Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/39

Rh fruits of civilisation, as well as of industry, far nobler and more abundant than those which were produced by great feudal kingdoms. But their liberties were mere burgher liberties, deeply tainted with the tyranny of guild over guild, of city over city, of the inhabitants of the cities over the peasantry beneath their sway; based upon no broad principles of equity or respect for human rights, and doomed by their vices to an extinction which we mourn for the sake of art, but which we cannot call unjust. Nor had these municipalities ever entirely cast off the idea of allegiance to a suzerain, or pronounced in unfaltering accents the name of freedom. The republicanism of Switzerland was rather a geographical accident than an effort of humanity to rise to a nobler state; and this also was deeply tainted with aristocracy and with the domination of canton over canton. The republic of Holland was the noble but transient offspring of a rebellion against a foreign master, whose tyranny provoked resistance and whose overthrow left the provinces for a time without a sovereign. The nation of the Old World which has approached most nearly to a commonwealth, though under monarchial and aristocratical forms, is that of which, in the hour when the love of the public good was strongest in the hearts of its citizens and their political character at its grandest elevation, the American Republic was born.

In its external relations, also, the American commonwealth was a new birth of time. It kept no standing army, and, as far as the Free States were concerned, cherished no thought of conquest, though the military spirit had been excited, and a somewhat thrasonical element introduced into the national education and character by the first Revolutionary war. It was the Democratic