Page:The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.djvu/110

104 equality and general privileges, while they stubbornly refuse to permit others to enjoy in peace a single fancied indulgence or taste, unless taken in their company, although nature, education and habits have all unfitted them to participate, and their presence would be sure to defeat what they could not, in the nature of things, enjoy.

The considerate, and modest, and just-minded man, of whatever social class, will view all this differently. In asserting his own rights, he respects those of others; in indulging his own tastes, he is willing to admit there may be superior; in pursuing his own course, in his own manner, he knows his neighbor has an equal right to do the same; and, most of all, is he impressed with the great moral truths, that flatterers are inherently miscreants, that fallacies never fail to bring their punishments, and that the empire of God is reason.

ON REPRESENTATION.

Representation is the vital principle of all free governments, with the exception of those which rule over unusually small territories. A pure democracy infers institutions under which the people, in primary assemblies, enact their own laws; a system of which the good is questionable under any circumstances, and which is evidently impracticable in large communities. The governments of the several states of this Union, with some slight modifications, are representative democracies, and as the federal government receives its distinctive character from the states, themselves, the