Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/34

28 combination for the public good. The more a community can afford to dispense with government the more Christian it must be, and no great country has yet been able to dispense with government so much as America.

No man of any depth of character will worship democracy any more than he will worship monarchy or aristocracy. All alike are embodiments of force: monarchy is the rule of one over all; aristocracy, of the few over the many; democracy, of the many over the few. An unjust democracy is perhaps the most deeply wicked of all governments, because so many must be implicated in the injustice. It is a fearful moral evil, compared with which a tyranny may be almost regarded as a physical visitation. And, at the best, democracy, like the other forms of governnmentgovernment [sic], has special vices of its own: it is beset by faction, by corruption, by popular passion, by demagogism, by envious ostracism of merit, by oppression of classes which are not numerically strong. American democracy has not been free from these things, or from the odious self-worship of the sovereign people. We have already glanced at the bad influence, flowing from the same source, which is visible in social and domestic life. I can well understand that men of dignified and refined character may shrink from politics, and wish, as the philosopher says, “to stand under the wall while the cloud of dust whirls by;” though I cannot deem it the greatest of evils that the highest intellect of the country should not be devoted to work which, under ordinary circumstances, is very far from being the highest. The evil has been aggravated by the revolutionary bias given to the national character through the rupture with the English monarchy, by the influx of French Jacobinism in connection with the same event,