prejudices, and to start forward in a different and hitherto despised
path toward which the iron hand of our necessity pointed, and in which
all men should be considered equal in their rights, and the position of
each should depend, not upon the distance to which he could trace a
proud genealogy, but upon the energy with which he should grapple with
the stern realities of life, the honesty and uprightness with which he
should tread its path, and the use he should make of the blessings which
God and his own exertions bestowed upon him. We had to learn the great
but simple lesson that

'The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the man for a' that;'

and in so doing, to accept, for a time, the position of the Pariahs of
Christendom, through the imputation of degrading all things high and
noble to the rank of the low and vulgar, of casting the pearls of a
lofty and ennobled class before the swinish multitude, of throwing open
the doors of the treasury, that creatures of low, plebeian blood might
grasp the crown jewels which had for ages been kept sacred to the
patrician few; in a word, we had to take upon ourselves all the odium of
a despised democracy--a moral agrarianism which should make common
property of all blessings and privileges, and mingle together all
things, pure and impure, in one common hotch-potch of corruption and
degradation. Greater heresy than all this was not then known, and the
philosopher of to-day has little conception of the sacrifice required of
those who would at that time accept such a position.

Another and not less important lesson which our ancestors had to learn
was, that national prosperity which depends upon the learning and
refinement or energy of a certain privileged class, can never be
otherwise than ephemeral; that the common people--the low plebeians,
whom they had been taught to consider of the least importance in the
state, are in reality the strength of the land; and that in the
amelioration of their condition, in the education and mental training of
the masses, while at the same time placing before them the highest
incentives to individual exertion, lies the only sure basis of an
enduring prosperity--that the only healthful national growth is that
which is made up of the individual strivings of the great mass rather
than the self-interested movements of the few; and as a consequence of
this truth, that the privileged minority is really the least important
of the two cla