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The argument of the matter is extensive, and, we admit, by no means
all on one side. What we shall offer will be far, far from sufficient.
But while leaving unsaid much that should properly even prepare
the way for the treatment of this many-sided question of political
liberty, equality, or republicanism--leaving the whole history and
consideration of the feudal plan and its products, embodying humanity,
its politics and civilization, through the retrospect of past time,
(which plan and products, indeed, make up all of the past, and a large
part of the present)--leaving unanswer'd, at least by any specific and
local answer, many a well-wrought argument and instance, and many a
conscientious declamatory cry and warning--as, very lately, from an
eminent and venerable person abroad[24]--things, problems, full of
doubt, dread, suspense, (not new to me, but old occupiers of many an
anxious hour in city's din, or night's silence,) we still may give a
page or so, whose drift is opportune. Time alone can finally answer
these things. But as a substitute in passing, let us, even if
fragmentarily, throw forth a short direct or indirect suggestion of
the premises of that other plan, in the new spirit, under the new
forms, started here in our America.

As to the political section of Democracy, which introduces and breaks
ground for further and vaster sections, few probably are the minds,
even in these republican States, that fully comprehend the aptness of
that phrase, "THE GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE
PEOPLE," which we inherit from the lips of Abraham Lincoln; a formula
whose verbal shape is homely wit, but whose scope includes both the
totality and all minutiae of the lesson.

The People! Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion,
is full of vulgar contradictions and offence, man, viewed in the
lump, displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront to the merely
educated classes. The rare, cosmical, artist-mind, lit with the
Infinite, alone confronts his manifold and oceanic qualities--but
taste, intelligence and culture, (so-called,) have been against the
masses, and remain so. There is plenty of glamour about the most
damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the
feudal and dynastic world over there, with its _personnel_ of lords
and queens and courts, so well-dress'd and so handsome. But the People
are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred.

Literature, strictly consider'd, has never recognized the People,
and, whatever may be said, does not to-day. Speaking generally, the
tendencies of literature, as hitherto pursued, have been to make
mostly critical and querulous men. It seems as if, so far, there were
some natural repugnance between a literary and professional life,
and the rude rank spirit of the democracies. There is, in later
literature, a treatment of benevolence, a charity business, rife
enough it is true; but I know nothing more rare, even in this country,
than a fit scientific estimate and reverent appreciation of the
People--of their measureless wealth of latent power and capacity,
their vast, artistic contrasts of lights and shades--with, in America,
their entire reliability in emergencies, and a certain breadth of
historic grandeur, of peace or war, far surpassing all the vaunted
samples of book-heroes, or any _haut ton_ coteries, in all the records
of the world.

The movements of the late secession war, and their results, to any
sense that studies well and comprehends them, show that popular
democracy, whatever its faults and dangers, practically justifies
itself beyond the proudest claims and wildest hopes of its
enthusiasts. Probably no future age can know, but I well know, how
the gist of this fiercest and most resolute of the world's war-like
contentions resided exclusively in the unnamed, unknown rank and
file; and how the brunt of its labor of death was, to all essential
purposes, volunteer'd. The People, of their own choice,
fighting, dying for their own idea, insolently attack'd by the
secession-slave-power, and its very existence imperil'd. Descending
to detail, entering any of the armies, and mixing with the private
soldiers, we see and have seen august spectacles. We have seen the
alacrity with which the American-born populace, the peaceablest
and most good-natured race in the world, and the most personally
independent and intelligent, and the least fitted to submit to the
irksomeness and exasperation of regimental discipline, sprang, at the
first tap of the drum, to arms--not for gain, nor even glory, nor to
repel invasion--but for an emblem, a mere abstraction--for the life,
_the safety of the flag_. We have seen the unequal'd docility and
obedience of these soldiers. We have seen them tried long and long by
hopelessness, mismanagement, and by defeat; have seen the incredible
slaughter toward or through which the armies (as at first
Fredericksburg, and afterward at the Wilderness,) still unhesitatingly
obey'd orders to advance. We have seen them in trench, or crouching
behind breastwork, or tramping in deep mud, or amid pouring rain or
thick-falling snow, or under forced marches in hottest summer (as on
the road to get to Gettysburg)--vast suffocating swarms, divisions,
corps, with every single man so grimed and black with sweat and dust,
his own mother would not have known him--his clothes all dirty,
stain'd and torn, with sour, accumulated sweat for perfume--many a
comrade, perhaps a brother, sun-struck, staggering out, dying, by
the roadside, of exhaustion--yet the great bulk bearing steadily
on, cheery enough, hollow-bellied from hunger, but sinewy with
unconquerable resolution.

We have seen this race proved by wholesale by drearier, yet more
fearful tests--the wound, the amputation, the shatter'd face or limb,
the slow hot fever, long impatient anchorage in bed, and all the forms
of maiming, operation and disease. Alas! America have we seen, though
only in her early youth, already to hospital brought. There have we
watch'd these soldiers, many of them only boys in years--mark'd
their decorum, their religious nature and fortitude, and their sweet
affection. Wholesale, truly. For at the front, and through the camps,
in countless tents, stood the regimental, brigade and division
hospitals; while everywhere amid the land, in or near cities, rose
clusters of huge, white-wash'd, crowded, one-story wooden barracks;
and there ruled agony with bitter scourge, yet seldom brought a cry;
and there stalk'd death by day and night along the narrow aisles
between the rows of cots, or by the blankets on the ground, and
touch'd lightly many a poor sufferer, often with blessed, welcome
touch.

I know not whether I shall be understood, but I realize that it is
finally from what I learn'd personally mixing in such scenes that I am
now penning these pages. One night in the gloomiest period of the war,
in the Patent-office hospital in Washington city, as I stood by
the bedside of a Pennsylvania soldier, who lay, conscious of quick
approaching death, yet perfectly calm, and with noble, spiritual
manner, the veteran surgeon, turning aside, said to me, that though he
had witness'd many, many deaths of soldiers, and had been a worker at
Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, &c., he had not seen yet the first
case of man or boy that met the approach of dissolution with cowardly
qualms or terror. My own observation fully bears out the remark.

What have we here, if not, towering above all talk and argument,
the plentifully-supplied, last-needed proof of democracy, in its
personalities? Curiously enough, too, the proof on this point comes,
I should say, every bit as much from the south, as from the north.
Although I have spoken only of the latter, yet I deliberately include
all. Grand, common stock! to me the accomplish'd and convincing
growth, prophetic of the future; proof undeniable to sharpest sense,
of perfect beauty, tenderness and pluck, that never feudal lord, nor
Greek, nor Roman breed, yet rival'd. Let no tongue ever speak in
disparagement of the American races, north or south, to one who has
been through the war in the great army hospitals.

Meantime, general humanity, (for to that we return, as, for our
purposes, what it really is, to bear in mind,) has always, in every
department, been full of perverse maleficence, and is so yet. In
downcast hours the soul thinks it always will be--but soon recovers
from such sickly moods. I myself see clearly enough the crude,
defective streaks in all the strata of the common people; the
specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the
unfit and uncouth, the incapable, and the very low and poor. The
eminent person just mention'd sneeringly asks whether we expect to
elevate and improve a nation's politics by absorbing such morbid
collections and qualities therein. The point is a formidable one,
and there will doubtless always be numbers of solid and reflective
citizens who will never get over it. Our answer is general, and
is involved in the scope and letter of this essay. We believe the
ulterior object of political and all other government, (having, of
course, provided for the police, the safety of life, property, and for
the basic statute and common law, and their administration, always
first in order,) to be among the rest, not merely to rule, to repress
disorder, &c., but to develop, to open up to cultivation, to encourage
the possibilities of all beneficent and manly outcroppage, and of that
aspiration for independence, and the pride and self-respect latent in
all characters. (Or, if there be exceptions, we cannot, fixing our
eyes on them alone, make theirs the rule for all.)

I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands, is
not repression alone, and not Authority alone, not even of law, nor
by that favorite standard of the eminent writer, the rule of the best
men, the born heroes and captains of the race, (as if such ever,
or one time out of a hundred, get into the big places, elective or
dynastic)--but higher than the highest arbitrary rule, to train
communities through all their grades, beginning with individuals and
ending there again, to rule themselves. What Christ appear'd for in
the moral-spiritual field for human-kind, namely, that in respect to
the absolute soul, there is in the possession of such by each single
individual, something so transcendent, so incapable of gradations,
(like life,) that, to that extent, it places all beings on a common
level, utterly regardless of the distinctions of intellect, virtue,
station, or any height or lowliness whatever--is tallied in like
manner, in this other field, by democracy's rule that men, the nation,
as a common aggregate of living identities, affording in each a
separate and complete subject for freedom, worldly thrift and
happiness, and for a fair chance for growth, and for protection in
citizenship, &c., must, to the political extent of the suffrage or
vote, if no further, be placed, in each and in the whole, on one
broad, primary, universal, common platform.

The purpose is not altogether direct; perhaps it is more indirect. For
it is not that democracy is of exhaustive account, in itself. Perhaps,
indeed, it is, (like Nature,) of no account in itself. It is that, as
we see, it is the best, perhaps only, fit and full means, formulater,
general caller-forth, trainer, for the million, not for grand material
personalities only, but for immortal souls. To be a voter with the
rest is not so much; and this, like every institute, will have its
imperfections.

But to become an enfranchised man, and now, impediments removed, to
stand and start without humiliation, and equal with the rest; to
commence, or have the road clear'd to commence, the grand experiment
of development, whose end, (perhaps requiring several generations,)
may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman--that _is_ something.
To ballast the State is also secured, and in our times is to be
secured, in no other way.

We do not, (at any rate I do not,) put it either on the ground that
the People, the masses, even the best of them, are, in their latent or
exhibited qualities, essentially sensible and good--nor on the ground
of their rights; but that good or bad, rights or no rights, the
democratic formula is the only safe and preservative one for coming
times. We endow the masses with the suffrage for their own sake, no
doubt; then, perhaps still more, from another point of view, for
community's sake. Leaving the rest to the sentimentalists, we
present freedom as sufficient in its scientific aspect, cold as ice,
reasoning, deductive, clear and passionless as crystal.

Democracy too is law, and of the strictest, amplest kind. Many
suppose, (and often in its own ranks the error,) that it means a
throwing aside of law, and running riot. But, briefly, it is the
superior law, not alone that of physical force, the body, which,
adding to, it supersedes with that of the spirit. Law is the
unshakable order of the universe forever; and the law over all, and
law of laws, is the law of successions; that of the superior law, in
time, gradually supplanting and overwhelming the inferior one. (While,
for myself, I would cheerfully agree--first covenanting that the
formative tendencies shall be administer'd in favor, or at least not
against it, and that this reservation be closely construed--that
until the individual or community show due signs, or be so minor
and fractional as not to endanger the State, the condition of
authoritative tutelage may continue, and self-government must abide
its time.) Nor is the esthetic point, always an important one, without
fascination for highest aiming souls. The common ambition strains
for elevations, to become some privileged exclusive. The master sees
greatness and health in being part of the mass; nothing will do as
well as common ground. Would you have in yourself the divine, vast,
general law? Then merge yourself in it.

And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can
bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men, of however various
and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet
ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her
fond philosophers and poets. Not that half only, individualism, which
isolates. There is another half, which is adhesiveness or love,
that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and
fraternizing all. Both are to be vitalized by religion, (sole
worthiest elevator of man or State,) breathing into the proud,
material tissues, the breath of life. For I say at the core of
democracy, finally, is the religious element. All the religions,
old and new, are there. Nor may the scheme step forth, clothed in
resplendent beauty and command, till these, bearing the best, the
latest fruit, the spiritual, shall fully appear.

A portion of our pages we might indite with reference toward Europe,
especially the British part of it, more than our own land, perhaps not
absolutely needed for the home reader. But the whole question hangs
together, and fastens and links all peoples. The liberalist of to-day
has this advantage over antique or mediaeval times, that his doctrine
seeks not only to individualize but to universalize. The great word
Solidarity has arisen. Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in
our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of
the people set off from the rest by a line drawn--they not privileged
as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account. Much quackery
teems, of course, even on democracy's side, yet does not really affect
the orbic quality of the matter. To work in, if we may so term it,
and justify God, his divine aggregate, the People, (or, the veritable
horn'd and sharp-tail'd Devil, _his_ aggregate, if there be who
convulsively insist upon it)--this, I say, is what democracy is for;
and this is what our America means, and is doing--may I not say, has
done? If not, she means nothing more, and does nothing more, than
any other land. And as, by virtue of its kosmical, antiseptic power,
Nature's stomach is fully strong enough not only to digest the
morbific matter always presented, not to be turn'd aside, and perhaps,
indeed, intuitively gravitating thither--but even to change such
contributions into nutriment for highest use and life--so American
democracy's. That is the lesson we, these days, send over to European
lands by every western breeze.

And, truly, whatever may be said in the way of abstract argument, for
or against the theory of a wider democratizing of institutions in any
civilized country, much trouble might well be saved to all European
lands by recognizing this palpable fact, (for a palpable fact it is,)
that some form of such democratizing is about the only resource now
left. _That_, or chronic dissatisfaction continued, mutterings which
grow annually louder and louder, till, in due course, and pretty
swiftly in most cases, the inevitable crisis, crash, dynastic ruin.
Anything worthy to be call'd statesmanship in the Old World, I should
say, among the advanced students, adepts, or men of any brains, does
not debate to-day whether to hold on, attempting to lean back and
monarchize, or to look forward and democratize--but _how_, and in what
degree and part, most prudently to democratize.

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and
revolutionists are indispensable, to counterbalance the inertness and
fossilism making so large a part of human institutions. The latter
will always take care of themselves--the danger being that they
rapidly tend to ossify us. The former is to be treated with
indulgence, and even with respect. As circulation to air, so is
agitation and a plentiful degree of speculative license to political
and moral sanity. Indirectly, but surely, goodness, virtue, law, (of
the very best,) follow freedom. These, to democracy, are what the keel
is to the ship, or saltness to the ocean.

The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be
a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general
comfort--a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. As the human
frame, or, indeed, any object in this manifold universe, is best kept
together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the necessity,
exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied nationality,
occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held and knit by the
principle of the safety and endurance of the aggregate of its middling
property owners. So that, from another point of view, ungracious as
it may sound, and a paradox after what we have been saying, democracy
looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor, the
ignorant, and on those out of business. She asks for men and women
with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash
in the bank--and with some cravings for literature, too; and must
have them, and hastens to make them. Luckily, the seed is already
well-sown, and has taken ineradicable root.[25]

Huge and mighty are our days, our republican lands--and most in their
rapid shiftings, their changes, all in the interest of the cause. As
I write this particular passage, (November, 1868,) the din of
disputation rages around me. Acrid the temper of the parties, vital
the pending questions. Congress convenes; the President sends his
message; reconstruction is still in abeyance; the nomination and the
contest for the twenty-first Presidentiad draw close, with loudest
threat and bustle. Of these, and all the like of these, the
eventuations I know not; but well I know that behind them, and
whatever their eventuations, the vital things remain safe and
certain, and all the needed work goes on. Time, with soon or later
superciliousness, disposes of Presidents, Congressmen, party
platforms, and such. Anon, it clears the stage of each and any mortal
shred that thinks itself so potent to its day; and at and after which,
(with precious, golden exceptions once or twice in a century,) all
that relates to sir potency is flung to moulder in a burial-vault,
and no one bothers himself the least bit about it afterward. But
the People ever remain, tendencies continue, and all the idiocratic
transfers in unbroken chain go on.

In a few years the dominion-heart of America will be far inland,
toward the west. Our future national capital may not be where the
present one is. It is possible, nay likely, that in less than fifty
years, it will migrate a thousand or two miles, will be re-founded,
and every thing belonging to it made on a different plan, original,
far more superb. The main social, political, spine-character of the
States will probably run along the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi
rivers, and west and north of them, including Canada. Those regions,
with the group of powerful brothers toward the Pacific, (destined to
the mastership of that sea and its countless paradises of islands,)
will compact and settle the traits of America, with all the old
retain'd, but more expanded, grafted on newer, hardier, purely
native stock. A giant growth, composite from the rest, getting their
contribution, absorbing it, to make it more illustrious. From the
north, intellect, the sun of things, also the idea of unswayable
justice, anchor amid the last, the wildest tempests. From the south
the living soul, the animus of good and bad, haughtily admitting no
demonstration but its own. While from the west itself comes
solid personality, with blood and brawn, and the deep quality of
all-accepting fusion.

Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America,
with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making
first-class men. It is life's gymnasium, not of good only, but of all.
We try often, though we fall back often. A brave delight, fit for
freedom's athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satisfies, out
of the action in them, irrespective of success. Whatever we do not
attain, we at any rate attain the experiences of the fight, the
hardening of the strong campaign, and throb with currents of attempt
at least. Time is ample. Let the victors come after us. Not for
nothing does evil play its part among us. Judging from the main
portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in
jeopardy, peace walks amid hourly pitfalls, and of slavery, misery,
meanness, the craft of tyrants and the credulity of the populace, in
some of their protean forms, no voice can at any time say, They are
not. The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out--but soon and
certain the lowering darkness falls again, as if to last forever. Yet
is there an immortal courage and prophecy in every sane soul that
cannot, must not, under any circumstances, capitulate. _Vive_, the
attack--the perennial assault! _Vive_, the unpopular cause--the spirit
that audaciously aims--the never-abandon'd efforts, pursued the same
amid opposing proofs and precedents.

Once, before the war, (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood
has come!) I, too, was fill'd with doubt and gloom. A foreigner, an
acute and good man, had impressively said to me, that day--putting in
form, indeed, my own observations: "I have travel'd much in the United
States, and watch'd their politicians, and listen'd to the speeches
of the candidates, and read the journals, and gone into the public
houses, and heard the unguarded talk of men. And I have found your
vaunted America honeycomb'd from top to toe with infidelism, even to
itself and its own programme. I have mark'd the brazen hell-faces
of secession and slavery gazing defiantly from all the windows and
doorways. I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves and scalliwags
arranging the nominations to offices, and sometimes filling the
offices themselves. I have found the north just as full of bad stuff
as the south. Of the holders of public office in the Nation or the
States or their municipalities, I have found that not one in a hundred
has been chosen by any spontaneous selection of the outsiders, the
people, but all have been nominated and put through by little or large
caucuses of the politicians, and have got in by corrupt rings and
electioneering, not capacity or desert. I have noticed how the
millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are thus the helpless
supple-jacks of comparatively few politicians. And I have noticed more
and more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the government,
and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party purposes."

Sad, serious, deep truths. Yet are there other, still deeper, amply
confronting, dominating truths. Over those politicians and great and
little rings, and over all their insolence and wiles, and over the
powerfulest parties, looms a power, too sluggish maybe, but ever
holding decisions and decrees in hand, ready, with stern process,
to execute them as soon as plainly needed--and at times, indeed,
summarily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in the hour of
their pride.