Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/38

32 for it in the most aristocratic journals of this country. The United States having, fortunately for them, no real metropolis, there is no metropolitan press ruling the opinion of the whole country, and itself liable to the secret influences of the central government and of the circles of the capital. Nor is the press in America so powefulpowerful [sic] either for good or evil as it is here. The government being itself the authentic organ of the popular will does not stand so much in awe of self-constituted tribunes of the people.

Without a master, without a governing class, this great community is a law to itself. That it is, indeed, a law to itself, that American freedom is not anarchy, anyone who has seen the country must know. If the persons and the property of men were not secure, how could industry thrive? Whence could the wealth arise? In no monarchy or aristocracy, I venture to say, is the reverence for law among the people so deep. If you asked Americans for what they were fighting, nine out of ten would tell you that they were fighting to vindicate the law. And surely a great community which is a law to itself is a glorious thing: not only in itself, but still more in what it denotes. It marks a great step in the progress of humanity. It marks a great advance in the influence of Christianity. It confirms the Christian’s faith in man.

There had been nothing like it before in history. Greece and Rome, though incomparably superior in their moral and intellectual productions to the monarchies of the East, though presenting in the intensity of their patriotism the narrow prototype of an ampler fellowship to come, were, as was said before, really republics of masters, the mass of the people being slaves. The free cities of Italy, of Germany, of Flanders, produced in virtue of their freedom