government in Europe is that of England, in which property has greater
influence than in that of any other nation. The conclusion drawn by
aristocrats and their admirers is, that aristocracies are the most
enduring of all the polities known to men, and that they are so because
aristocrats are the most prudent and cautious of men. The governments
they form and control wash and wear well, and bid defiance to what Bacon
calls "the waves and weathers of time."

There is some truth in this. Aristocracies _are_ cautious and prudent,
and indisposed to risk present advantage in the hope of future gain.
Therefore aristocratical polities often attain to great age, and the
nations that know them attain slowly to great and firmly-placed power.
Rome and Venice and England are striking examples of these truths. Yet
it is not the less true that aristocracies sometimes do behave with a
rashness that cannot be paralleled from the histories of democracies and
despotisms. It has been the fortune of this age to see two examples of
this rashness, such as no other age ever witnessed or ever could have
witnessed. The first of these was presented in the action, in 1860-61,
of the American aristocracy. The second was that of the Austrian
aristocracy, in 1866. The American aristocracy--the late slavocracy--was
the most powerful body in the world; so powerful, that it was safe
against everything but itself. It had been gradually built up, until it
was as towering as its foundations were deep and broad. Not only was it
unassailed, but there was no disposition in any influential quarter to
assail it. The few persons who did attack it, from a distance, produced
scarcely more effect adverse to its ascendency, than was produced by the
labors of the first Christians against the Capitoline Jupiter in the
days of the Julian Caesars. Abolitionists were annoyed and insulted even
in the course of that political campaign which ended in the election of
Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency; and not a few of the victors in that
campaign were forward to declare, that between their party and the
"friends of the slave" there was neither friendship nor sympathy. One of
the most eminent of the Republicans of Massachusetts declared that he
felt hurt at the thought that his party could be suspected of approving
the conduct of Captain John Brown at Harper's Ferry. Down to the
spring-time of 1860, it required, on the part of the American
slaveholding interest, only a moderate d