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nches that must be lopped off. They are rubbish that must be removed--relics of monarchy or aristocracy, cunningly devised inventions of priestcraft or kingcraft, that retard the triumph of democracy. If the will of the people is supreme, then away with your high and life-long judges, or at least let them be elected by the people and for very brief terms. Let grand juries be voted a humbug, and trial by jury a nuisance. Let electoral colleges be abolished as meaningless and cumbersome anomalies. Let the President be the direct representative of a mighty people, and act without let or hindrance--only let him act with gigantic energy and swift execution. Let senatorial terms be dependent upon changing legislative majorities. In fact, let the two legislative houses, as being wholly useless and very expensive, be reduced to one. Let the representative be a tongue-bound deputy, and not a free, manly, self-acting agent. Let county boards of supervisors give way to the one man power of the county judge. And, in short, let us go on, as we have been going on, democratizing or popularising our institutions, 'improving,' or rather impairing and tearing down one after another of the venerable columns of the original system, until every safeguard of personal freedom is removed, and there shall be nothing left to restrain the giant sway of unmitigated and unmediatized public power. Then we shall have despotism or absolutism, pure and simple--and none the less so because it shall be democratic. The London _Times_ will have nothing to jubilate over if what it mistakenly calls our 'trial of democratic institutions' shall be unsuccessful. For in fact, our constitutional system was but the reproduction, in a broader field and on a grander scale, of the British Constitution, in all its essential features, differing only in what philosophic historians call 'accidentals.' And if that system finally fails here, _The Times_ may have a 'most comfortable assurance' that it will fail in England. True, we have more rapidly departed from and defaced that system than the English, chiefly because, in escaping from the fogs of England, we left behind us that stolid conservatism, that bulldog tenacity for the old because it is old, which are instinctive in the narrow-minded islanders. But they, just as much as we, have lost out of mind the significance of the Christian idea. They, just as much as we, have become thoroughly paganized--have become sat
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