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ides toward absolutism. 'Every man for himself' is the first idea. In the family, in church, in politics, in commerce, in all social and political relations, every man striving, pushing, scrambling, straining every nerve to advance himself, regardless of his neighbor or the public interest--such everywhere is the confused and hideous picture of American society. Selfishness predominates, and selfishness is repellant. So it was before the ages were, when Lucifer, in the pride of self, refused obedience to the Word. So it is even yet, and its inevitable tendency is to hostile isolation and final dissolution. Its logical consequence is anarchy. But anarchy is intolerable, and a civilized people, yea, even barbarians, will submit to anything rather than social and political chaos. Then comes the iron band of despotism to hold together the antagonistic fragments. 'The supremacy of the people's will' is the second idea. _Vox Populi, vox Dei!_ What the people decree is right, and nothing must stand between their will and the subject or object upon which it operates! Such is the political gospel according to democracy, and fifty years' earnest proclamation thereof has wellnigh abolished all the barriers of constitutionalism--barriers, which stood like faithful guardians, stern but just, between the Individual and the State, which reconciled the harmonious coexistence of private liberty and public power--an idea wholly unknown in pagan or classic civilization--and which at once prevented the anarchy of individualism and the tyranny of absolutism. But true it is, whatever a people constantly assert they come to believe, and whatever they believe will at last crystallize itself in action. And thus, with the oft-repeated and ever-increasing assertion that 'man is his own end,' and 'is sufficient unto himself,' and with that other assertion that the will of the people is law and must act directly upon its object, we have gradually lost out of mind the true significance of the constitutional system. Those numberless intermediary institutions--which logically _grew_ out of the Christian idea of mediation, as the oak naturally grows out of the acorn, and which wonderfully reconciled liberty with authority, freedom with order, the finite with the infinite--have become more and more obsolete, and less and less understood. They have crumbled away like the stately columns of a magnificent but neglected cathedral. They have become dead bra
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