e is the truth of spiritual Rank or Degree,--that
one man may be immensely superior in human quality to another. This is
the truth that is most powerfully present to your mind, and you would
constitute government strictly, if not solely, in the light of it. To
this you are impelled by the peculiar quality of your genius, which is
so purely _biographical_, so inevitably drawn to special personalities,
that you can hardly conceive of history otherwise than as a record of
personal influence.

We assume, then, as a basis, common sense; you, uncommon sense. We
assume Unity or Identity; you assume Difference, and seek to
reconstitute unity only through mastership on the one hand and reverent
obedience on the other. We do not deny Difference; we recognize the
truth of spiritual Degree; we merely _elect the common element as the
material out of which to constitute, and the force by which to operate,
the State._

Now my judgment is, that either the truth of a common Manhood or the
truth of spiritual Rank may be made primary in a State, and that with
admirable results, provided it be duly allied and tempered with its
opposite. For these opposites I hold to be correlative and polaric, each
required by the other. But chasm is worse than indistinction; and he
that breaks the circle of human fellowship is more mischievous than he
who blurs the hues of gradation.

I affirm, then, that America has a grand spiritual fact at the base of
her political system. But you are the prophet of an opposite order of
truths. And you are so intensely the partisan of your pole, that you
have not a moment's patience with anything else, above all with an
opposite partiality. And wanting sympathy and patience with it, you
equally want apprehension of its meaning.

But this is not all. An awful shadow accompanies the brilliant day of
your genius. That dark humor of yours, that woful demon from whose
companionship, by the law of your existence, you cannot be free, tolls
funeral-bells and chants the dirges of death in your ears forever. What
your faith does not take with warmth to its bosom it must spurn
violently away; where you cannot hope strongly, you must vehemently
despair; what your genius does not illumine to your heart it must bury
as in shadows of eternal night. It being, therefore, of the nature of
your mind to shine powerfully on the eminences of mankind, it became in
consequence no less its nature to call up over the broad levels a black
f