just as before, although his
slander, and the refutation of it, were both well known.

The reader will now perceive the great moral evil arising from this
vice, which is, that it habituates people to falsehood. The lie of
slander is the basest of all lies; and the practice of it, the most
demoralising to the human heart. Those who will descend to such
deliberate and malignant falsehood, will not scruple at any other
description. The consequence is, that what the Americans have been so
often taxed with, is but too prevalent, "a disregard to _truth_."

To what must we ascribe the great prevalence of this demoralising habit
in the United States? That the licentiousness of the press feeds it, it
is true; but I am rather inclined to imagine that the real source of it
is to be found in the peculiarity of their institutions. Under a
democracy, there are but two means by which a man can rise above his
fellows--wealth and character; and when all are equal, and each is
struggling to rise above the other, it is to the principle that if you
cannot rise above another by your own merit, you can at least so far
equalise your condition by pulling him down to your own level, that this
inordinate appetite for defamation must be ascribed. It is a state of
ungenerous warfare, arising from there being no gradation, no scale, no
discipline, if I may use the term, in society. Every one asserts his
equality, and at the same time wishes to rise above his fellows; and
society is in a state of perpetual and disgraceful scuffle. Mr
Tocqueville says, "There exists in the human heart a depraved taste for
equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to
their own level, and induces men to prefer equality in slavery to
inequality with freedom."

In politics, especially, character becomes of much more importance than
wealth, and if a man in public life can once be rendered odious, or be
made suspected, he loses his supporters, and there is one antagonist
removed in the race for pre-eminence. Such is one of the lamentable
defects arising from a democratical form of Government. How different
from England, and the settled nations of the old world, where it may be
said that everything and everybody is, comparatively speaking, in his
place!

Although many will, and may justifiably, attempt to rise beyond his
circumstances and birth, still there is order and regularity; each party
knows the precise round in the ladder on whi