. Proudhon, or the
Englishman Godwin. It is unjust that one should have what another
wants, or even more than another. What right have you to ride in your
coach or astride your spirited barb while I am forced to trudge on
foot? Nor can our humanitarian stop there. Individuals are, and as
long as there are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and
some are uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger
or weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and
therefore some have natural advantages which others have not. There is
inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied only by the
abolition of all individualities, and the reduction of all individuals
to the race, or humanity, man in general. He can find no limit to his
agitation this side of vague generality, which is no reality, but a
pure nullity, for he respects no territorial or individual
circumscriptions, and must regard creation itself as a blunder. This
is not fancy, for he has gone very nearly as far as it is here shown,
if logical, he must go.

The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and abroad, be
interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social or humanitarian
democracy. It was because they regarded the war waged on the side of
the Union as waged in the interest of this terrible democracy, that our
bishops and clergy sympathized so little with the Government in
prosecuting it; not, as some imagined, because they were disloyal,
hostile to American or territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor
of freedom for all men, whatever their race or complexion. They had no
wish to see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any
other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would have
regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up; but they
held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy represented by Northern
abolitionists as hostile alike to the Church and to civilization. For
the same reason that they were backward or reserved in their sympathy,
all the humanitarian sects at home and abroad were forward and even
ostentatious in theirs. The Catholics feared the war might result in
encouraging La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian
sects trusted that it would. If the victory of the Union should turn
out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized world
will have no reason to applaud it.

That there is some danger