Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/12

6 could scarcely find a place; while it was severed from the Old World by an ocean which steam has now narrowed, but which was broad enough at first to emancipate the New World from old influences, and give human progress a fresh spring.

By the same exodus, which brought Christianity out of the State Churches, society escaped from feudalism into a system founded on equality and justice. This social transition Europe for two centuries of abortive revolution has been striving in vain to effect. The feudal aristocracy has in some countries been overthrown; but from the inability of untrained communities, with dangerous masses of destitution and with no moral stay stronger than that of a state religion, to carry on self-government, the nations have escaped from aristocracy only to become the prey of despotism, supported by great standing armies, which now arrests the progress of humanity here, and from which there is at present no visible escape, though we may be sure that God, who has not made the world for standing armies and their masters, will in time find a way.

The Western States of America are a colony of New England. The original company of pilgrims is the seed from which the whole tree has grown. No creative monad, imagined by science, could be more pregnant with a new order of things than that little band of exiles; no moment in history is more solemn or more big with consequences than that in which the colony on its arrival in the New World made a set of laws for itself—laws for self-government—rational, unfeudal laws.

The little Puritan settlement is lost in a great nation, and the narrow Puritan religion has expanded, or is fast expanding, into something more comprehensive, though