandy, Flanders, . are likewise foremost among all others in agriculture. Free trade is the death of prosper ity and progress. The human mind and intellect as weU as the human body prospers in variety, in the manifold ap plication of its faculties. Neither man nor nature is ruled by oneness and onesightedness. Matter adapts itself to multifarious productions and uses, when plied and directed by the intellect and the hand of man. Harmony of mental and material life in individuals, communities and nations, consists in the development of varieties, in the combination of various chords and tunes. A man whose mind is concentrated in one idea — whatever be its intrin sic value — destroys within himself the fulness of his na ture. An operative using principally one of his limbs distorts it, and the harmony of his frame is destroyed. A country devoted to a single labor, working out a single branch of production, becomes impoverished mentally and physically. Its inhabitants sink in every respect, and be come inferior to those who multiply and diffuse their men tal and intellectual occupations, who vary to infinity their pursuits in life. The exclusively agricultural countries have been always inferior, and their inferiority is not limited to the laborers only — either free, serfs, or slaves, — but stamps the immense majority of the ruling class, be it noblemen or planters. Serfdom, contempt for free labor and civilization, arro gant presumption and free trade, exclusively and absolutely 210 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. caused the destruction of Poland. The Polish serfs, as well as those of Germany, Russia, and of some other parts of Eastern Europe, wei'e of the same race, of the same blood as their masters or the nobility. There exists, how ever, the most perfect analogy between the social state, the political action and the reasonings of the slave-breed ers, and that of the ancient Polish nobility. Poland was for several centuries nearly the only granary of Europe, above all of the northern part, as the cotton planter en joys at present the monopoly of cotton. The Polish no bility imported most of the manufactured necessaries of life from abroad, instead of fostering industrial develop ment at home. For centuries free trade flourished in the fullest blaze, and with it increased domestic misery, abjec tion and ignorance. Free trade impeded and prevented the sprouting, the growth of an industrial, active, intelligent national class ; the few unavoidably necessary artisans and operatives were all foreigners. There was no native mid dle class of any consequence to stand between the serf and the nobleman, as there is none in the South between the slave and the master. The mass of the nobility, amounting to between two and three hundred thousand — and all in principle politically equal — constituted the political and civil nation, as is the case to a great extent with the aggregate of planters and slaveholders. The magnates possessed polish and culture ; the immense ma jority of the small or poor nobility were a lazy, ignorant, pugnacious, boisterous rabble, although not murderers or treacherous assassins, not heroes of the cudgel. They were clamorous at political reunions and diets, virulently opposing reforms and progress, averse to recognizing hu man and political rights in others. They considered in dustrial pursuits and occupations as beneath them. They spoke with the same contempt of their intelUgent, orderly SLAVERY. 211 laborious, progressive, enlightened neighbors, the Ger mans, as the slavebreeders speak of the Yankees, so far superior to them in every way. The Polish nobles boast ed that the world would become starved without their cerealia, that they could buy for them whatever else they wanted, as the South boasts that the world will be naked without its cotton. The world went on ; the Ger man neighbor, Prussia — ^which as a state shot out of Po lish imbecility — is to-day among the greatest and most enlightened nations ; Poland, with its nobiUty, feeble and decrepit, dissolved in ignorance, has disappeared from the record of living nations. So mental and material degradation, the fruits of serfdom and of free trade, dug for centuries the abyss into which Poland fell. The South begins to feel its degradation, its backward ness, its industrial and commercial dependence. It tries to remedy it by conventions and resolutions, that such or such a port or city is to become a Southern metropolis ; that trade is to expand, navigation and industry to be created. But liberty, civilization, the free opening of all issues to human activity, respect for free labor, intelligent and educated populations, and not boisterous and foolish conventions, create trade, animate cities, raise manufac tures, build ships, and evoking a higher life, evoke and fix prosperity. Not conventions and resolutions, but freedom has made New York, Boston, Philadelphia, the centres of the com mercial wealth of this hemisphere. Freedom erects cities as Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, and others, which, emerging as by a spell from nothingness, teem with indus try, trade, grow with an unheard of rapidity ; while Charleston and Savannah, old already by centuries, backed by the cotton-growing and slave-whipping South, situated 212 AMERICA AND EUROPE. near the ocean, see the grass growing in their desolated streets. Despotism in its most implacable and virulent action, has now become the paramount creed of the upholders of slavery. Suspicious, uneasy, alarmed, exasperated, they, like all the tyrants, remorselessly proscribe, attempt to extirpate, to kill and destroy whatever has the slightest shadow of disagreement with the most frenetic conceptions, definitions and exercise of slavery. Under penalty of lynching, mobbing, imprisonment, expulsion, or assassina tion — applauded from one end to the other in the slavery region — no voice can be raised contrary to the institution. Its value, its good or evil is forbidden to be discussed, nay even the slightest doubt is criminal, is unpardonable. Identity of causes produces identity of effects. As the Neros, the Domitians, the Heliogobali allowed only one worship, that of their person, and of their will, so slavery requires from all within its area, to bend the knee and worship her. Minds, opinions, words, the secrecy of intercourse and of letters are overwatched; the closet as well as the pulpit, the sacred ceremonies of public religious prayer are put absolutely under the control of slavery. What else was done by the most abhorred ty rants and despots of all times, of all nations ? Not in the fiction of a novel, but in inexcusable facts, in public speeches, in public acts perpetrated in cities and communities, in the numberless articles of the Southern press, are brought forth these terroristic principles, are recorded those saturnalia of slaveholding polity, For the first time the history of the human race will have to deeply imbrue in blood and shame the annals of a society, in which terror, remorseless espionage, inexorable hatred carried to homicide, became the supreme law, being per- SLA-7ERY. 213 petrated not by a single despot and his accomplices and mercenaries, but by whole communities. In vain for slavery are the teachings of history, the fate of tyrants and tyrannies, the rapid fall and ruin of social systems, conditions and bodies, needing in self-defence to be upheld by stringent and atrocious laws, treading ^ in their fury upon freedom, rights, and independent con victions. In the whole world's history never was oppres sion carried out more consistently, conducted with such reckless energy, cold blood, understanding and discern ment, than that by Sulla in Rome, for the sake and in the name of the Roman patricians. But the oligarchical des potism for which Sulla acted could not stand ; the patri cians lost their power, and the hecatombs of people were avenged by their blood. On such a social condition is supported what in the po Utical struggles of America takes the name of the demo cratic party. But as Demosthenes said : " To a democracy nothing is more essential than a scrupulous regard to equity and justice." Here slavery extends its action be yond its geographical boundaries, and encroaches upon the domain of liberty. So it accomplishes the perversion of names and principles. The Southern, the slavery States, as a political party in the Union, form the hot-bed, the heart, the pivot of such a democracy. Never was mis nomer more salient, never a confusion of truth and false hood, of right and wrong, of justice and injustice more complete. A society wherein bondage, degradation, con tempt for labor, for popular education are the cardinal strictures, is held up as democracy. Whereas the efforts of true democracy are uninterruptedly directed to eman cipate, to enlighten man, to exalt him in proportion to his intrinsic worth, and thus to exalt labor, the true main spring of democratic association and polity. Thus de- 214 AMERICA AND EUROPE. mocracy, one of the highest and most salutary philosophi cal and social conceptions, identified, embodied in slavery, has become a social ulcer. The annals of the past, or modern European theories, would be searched in vain to elucidate how this most generous principle could be ever distorted to such an extent for the use of narrow, egotisti cal schemes and views. It was the lot of America to show how it becomes degraded in its substance, when re duced to merely a partisan denomination, a shroud ex tended over a socially and politically corroded body. The confessors of the thus desecrated democracy, pro claim her to be conservative of darkness and slavery, of abuse and prejudice. But democracy in its genuine and pure nature, as it really constitutes the essence of Ameri can society, is neither conservative nor destructive. American democracy in its germ, in its growth and devel opment, has been hitherto and is now integrally creative, self-improving and progressive. Such a democracy spurns the revolting association with slavery, deceitfully seeking a shelter behind the splendor of the name, as crime often assumes or borrows the semblance of virtue. Mental sterility preeminently stamps, the pro-slavery States. In the boundless expanse of the human mind, the slavery region alone gives no signs of a healthy, intellec tual activity. It is a dark speck on the auroral horizon of literary America. Science, scholarship, mechanic in ventions, poetry, arts, in one word, the domain of intui tions, of knowledge, as well as that of imagination, belongs almost exclusively to New England and to the other free States. The South is a withered desert. And as in the desert, only a few plants are brought forth by nature's crea tive power ; so in the slavery land it is only a puny slave literature that thrives. Forcibly bent and circumscribed into a narrow and crooked orbit, the southern intellect has SLAVERY. 215 seemingly lost all susceptibility, it shrinks and wastes in its restriction. It is impossible to rise into the higher domains of science, to think, to combine, to embrace and diversify, when the power of independent investigation is thwarted in man by absolute, narrow, preconceived, and deeply im printed notions. But the South is proud of not produ cing, of not possessing thinkers. , Poets and artists can find no high inspiration and impulse in the clang of chains. In the feverish excitement which surrounds them on all sides, the inner world of imagination dissolves and vanishes. The pro-slavery or the southern intellect has only one issue open, is impressible but by one single phe nomenon, directs its activity towards one single object, embraces and comprehends only one single problem, and that is slavery. Its forced literary efforts are like those of a paralytic for motion. Disgust and sorrow fill the mind in wading through such a miasmatic pool, in witness ing such a defilement of the noblest facttlties. European pauperism — this favorite contrast which sla very champions urge against their opponents — European pauperism has not stifled the activity of mind, has not dried up or cooled the heart-warmth of those devoted to intellectual or scientific pursuits and occupations. Where this social evil is the most deeply rooted, there has ap peared against it the most vigorous scientific, philosophical, and literary reaction. Statesmen, moralists, theologians, economists, poets, artists, in one word, all those whom the all-embracing genius of humanity illuminates and incites in various ways — all those investigate, analyze the evil, try to find a cure, or at least an alleviation ; others, by reality or fiction, depict its blighting infiuence on the poor as well as on the rich. Whatever in other respects may have been the depravation of those who have supported by their pen the abuses of caste or despotic rule, they have never 216 AMERICA AND EUROPE. sunk so low as to proclaim and elucidate scientifically the unavoidable necessity of the moral, mental and material degradation of the masses of the people, or of the paupers, to uphold it as an imperative condition for the proletaries, and for those in a position above them. European science, scholarship, and literature preserve and maintain the sacred rights of mental independent investigation. In the minds, in the souls of those devoted to them, the sciences hover above the world's casualties. Their disciples enter the sanctuary with minds purified from egotistical, parti san, degrading influences. They shield science from being forced to receive the watchword from reckless pas sions. The few who act differently form as rare excep tions in Europe, as do those in the Southern region who dare to maintain the independence of science and letters, against the all-crushing mental and material corrosion of slavery. The recognition of slavery as a cardinal social and po litical element, has destroyed the true statesmanship which was once the glory of the Southern region. The men who engendered the revolutionary epoch and the independence of this country, did not belong to the range of pro-slavery convictions. Patrick Henry, Washington, Jefferson, and the other great patriots of that time, belonged to an anti-slavery epoch. Those men who, as patriots, states men will shine immortal in the annals of our race, those pUots of the new-born nation among the breakers surround ing her first independent movements — these by their creed, their culture, their convictions, belonged to the general Christian, humane, and at that time European civilization. They had nothing in common with the modern exponents of the South. In common with the moral creed of the civUized world, they recognized in slavery an evil, a curse. They admonished their compatriots to arrest, if not to ex tirpate it. For them civic virtue and patriotism were not SLAVERY. 217 condensed into the belief in slavery. Its modern off shoots in the councils of their own States, or in those of the Union, are of a wholly different substance and mould. In vain one searches in them for broad conceptions, for an enlightened and warm patriotism, for generously elated and high-toned feeUngs, for wide-reaching ideas. Never in history can be pointed out such a rapid decomposition and degradation of the mental faculties, as well as of no bleness of convictions, as is found in the juxtaposition of the men of the anti-slavery times by the side of their actual successors. The race, the blood is the same ; — ^but conditions, events have changed, defiled manhood and mind. Such a degeneracy, unprecedented in its rapidity, more and more thoroughly permeates the Southern society. And no wonder. The first generation of the heroes of American independence encompassed in their minds the world, with its elevated aspirations. Their successors began to cut themselves willingly off from all communion with the generous and all-embracing interests of mankind, concentrating all their mental powers and material re sources upon the organization of a social state and polity, outlawed by reason, by the moral sense, by the tendencies of the age. Quick and in widening circles extends the corrosion. Now the younger generation distances already in virulence and blind worship of slavery, those who first abandoned the glorious and luminous path of their revolu tionary sires. Its exasperation against freedom and hu man rights, its hostility to discussion, its indifference to wards ennobling and fructifying culture, increases in pro portion to the space of time which separates it from the forefathers. Those drew their wisdom from the fountain common to the world's civilization. Now the deteriorated, secluded social organism makes public education more and 10 218 AMERICA AND EUROPE. more divergent from that of other civilized communities, more and more circumscribed, compressed. In this man ner pro-slavery education is void of elasticity, of generality, of free choice, is trammelled in its expansion. The aim publicly asserted is, to elevate slave-breeders, slavery up holders. The avowed tendency is to turn all science up side down. The mental and moral training of the youth is to become in harmony with the social institution, A conclusion logical in itself, and therefore producing re peated appeals from divines, professors, politicians, and the press, for the production of new sources or books for tuition in sciences, history, religion and morality, all to be made in accordance with slavery. Such a proceeding is not new in the history of the attempts and efforts to degrade reason, to blight heart and soul. It originated with the Jesuits, In order to de prave the youthful minds, the Jesuits, in their educational establishments, adjust the sciences to suit their purpose. Ethics, religion, history, positive facts and phenomena, truth recognized by ages, are perverted and form the venom instilled as knowledge. So they have poisoned generation after generation. But in the end Jesuitism, Jesuits, and their tuition are placed without the pale of civilization ; and human reason, human freedom, over clouded, darkened and arrested for a time, emerge victo rious from the deadly struggle. Such are the characteristics and the criteria of slavery, as the element on which is buUt this social structure. Such is the condition into which it drags its supporters, its champions. Thus covered with sores, the Southern body politic loudly proclaims its superiority in all respects over the citizens of the free States, and, above all, over those of New England, The aggregate of habits, senti ments, creative, productive energies, of intelligence mani- SLAVERY. 219 fested by the freeman, by the New Englander, is in salient contrast with those in which, generally or habitually, etio lates the man of the South. There is not one mental faculty, not one attribute of genuine manhood, in which the Southerner is justified in claiming any superiority over the character of the masses of the Northern, Western, and Eastern free populations. Because the freeman or the Yankee does not spend his time in idleness, because on def erence to the individuality of others he bases his own per sonal honor und security, and thus does not recur to the mean and brutal usage of concealed weapons, it is not a proof that he lacks genuine courage. A civilized man does not consider fighting as the paramount duty. His life, his activity is devoted to other pursuits. He prefers to study, to enlighten his mind, to work, to plough, to be occupied industrially in manufactures and workshops, to build towns, mUls, railroads, farms, to live peacefully, raise well-bred and intelligent families ; in one word, to honor humanity in a true manner, rather than by assailing, kill ing and murdering his fellow-men. The civilized man resents a personal, wanton outrage by the self-consciousness of moral superiority, of that of mind and intellect. All this does not exclude courage. The sons of New-England shed the first blood in the American Revolution. No chivalry surpassed the heroes of Bunker Hill. The Yan kees numbered the most largely in the defence of inde pendence, and they were the last to furl their flag in that terrible struggle. They never disgraced their country by cowardice. They are men with spirit, courage, endurance, and deep love of liberty, and they remain faithful to this their common mother. New England, with the free States, and their antago nists, the Southern slave-holding communities, started as two mighty meteors from one and the same point ; but 220 AMERICA AND EUROPE. each took an opposite course. The one ascending into higher and purer regions of light, freedom and culture ; the other whirling down into the chaotic night of preju dices, abuses, and misconstructions of duties, obligations, rights and mutual relations. And the fallen, tarnished meteor, having lost faith in the original and common es sence, envious of the superiority of the brilliant one, ac cuses it of fanaticism. But what is fanaticism, and what makes a fanatic ? The initiation of human kind into an ascending and superior moral, social and political condition, has been al ways accomplished by self-conscious, unyielding minds, liberating themselves at their own risk and peril from mental or social bondage, liberating their individual deep and ardent convictions from subjection to established, worn-out notions or forms. Such fiery minds, identifying themselves and the world around them with the sacred and sublime ideas which they cherish, have been commonly called fanatics. Such fanatics have unhinged and moved onward the world and single nations. They have dragged human society out of the mire, and given to it a fresh and invigorating impulse. Such a state of mind is called a fanaticised one by those averse to any emancipation, amelioration or progress. Christ and the apostles were criminal fanatics to the orthodox high-priests, the Sanhe drim, the Pharisees. Fanaticism extends to all sub jects which deeply move the human mind and heart. There are fanatics in religion as well as in patriotism, in the love of liberty, in science, in arts. Fanatics for the disenthralment of human reason, were the reformers of the 16th century. Fanatic for science ¦was Galileo ; for po etry, Tasso ; for philosophy, Bruno, Vanmi, Campanella. All those who sacrifice themselves for an idea, successful or not, an idea encompassing an emancipation of whatever SLAVERY. 221 nature, are considered by the vulgar mind as fanatics. Such, in the eyes of their adversaries, were the heroes of the American and of the French Revolution. So fanatics are now those who rise to oppose the progress, the exten sion of slavery ; who devote themselves to rescue from ig norance, to redeem their kindred, their white countrymen and their former colaborers in the struggle for national in dependence. Fanatics are those who above the transient conven tions made between men recognize the prevalence of a higher law ; a law which for the religious mind is of di vine emanation, which for the moralist proceeds from the inward pure essence of our existence. But in pagan as well as Christian times, whatever might have been the con ception of Divinity, and of the relation of man to it, whatever might have been the moral standard of society, the variously manifested but nevertheless uninterrupted and unequivocal tendency of legislators, and even often of despots, was to make the laws more or less harmonize with what was recognized as the higher law. And woe to the society or nation, when its laws oppose these higher sources. Slavery with its withering breath reaches the hearth stone of the freeman of the Free States. It corrupts there in various ways the public mind and individual character. In the generality of men, passions, interests, ambition, often get the upper hand of the most generous primitive im pulses and principles. Temptation often proves irresisti ble, and the rule of common sense as well as of morality is to avert, to keep temptation out of reacli, Thus very naturally the better part of the people in northern com munities shudder at the contact, and the deleterious influ ence of slavery upon their citizens. Thus very naturally the sense of the people craves to circumscribe slavery 222 AMERICA AND EUROPE. within absolute and limited precincts, to lessen its power in the general political relations which concern the whole Union. Many are the examples of men of the North who embraced the political career, pure and unstain ed, who would otherwise remain true and faithful to freedom — this vital principle of the American body politic — and to themselves; but who, hardened by poUtical struggles, gnawed by ambition, give the lie to themselves, abandon and deny what once they recognized as the su preme good, and sell their conscience to the support of the pro-slavery party. The betrayed must mourn the loss and fall of one from among them, and they are justified in at tempting to preserve others in future from pollution. And the only way to reach this aim is to render the slavery power less predominant in its action on the common father land. Manifold are the enticements which generally car ry away man from the path of duty ; and those growing out of the community between the free and the slave States are diversified in their action. To them some yield from debility of mind, some by the weakness of an otherwise good heart, others by want of character or obtuseness of intellect, others by fear, others again by egotistical calcu lation bearing on their ambitious schemes or on commer cial pecuniary gains and advantages. And in this man ner slavery most sensibly wounds, affects and vitiates the free communities. The principle of justice, its character, its administration, becomes daily more and more denaturalized, alloyed, and perverted, by the alUance of freedom with bondage. Often does it happen that the Northern judge, when the interests of humanity and freedom clash with those of slavery, twists and tortures the law to wrest from it constructions and definitions favorable to the latter. Often the clear est principle of law, as estabUshed and consecrated by ju- SLAVERY. 223 dicial science, as well as by the successive acquiescence and common use of civil society, if contrary to slavehold ing interests, is made nugatory by the decision of a partial judge. The spirit of eternal justice is then banished from the law, and the dry and dead letter loads and overturns the scales. Pauperism has not hitherto withered and blackened the sanctuary of justice in the majority of European states. When the two opposite interests — that of the poor and destitute, and that of the rich — are brought into litigation, the judge would rather put the most favorable construc tion of the law on the side of the poor. Above all France, Prussia, and several other German states, preserve unsul lied the impartiality of judicial decisions. On three cardinal columns reposes slavery in its own home. The ministers of various confessions, the press, and the public leading men — ^whose influence on the masses is proportional to popular passion, shortsightedness, indo lence and ignorance — ^form this triad. They stimulate the pro-slavery ardor, they justify and reconcile it with the duties of man and of citizen ; they blunt the consciences of the people and harden them against the outburst of gene rous, humane and religious feeUngs. The ministers, those teachers of religion and morals, consecrate by the authority of their example and of their words, a state of society which is a continual outrage against both. In no other Christian country do the min isters of religion exercise such a wide-spread influence as they do over the people at large in the United States. But pusillanimity or worldly interests make them subservient to the imperious commands of slavery. Thus they have iden tified the cause of their God with the cause of bondage and of chattelhood. They sustain it in the pulpit and in various theological and would-be biblical writings and dis- 224 AMERICA AND EUEOPE. quisitions ; not to mention and enlarge upon the thorough absence of religious instruction among the slaves, about the immorality which must necessarily prevail among those victims, abandoned by God and man. Difficult to be sure it is for the ministers to speak and expatiate about divine love, mercy, and justice, before those to whom no love, no mercy, no justice is shown, to whom the quality of man is contested. At the marriage of the slaves the religious rite becomes degraded by the minister to a ludi crous formality, and often even this formality is authori tatively dispensed with, without arousing the admonition or the holy wrath of the divines. The promiscuity of sexes between the blacks is not only tolerated but stim ulated by the masters, who do not care about the sac ramental ceremony, provided that children are procreated and the stock increased. At the best, the master himself ties or unties the matrimonial knot among his chattels. The ministers are silent as to the birth of mulattoes, who necessarily must be the fruits of adultery; neither do they thunder in the name of God against the sale of those mu lattoes by their parents or the nearest kindred. Those privileged depositaries, and guardians of what they call the Word of God, torture it in order to make it bear witness in favor of the biblical justification of the enslave ment of the colored race. Those apostles and expounders of the gospel forget the words of St. Paul to the Athe nians : " That God has made of one blood all races of men to dwell on the face of the earth." On it dwells the black race. If that race might even have been doomed to ser vitude by the curse of Noah, — in the true spirit of Chris tian salvation, the black race was redeemed together with the white one, by the sacrifice on Calvary, from previous hereditary sins. If there is any truth in the theory of re demption, then the death of Christ atoned for the sin in SLAVEEY. 225 Eden, and for that committed on the slopes of Mount Ara rat as well. Or if, according to the Southern science, the black race is different from the white, and inferior to it psy chologically, then even the simulacreum of religion ought not to be thrown before it. If the Africans, children of the same God, descend from the same common ancestor as the planters, and are judged worthy to be embraced in the sacrifice of redemption, if before the majesty of God they are endowed with all human attributes, and deserve to be admitted into Christian communion, — ^then the more do they possess human rights and attributes in worldly rela tions. A religious Christian despoiling his spiritual breth ren of their inborn rights, commits religious and moral fratricide, commits the deed of Cain, and the clergy which sanctifies such a spoliation take sides with Cain. Moreover, in no way can American slavery be justified, and still less considered as being authorized by the Scrip tures. Slavery among the Hebrews was different in its origin from that established here. Neither Moses nor the Scriptures maintain that such or such race is predestined to be held in bondage by another. The ten command ments do not mention slavery or slaves. Jews were slaves one of another ; Hebrew servants were bought, as says the Bible. In Egypt the Jews had no slaves, but were en slaved themselves. When they subdued other tribes, or conquered them, they transformed their prisoners into slaves, as very often they in their turn were enslaved by the contrary fortunes of war. Nowhere does the Bible speak of slavery as of a social institution, but as of one of domestic economy. The character of slavery among the Hebrews was accidental and transient, as it was among all the other nations of that time. American slave ry is a permanent, unredeemable, social state. Jewish slaves, of the sanie origin, at certain periods were liberated. 10* 226 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. Lepers and leprosy existed among the Jews, and the Scrip tures speak of .it more than of slavery. Should it there from be concluded that the leper and leprosy have bibli cal authority for their necessary existence ? Slavery at the time of Christ and the apostles was of the same character as that above mentioned. Christ and the apostles considered it as a transient human evil, and they were devoted to extirpating the cardinal and perma nent ones. Teaching brotherly love, equality before God, they undermined slavery. Christ, Peter, Paul, and the other apostles, were mechanical working-men, operatives, and thus paid tribute to free labor. The triumph of their doctrine in its highest purity, as conceived by them, in cluded the cessation of all kind of social and domestic op pressions. Further, brotherly love, if realized, destroys war, and thus the nursery of ancient slavery would have disappeared. The Roman clergy in America, by sustaining slavery in the most distant manner, act — even if possible — ^more revoltingly than the ministers of the other denominations. At the side of the original Christian doctrine common to all those confessions and denaturalized by them all, the Roman clergy recognizes absolute obedience to the hier archy, to the orders issued by the supreme heads of that Church, Siding with slavery in America, the priesthood abandons the multiplied examples given by the clergy at the time of the invasion of the Roman Empire, Then the Church did not spare moral and material efforts, and used its powerful spiritual authority to diminish slavery, to foster the emancipation of slaves. Now the branch of the Roman Church in this country puts aside the various de cisions of councils and synods, and flatly disobeys the pos itive admonitions and orders of various Popes, thus incur ring directly or indirectly the penalty of excommunication. SLAVEEY. 227 The Roman clergy forget the explicit words of Pope St. Gregory the First, admonishing manumission : " Homines quos ab initio natura creavit liberos, — et jus gentium jugo substituit servitutis ; " that clergy deliberately oppose the pastoral letters of Paul III., of Urban VIII., of Bene dict XIV., above all that of Pius IL, who specially blames the conduct of those who reduce negroes to slave ry. Finally, the clergy directly violate the prohibitions contained in the Encyclique issued in 1839 by Pope Greg ory XVI., who is not celebrated in history for mildness, or for any liberal propensities. This most severe absolutist and reactionary Pope, " in virtue of his apostolic authori ty, condemns those who reduce blacks into servitude, or buy and seU them ; and by the same authority he abso lutely prohibts and interdicts all ecclesiastics from ventur ing to maintain that this traffic in blacks is permitted under any pretext or color whatsoever, or to preach or teach in public or in private in any way whatever any thing contrary to his apostolic letters." The press of the pro-slavery States is a melancholy evidence how the most beneficial agency and lever of civi lization and freedom may become a degraded instrumen- taUty of blind and violent passions. It shows how the misused faculty of reasoning can become nefarious and pernicious when enlisted in favor of falsehood and outrage. The Southern press, the most unrelenting apostle of slave ry, by its every-day action strengthens the prejudices and emasculates the minds of the credulous and uncultivated masses. If nothing else were at hand, in the Southern press one can study and become perfectly familiar with the intellectual aberrations in which slavery entangles and hurries away its confessors. Its perusal, repugnant in itself, is nevertheless the most instructive with regard to the deterioration of social moraUty and manly honor by 228 AMEEICA AND EUEOPE. the baneful workings of this institution. All its tenets are fully exposed by the Southern press. It not only mir rors the state of opinion, but it is as a focus from which radiate the most extreme and vehement incentives. It evokes, stirs up the most unbounded and hidden passions of those who look to her for direction and advice. It encourages all the violences offered to the laws of jus tice and civility. It preaches and incites to lawless ness, to the murder and assassination of those who con sider slavery as a social and political evil, as an institu tion degrading more the master than his chattel. Thus even the murder of inoffensive teachers is at times held up to the Southern public as a signal service rendered to soci ety. The press carefully nurses all the perversions of sci ence, of polity, of public and domestic economy, adminis tering poison daily and in large quantities. To its ebulli tions are to be principally ascribed the low moral tone, the mental prostration of the Southern population. The exceptions to this general character of the pro- slavery press aro few and rare. Still fewer are the instan ces that the cooler and dignified organs sternly rebuke or repudiate fellowship with those who sacrilegiously prosti tute the elevated mission of the press. What must be the society in which such a press can spring up, and which endures, supports, and patronizes it ? The politicians, the public men, the statesmen of slave- ¦ ry, belong to the same category, and go hand in hand with the press. As if by reciprocal compact, they do the ut most, they vie with each other in distorting the judgment of their fellow-citizens. If some of them, as well as of the members of the press, are under what must be believed to be an insane exaltation, by far the greatest number foment deliberately the prejudices of the people, as an easier way to increase their personal influence, to secure the leader- SLAVEEY. 229 ship in the district, the State, or that of the whole party. If ever history shall preserve their names from oblivion, it will consign them to irretrievable condemnation. The significance of America in the development, in the march of the Christian world, is fully and exclusively em bodied in the Free States. Humanity, history, philos ophy, civilization, ignore absolutely or repudiate the slave ry connection. Without the Free States, America would lose the briUiant halo which marks her as the harbinger of the future, as the foremost among the nations of the earth. The Slave States have hitherto passed unnoticed under the fascination emanating from the holy labarum unfurled and held in the hand of the intelligent, active, laborious, self-improving freemen of the Union. The Slave States, separated and alone, would sink at the best into absolute insignificancy, would become of less interest than are the Papuans or Polynesians for the great association of man kind. If by an unforeseen calamity. Free America should become palsied in its onward course, if ever slavery policy shovdd prevail in the councils of the united nation, — then her phenomenal apparition on the historical horizon will be an abortion, a social mistake. Then she will stand there branded for future generations and future ages, — the sign of disgrace burning for eternity on the brow of this faUen genius of humanity. 230 AMERICA AUTD EUEOPE. CHAPTEE VI. MANIFEST DESTINY. Nations, like indiriduals, have destinies to fulfil. Seldom individuals, however, as well as nations, have had a clear comprehension of the task allotted to them. Only when their course was run could it be said — ^that their destinies were ascertained. Hitherto, science, embracing in a general view and comprehension the tasks variously fulfiUed by nations and by representative men, has explained their respective desti nies. Science has unveiled mysteries, disentangled and elucidated combinations of events compUcated, and for the most part otherwise incomprehensible ; events by which have been unfolded the destinies, the mission, the charac ter of various epochs and peoples. Science has found out the meaning, and pointed out the influence of the various conquests and invasions on the general march and development of the human race ; science has explained the existence of a Cjrrus, an Alexander, and the insatiable conquering avidity of the Romans, and thus has mirrored their destinies. These various conquests have mediated the intercourse, and dra'wn nations nearer to each other. They were terrible and rude, but nevertheless they were the agencies and channels of civUization. They were a bond of union. Alexander opened the door to the heUenization of Asia, and centuries afterwards Christian MASIFEST DESTINY. 231 doctrine and science profited by the unity of langnage pre- TaUing since Alexander in those Greco-Asiatic i^ions. The Roman conquests, overhaoling the world, bronght and mixed together in the inter^fe of general culture, nations s