THE PERILS OF DISUNION. 261 ing with an heroic emotion, lays in ashes its ancient cities rather than yield them up to an invader! Worthy flowers to be cast by a nation in the way of that Emperor. PETER BAYNE. Note 112. THE PERILS OF DISUNION. THE political prosperity which this country has attained, and which it now enjoys, it has acquired mainly through the instrumentality of the present government. While this agent continues, the capacity of attaining to still higher degrees of prosperity exists also. We have while this lasts, a political life capable of beneficial exertion, with power to resist or overcome misfortunes, to sustain us against the ordinary accidents of human affairs, and to promote, by active efforts, every public interest. But dismemberment strikes at the very being which preserves these faculties. It would lay its rude and ruthless hand on this great agent itself; it would sweep away, not only what we possess, but all the power of regaining lost, or acquiring new possessions; it would leave the country, not only bereft of its prosperity and happiness, but without limbs, or organs, or faculties by which to exert itself hereafter in the pursuit of that prosperity and happiness. Other misfortunes may be borne, or their effects overcome. If disastrous war should sweep our commerce from the ocean, another generation may renew it: if it exhaust our treasury, future industry may replenish it: if it desolate and lay waste our fields, still under a new cultivation they will grow green again, and ripen to future harvests. It were but a trifle even if the walls of yonder capitol were to crumble, if its lofty pillars should fall, and its gorgeous decorations be covered by the dust of the valley. All these might be rebuilt, but who shall reconstruct the fabric of demolished government? Who shall rear again the well-propor tioned columns of constitutional liberty? Who shall frame together the skilful architecture which unites national sovereignty with state rights, individual security, and public prosperity? No, if these columns fall, they will not be raised again. Like the Coliseum and the Parthenon, they will be destined to a mournful, a melancholy immortality. Bitterer tears, however, will flow over them than were ever shed over the monuments of Roman or Grecian art for they will be the remnants of a more glorious edifice than Greece or Rome ever saw-the edifice of Constitutional American liberty. DANIEL WEBSTER. THEORY AND PRACTICE IN GOVERNMENT. THERE is a very fashionable habit among men of waiving a proposition on the ground that it is mere theory. One would think to hear some people talk that if one could just succeed in inventing a practice without a theory, affairs would roll along as smoothly as the planets around the sun. Unfortunately it cannot be done. There is a bad theory at the bottom of every bad practice, and a good theory at the bottom of every good practice, and the most that can be said against a theory of human affairs is that it must seem likely to meet an actual want and then must be tested by faithful practical experiments. By their fruits ye shall know them. But will any American say that the system of equal rights and majority rule, a government of all by all, is not needed or has not been tested? It stands to-day triumphant against the most tremendous odds that Europe and the British Isles could send in the shape of forty years' import of their lower classes, ignorant, alien, aggressive, and dazzled with sudden and ill-comprehended freedom; and amidst all the conditions of the commotion and abuse from this and other causes the sober thought of the nation has never once taken a glance toward any other system of law THE STABILITY OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. 263 and order. "Ah, but," replies the Conservative side, "with negroes it is no go. You do not understand the negro." The truth is, nobody has had to correct so many or such radical mistakes concerning the negro as the Southerners have themselves. I speak as one of them. We did not believe he would work of his own accord until we saw him do it. We did not believe he would study until we saw him do that. We still rejected the idea that he could learn anything more than the mere rudiments of an education; when we saw him graduate from colleges we could scarcely believe our eyes. In short, we had not supposed he ever would or could qualify as an intelligent citizen. But for all that it is almost wholly due to the educational missions carried on by people in the South who did not, according to the belief on our side, understand the negro, that the South is to-day indebted for a corps of sixteen thousand colored teachers for its colored youth, and other thousands in other callings leading the thought and lifting the errors of their race. All that is really necessary to understand about the negro is, that he with all his differences, be they many or be they few, is a man of like passions with ourselves. GEORGE W. CABLE. THE STABILITY OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. Note 113. (Abridged.) WHEN We despairingly talk of general declension and loss of human virtue and piety, let us remember that, true as it may be of special communities, it is never true of the whole world or the whole race. There may be no country of its size now in existence as cultivated and as marked by genius and refinement as Greece was in its palmy though brief life; but when Greece was great and glorious the ordinary humanity of the globe was grossly barbarous. It is the whole world taken together that alone shows what steady gains liberty, education, and morality are making. It is not a Pericles or a Phidias here and there, a Numa, a Raphael, a Shakespeare, a Howard now and then, that shows where the general level of humanity stands. It is not the waterspouts, but the tide, that we must watch, if we would estimate the rising level and upward spring of humanity. The times are marked among merely literary men without moral enthusiasm or faith in man's spiritual origin, by new and increasing suspicions of the worth and durability of our democratic institutions. Unless humanity is stronger, better, safer, when it is trusted, when it is free, wholly equal before the law, than when it is doubted, feared, overawed, and guided by its superiors, then democracy is a ruinous, a short-lived, a death-struck fancy and folly. Such it seems to Englishmen, who regard us as on the rapid road to decline and certain to bring up against a constitutional king or a despot. Such it seems to some American capitalists as they see the threatening cloud of Communism slowly rising and blackening West and South. Certainly the people are not yet very wise in guiding government, or organizing industries; and if these, the ordinary tests of national success, were the true measure of our rightful hopes, then there were ground enough for anxiety and misgiving. But the wonder of America is the spread of self-respecting intelligence, aspiration, and private independence: the extent of family life in convenient dwellings: the nearly universal habit of reading: the attention given to education the voluntary support of religion: the freedom of thinking and the free and patient relations between the foreign and native races. Never before were the masses of a nation in such essential equality of rights and privileges, in such circumstances of intelligence and aspiration, in such freedom with such order. And this is all due to the national faith in humanity which alone can think freedom safe. It is because American democracy, in a sense in which kings were never entitled to use the words, exists "by grace of God," that it is to be trusted, that it is safe and will out THE EXAMPLE OF WASHINGTON. 265 live its inexperience. It has produced common blessings never equalled elsewhere. Its principles are popular. They are based on the ethics and faith of the Christian religion; and they will conquer all doubts and survive all misgivings. H. W. BELLOWS. Note 114. THE EXAMPLE OF WASHINGTON. ONE of the strongest muniments to save us from all harm is the example of Washington. Far be it from me to raise up a visionary idol. I have lived too long to trust in mere panegyric. Fulsome eulogy of any man raises with me only a smile. Indiscriminate laudation is equivalent to falsehood. Washington, as I understand him, was gifted with nothing ordinarily defined as genius, and he had not had great advantages of education. His intellectual powers were clear, but not much above the average men of his time. What knowledge he possessed had been gained from association with others in his long public career, rather than by secluded study. As an actor he scarcely distinguished himself by more than one brilliant stroke. As a writer the greater part of his correspondence discloses nothing more than average natural good sense. On the field of battle his powers pale before the splendid strategy of Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet, notwithstanding all these deductions, the thread of his life from youth to age displays a maturity of judgment, a consistency of principle, a steadiness of action, a discriminating wisdom, and a purity of purpose hardly found united to the same extent in any other instance I can recall in history. Of his entire disinterestedness in all his pecuniary relations with the public, it is needless for me to speak; more than all, and above all, he was master of himself. If there be one quality more than another in his character which may exercise a useful control over the men of the |