schisms, and
backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction
was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American
Republic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.' It
was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of
conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of
peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.
These men encountered various difficulties and made various compromises
in relation to the practical politics of their time; in England they
preserved aristocracy; in America they preserved slavery. But though
they had more difficulties, they had less doubts. Since their time
democracy has been steadily disintegrated by doubts; and these political
doubts have been contemporary with and often identical with religious
doubts. This fact could be followed over almost the whole field of the
modern world; in this place it will be more appropriate to take the
great American example of slavery. I have found traces in all sorts of
intelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all the Fathers of
the Republic owned black men like beasts of burden because they knew no
better, until the light of liberty was revealed to them by John Brown
and Mrs. Beecher Stowe. One of the best weekly papers in England said
recently that even those who drew up the Declaration of Independence did
not include negroes in its generalisation about humanity. This is quite
consistent with the current convention, in which we were all brought up;
the theory that the heart of humanity broadens in ever larger circles of
brotherhood, till we pass from embracing a black man to adoring a black
beetle. Unfortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of
American history. The facts show that, in this problem of the Old South,
the eighteenth century was _more_ liberal than the nineteenth century.
There was _more_ sympathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson than
in the school of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, in the dark estate of his
simple Deism, said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble,
remembering that God is just. His fellow Southerners, after a century of
the world's advance, said that slavery in itself was good, when they did
not go farther and say that negroes in themselves were bad. And they
were supported in this by the great and growing modern suspicion that
nature is unjust. Difficulties seemed inevitably