is something. In all that territory there are probably more muskets in the hands of private men than there are habitations, yet not one is kept for actual defence; and, through the Free States, no soldier walks abroad with loaded gun; only in the large towns is there a visible police. There are not two thousand soldiers of the state in all that territory, and they are as inoffensive to the citizens as the scarecrows in the field, only not so useful, nor so well paying for their keep. Of this population some three millions are in the public schools, academies, and colleges. Nowhere are churches so numerous, or so well attended; nowhere such indications of happiness, comfort, intelligence, morality among the mass of men. This, we repeat, is something. We have no very great men; we have never had such. An Alexander, a Cæsar, a Charlemagne, a Napoleon, we have not had. Perhaps we never shall; but it is hardly worth while to go into mourning yet for the absence of such. Great artists, poets, philosophers, men of letters, we have not had, hitherto. We have shown no great respect for such, to our shame be it spoken; but in due time we may trust that they also will come and shine for ages, with the halo of genius around their brow. However, it does seem a little remarkable that, in America, everything seems to be done democratically-by the combined force of many men with moderate abilities, and not by one man of Herculean powers. It was so in the early periods of the nation; so in the Revolution, and so now. It has always been so with the Teutonic tribes of men, much more than with the nations from the Shemitic stock. With them there comes a Moses, or a Mohammed, who overrides a nation for one or two thousand years, and its progress seems to be by a series of leaps; while the western nations, with less nationalism, and more individualism, accomplish less in that way, but slope upwards by a more gradual ascent. In the English Revolution, there was no one great man who condensed the age into himself, and created the institutions of coming generations, as Moses and Mohammed have done: spite of the great abilities and great services of Cromwell, no just historian will claim that for him. It was so in the American Revolution; so in the French. Washington led our armies, and Napoleon the legions of France, but neither gave the actors the idea which was slowly or suddenly to be realized in institutions.

It is an interesting work to trace the growth of the American people from their humble beginnings to their present condition; to discover and point out the causes which have helped that growth, and the causes which have hindered it. To a philosophical historian this is no unpromising field; the facts are well known; it is easy to ascertain the ideas out of which the general political institutions of America have grown; it is not difficult to see the historical causes which have modified these institutions, giving them their present character and form. None but a democrat can thoroughly appreciate that history. As the history of Christianity must be written by a Christian who can write from within, and the history of art by a man with an artistic soul, so must the history of America be written by a democrat—we mean one who puts man before the accidents of man, valuing his permanent nature more than the transient results of his history.

American history, up to the adoption of the Federal Constitution, forms a whole, and has a certain unity which is not obvious at first sight. The several colonies were getting established, learning to stand alone; they were quite unlike in their origin, form of government, ecclesiastical and other institutions. Very different ideas prevailed in Georgia and New Hampshire. Looked at carelessly, they seem only divergent, but when studied carefully, it seems as if there was a regular plan, and as if the whole was calculated to bring about the present result. No doubt there was such a concatenation of part with part, only the plan lay in God, not in the mind of Oglethorpe and Captain Smith, of Carver and Roger Williams.

Considering this history as an organic whole, to treat it philosophically, it seems to us it is necessary to describe the material theatre on which this historic drama is to be acted out; to describe the American continent, telling of its extent and peculiarities in general, its soil, climate, and natural productions, and its condition at the time when the white men first landed on its shores; this, of course, comprises a description of the inhabitants at that time in possession of its soil.

Then the historian is to tell us of the men who came here to found this empire; of their origin, their character, and their history in general. He is to tell the external

causes which brought them here, or the motives which impelled them and the ideas which they brought, as well as those which sprung up under their new circumstances. Next, he is to show speculatively by the idea, and practically by the facts, how these ideas worked under the new conditions of the people; how they acted on circumstances and circumstances on them, and what institutions came thereof. The historian very poorly performs his duty who merely relates the succession of rulers, the increase or diminution of wealth and numbers, the coming on of wars, and the termination thereof, the rise of great men, with their decline and fall, and the presence of institutions, without telling of the ideas they represented. Showing the continual growth of the ideas which create the institutions, is little more than the work of an annalist or chronicler.

If a great idea appears in human affairs, founding new institutions and overturning the old, it is part of the work of a philosophical historian to give us the story of this idea; to refer it back to its origin in the permanent nature of man, or the accidents of his development; to show the various attempts to make the thought a thing, and the idea a fact. Such is the case in American history: political institutions were set agoing here radically unlike any others in the world. True, we may find points of agreement between the American and various European governments. The trial by jury dates far back beyond the "gray goose" code, and has its origin in remote antiquity; the habeas corpus is doubtless of English origin, and its history may be read in Hallam, and elsewhere; the notion of delegates to represent corporations, or republics, may have originated with the early Christians, who sent their ministers and other servants (or masters) to some provincial synod; the idea of individual liberty, the sacredness of the person before the state, may be traced to the wilds of Germany long before the time of Christ. We know how much of American freedom may be found in Sir John Fortescue's Laudation of the laws of England, or in the books of Moses, if we will; but yet the American government, in nation, estate, and town, is an original thing. The parts are old, many of them, but the whole is the most original thing that can be found in the political history of the world, for many an age. Almost every special and true moral precept of the

New Testament may be found in some heathen or Hebrew writer before Jesus, but yet, spite of that, Christianity was an original form of religion, as much so as the statue of a goddess, which a Grecian sculptor gathered by a grand eclecticism from five hundred Spartan maids, corrected by the ideal in his own creative and critical mind.

You trace the secret cause of the American institutions far off in the history of mankind. Here it is a dim sentiment in the breast of the German in the Hercynian forest ; then again it burns in the bosom of the Christian, and he tells the world that God is no respecter of persons, that Jew and Gentile are alike to Him. But it leads, at first, to no political consequences; even its ecclesiastical results are trifling, and its social consequences at first of small moment. It could not make St Paul hostile to personal Roman slavery. In the Middle Ages you trace the path of this idea. Sometimes it goes over the mountain side, and is seen amid the works of great men, but commonly it winds along in the low valleys of human life; a little path, known only to the people, and worn by their feet, not knowing whither it leads them; a by-path for the vassal, not the highway which the baron and prelate took care to have in order. The record of its existence is found in the song of the peasant or in the popular proverb; in some fabulous legend of unhistorical times,-times that never were,- -or in the predictions of days to come. idea has not a place in the pulpit of the minister; but in the silent cell of the devout mystic it has its dwellingplace, and gladdens his enraptured heart as a vision of the kingdom of heaven.

This

Now it waxes mighty, and contends against the oppression of tyrannical men, less in the state than in the church. Fast as it becomes an idea, men organize it as well as they can, now in little convents or monasteries, then in trading companies; then in guilds of mechanics; in cities and small states, as in Italy and in the Low Countries, in Switzerland, and the Hanse towns. At length this impulse-it was hardly an idea-puts all Europe into commotion. Men call for spiritual freedom. Under the guidance of that great spirit who stands as the water-shed between the Middle Ages and modern times, feeling the contradictions of a divided age, under Martin Luther, men

break the yoke of ecclesiastical tyranny they have borne so long. Liberty of conscience was all mankind called for, but for that time they must put up with liberty of conscience limited on the divine side by the Bible, on the human side by the king. Strait and oppressive limits both proved to be,-bonds that approached nearer and threatened to crush the struggling soul. Still men were not satisfied; they wanted political liberty as well as spiritual, and of spiritual much more than they got. How rapidly the idea of a free state got abroad over Europe. Bodinus, in his Republic; Thomas More, in his Utopia; Bacon, in his New Atlantis,-very undemocratic men at the best,-are witnesses to the power of this demand. The sentiment had long been in men's hearts,-it was now rapidly becoming an idea. Kings and priests told men the less liberty they had the better; if they tried to go alone they would certainly fall. Was it not better to sit on the hearth of the king, their head under the apron of the church, than thus try to walk in the open air? There was good and bad scripture for such a course, and of precedents the world was full. But men would not be satisfied; the king's hearth was warm, and the motherly apron of the church made the head easy and comfortable, but there was a divine soul in man which would break out into all sorts of peasant wars, of Jack Cade's rebellions, of Runymedes, and the like. At length the idea gets so fully set forth, as an idea, and so widely spread abroad by fanatics, and amongst sober men, that the chief question is, Where shall the idea first become a fact? Shall it be in Germany, where the ecclesiastical Reformation began and succeeded most? No, the feudal system had taken deep root in the Teutonic soil, and could not be pulled up for some ages to come; the Reformation had affected thought in all departments, in Germany, but politics suffered little change, and by that little it does not appear that the people were directly gainers, to any considerable degree. Could it be in France? There was a body of enlightened men taking the lead in European science and literature, but there was no intelligence in the people. They seemed subjects of authority, not subjects of reason, and, though they now and then gave indication of the sentiment for freedom, which has since become so mighty in that nation, yet then