until nothing was
left of it, in order to make it "sinsible of its desthroction." They
meant it all, too, the honest souls! For a long time after the setting
up of the republic the republic meant active hatred to kings, nobles,
aristocracies. It was held, and rightly held, that a nobleman could not
breathe in America--that he left his title and his privileges on the
ship that brought him over. Do we observe anything of that in this
generation? On the landing of a foreign king, prince or nobleman--even a
miserable "knight"--do we not execute sycophantic genuflexions? Are not
our newspapers full of flamboyant descriptions and qualming adulation?
Nay, does not our President himself--successor to Washington and
Jefferson!--greet and entertain the "nation's guest"? Is not every
American young woman crazy to mate with a male of title? Does all this
represent no retrogression?--is it not the backward movement of the
shadow on the dial? Doubtless the republican idea has struck strong
roots into the soil of the two Americas, but he who rightly considers
the tendencies of events, the causes that bring them about and the
consequences that flow from them, will not be hot to affirm the
perpetuity of republican institutions in the Western Hemisphere. Between
their inception and their present stage of development there is scarcely
the beat of a pendulum; and already, by corruption and lawlessness,
the people of both continents, with all their diversities of race and
character, have shown themselves about equally unfit. To become a nation
of scoundrels all that any people needs is opportunity, and what we are
pleased to call by the impossible name of "self-government" supplies it.

The capital defect of republican government is inability to repress
internal forces tending to disintegration. It does not take long for a
"self-governed" people to learn that it is not really governed--that an
agreement enforcible by nobody but the parties to it is not binding.
We are learning this very rapidly: we set aside our laws whenever we
please. The sovereign power--the tribunal of ultimate jurisdiction--is
a mob. If the mob is large enough (it need not be very large), even
if composed of vicious tramps, it may do as it will. It may destroy
property and life. It may without proof of guilt inflict upon
individuals torments unthinkable by fire and flaying, mutilations that
are nameless. It may call men, women and children from their beds and
beat the