inst all law. Puritanism in England,
Pietism in Germany, and Huguenotism in France, were all directly and
strongly republican and law-abiding in their social relations; while for
an example of the contrary we need only glance at our own South.
Aristocracy--a regularly ordered system of society into ranks--is the
dream of the slaveholder, and experience is showing us how extremely
difficult it is to uproot the power of a very few wicked men who have
fairly mudsilled the majority; and yet, despite this strength, there was
never yet a country claiming to be civilized, in which the wild caprices
and armed outrages of the individual were regarded with such toleration.
_Republicanism is Christian._ When will the world see this tremendous
truth as it should, and realize that as there is a present and a future,
so did the Saviour lay down one law whereby man might progress in this
life, and another for the attainment of happiness in the next, and that
the two are mutually sustaining? There was no real republicanism before
the Gospels, and there has been no real addition to the doctrine since.
The instant that religion or any great law of truth falls into the hands
of a high caste, and puts on its livery, it becomes--ridiculous. What
think you of a shepherd's crook of gold blazing with diamonds?
It is interesting to trace an excellent illustration of the natural
affinity between the fondness for feudalism and the love of law-breaking
in Sir WALTER SCOTT. Whatever his head and his natural common sense
dictated (and as he was a canny Scot and a shrewd observer, they
dictated many wise truths), his heart was always with the men of bow and
brand; with dashing robbers, moss troopers, duellists, wild-eagle
barons, wild-wolf borderers, and the whole farrago of autocratic
scoundrelism. With his soul devoted to dreams of feudalism, his fond
love of its romance was principally based on the constant infractions of
law and order to which a state of society must always be subject in
which certain men acquire power out of proportion to their integrity.
The result of this always is a lurking sympathy with rascality, a secret
relish for bold selfishness, which is in every community the deadliest
poison of the rights of the poor, and all the disinherited by fortune.
It is very remarkable that Walter Scott, a Tory to the soul, should, by
his apparently contradictory yet still most consistent love of the
_outre_, have had a keen amateur sympat
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