Page:Americanisation - a letter to John Stuart Mill.djvu/18

 Democratic absolutism of "a tyrant majority" as it is to the Autocratic absolutism of an Emperor elected by universal suffrage and the ballot. "Englishmen," as Mr. Emerson remarks, are not to be led by a phrase; they want a working plan—a working machine—a working constitution." Hence the strong aversion they have always manifested to Gallican and American ideas when any attempt has been made to incorporate them in our institutions. Their first inquiry is: How have those theories worked in America and France? So far as the United States was concerned, it was easy to give a plausible answer to this question a few years ago. But the civil war which broke out in 1861 gave a terrible blow to the theory of American perfectibility, as well as to those arguments in favour of "Americanising our institutions" which, the advanced Liberals naturally founded on that theory.

It was only a few months before the fall of Fort Sumter that Mr. Bright, in a speech he made at Wakefield, drew the following contrast between the working of English and American institutions:—

The majority of your "Westminster constituents, who