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12 Finally, it remains to consider specifically the political theories then in vogue in their relation to the individual. In this country, it was the period of the equality of man and individuality in the development of the type. It was generally believed that the world had hitherto been governed too much,—that the day of caste, and even class, was over and gone; and finally, that America was a species of vast modern melting-pot of humanity, in which, within a comparatively short period of time, the characteristics of all branches of Indo–Aryan origin would resolve themselves. A new type would emerge,—the American. These theories were also in their consequences far-reaching. Practically, 1853 antedates all our present industrial organizations so loudly in evidence,—the multifarious trades-unions which now divide the population of the United States into what are known as the "masses" and the "classes." As recently as a century ago, it used to be said of the French army under the Empire, that every soldier carried the baton of the Field-Marshal in his knapsack. And this ideal of equality and individuality was fixed in the American mind.

Not that I for a moment mean to imply that in my belief the middle of the last century, or the twenty years anterior to the Civil War, was a species of golden age in our American annals. On the contrary, it was, as I remember it, a phase of development very open to criticism; and that in many respects. It was crude, self-conscious and self-assertive; provincial and formative,