aristocracy, nor the ministry, nor the Parliament, nor to any cause in England, but solely to a great historic crisis, the consequences of which would be favorable to religion and human nature. They continued not only docile to the teachings of reason and patriotism in their attitude in regard to the authorities and other classes in their country, but unshakably faithful in their demonstrations and petitions to Parliament, to their sympathies with the northern States, which represented in their eyes the cause of justice and of liberty. They have thus given the best proof of their aptitude for public life, as well as for the political rights which they claim, and which they cannot fail to obtain, and which must be desired for them, in desiring also the regulated and peaceful admission of the masses to the electoral suffrage may be brought about with the guarantees necessary to prevent intelligence and liberty from succumbing beneath the abused preponderance of numbers.

V.

Let us recapitulate, and come to a conclusion. We maintain that the victory of the north is an event as happy as glorious, and we hoped to have proved it; but should we not have succeeded, none of our readers will deny that it is the most important event of the present day, and that whose consequences are of most vital interest for the world entire.

The American Union is henceforth replaced in the first rank of the great powers of earth. All eyes will henceforth be turned on her; all hearts will be agitated by the destiny in reserve for her; all minds will seek enlightenment from her future. For that future will be more or less ours, and her destiny will perhaps decide our own.

From all that has yet passed in America, from all that is about to pass there in the future, there results for us grave teachings, lessons which it is indispensable to make account of, for, willing or unwilling, we belong to a society irrevocably democratized, and democratic societies resemble each other much more than monarchic or aristocratic societies. It is true that differences are still great between all countries, as well as between all epochs; it is true, above all, thank God, that nations, like individuals, preserve, under all rule, their free will, and remain responsible for their condition. To know how to use this free will in the midst of the impetuous and apparently irresistible current of the tendencies of the times is the great problem. To resolve it, account must first be taken of these tendencies, either to contest, or follow, or direct them according to the dictates of conscience.

The question is, then, in the study of contemporary events; not of preferences, but of teachings. It is not in our power here below to choose between things which please or which displease, but between things that are. I have not to reason here with those who have not done mourning for the political past of the Old World; with those who still dream of a theocratic reconstruction, monarchic or aristocratic, of modern society. I understand all the regrets; I share in more than one; I honor greatly some, in which I do not share. I hold as much as others the religion, perhaps even the superstitution, of the past, but reserving to myself the faculty of distinguishing the past from the future, as of death from life. I will not exult over any ruin, except that of falsehood and wickedness, which it has not been given to me to contemplate. Thus much said, I mean not to offend any, nor even to utter anything but a commonplace, almost trivial because it is so plain, by proving that the modern world has fallen to the lot of democracy, and that there is only a choice between two forms of democracy, but two forms which differ as much as night from day; between democracy disciplined, authoritative, more or less incarnate in a single, all-powerful man; and liberal democracy, where all powers are restrained and controlled by unlimited publicity and by individual liberty; in other words by Cæsarian democracy and American democracy. One might be well pleased not to take either the one or the other. Be it so, that is intelligible. "Delicate people are unfortunate!" But that is no reason why they should become blind and powerless; once again, the choice must be made, and the choice can be only between these two conditions. All the rest are nothing but Utopian fancies, or regrets of the archæologist; fancies and regrets, very respectable perhaps, but perfectly unproductive.

It is well enough known my choice is made, and I suppose it is also made in the same way by those to whom I would now speak. It is to them, therefore, that I present with gladness and with pride the strife which has traversed America, and the victory she has achieved (if this victory continues unstained) as a gage of trust and hope.

The civil war might have made out of American democracy a Cæsarian and military democracy. But the contrary has happened. It remains a liberal and Christian democracy. This is the first great fact which, in the annals of modern democracy, reassures and comforts without reservation, the first which is fit to inspire trust in its future, trust limited, humble, and unassuming, as is becoming all human trust should be, but trust fearless and sincere, as might and should be that of free hearts and clear consciences.

America has just shown, for the first time since the world began, that liberty could be coexistent in a democracy with war, and, moreover, with the almost measureless greatness of a country. This simultaneous existence rests always full of perils and of hazards; but in fine it is possible, it is real, it passes provisionally out of the region of problems into that of facts. American democracy has its creeds and its morals-Christian creeds, pure and virile morals; it is in that very superior to the greater part of European societies. It professes and practices respect for religious faith, and respect for woman. But above all it practices and maintains liberty in a degree which no nation, except England, has yet been able to attain,

liberty without restriction and without inconsistency; entire liberty, that is to say, domestic liberty not less than political liberty; civil liberty side by side with religious liberty; liberty to devise, with the liberty of the press, liberty of association and of instruction, with the liberty of the tribune. Notwithstanding the rudeness of its attractions, notwithstanding a certain decadence of the moral sense which seems to have shown itself there since the death of Washington, it despises and ignores the odious and ridiculous clogs, the hateful and jealous restrictions which our French democrats associate with their strange liberalism.

Besides, it approaches more nearly than any other contemporary society the object which every human society should propose to itself: it offers and secures to every member of com munity an active participation in the fruits and benefits of the social union.

The new President (Johnson) has frankly adopted in his first allocution the fundamental doctrine of free and Christian countries: "I believe that government was made for man, and not man for government." In other terms, society is made for man, and not man for society or the state. He has thus laid down the sovereign distinction which separates liberty from absolute power.

Certain it is, that neither want nor immorality are unknown in the great republic. The poison of slavery with which it has been too long infected, the scum which is brought to it by the European emigration from which it is recruited, the dangers and weaknesses belonging to all democracy, aggravated by the untutored rudeness of certain social habits, all that shakes and menaces it, but does not hinder it giving to public order and to property a security, if not complete, at least sufficient, and whose superficial vascillations are a thousand times preferable to the enervating and corrupting peace of despotism.

Certain it is, also, you will never see in the United States, nor in other countries pursuing the same track, effeminate and easy life of the eastern nations, or of southern Europe in the eighteenth century. There will be hardships, difficulties, fatigues, dangers for all and each. This action and this censorship of all the world over all the world, which constitutes the real life and the only efficacious discipline of free nations, draws along with it a thousand cares and sometimes a thousand perils. "The gods," says Montesquieu, in the words of Sylla, "the gods who have given most men a weak ambition, have attached to liberty almost as many evils as to bondage. But whatever be the cost of this noble liberty, it must be paid to the gods." America teaches us how to cure ourselves of this weak ambition, without denying any of the principles, any of the conquests of Christian civilization.

That which hurts and disturbs us most, we Europeans, who study America with a destre to read therein the secret of our future, is the system, or rather popular instinct, which keeps at a distance from power, and often even from public life, men the most eminent for talent, for character, and for services rendered. This legal and gradual ostracism, of which the United States have made a sort of habit, is certainly a very great evil. But I hear it said this result is not altogether unknown in certain countries which have nothing in common with American liberty, and where these victims of ostracism have not the same resource of periodic and constitutional changes, still less of weapons offensive and defensive, which guarantees to every citizen of the United States the unrestricted liberty of all. Even under the old time royalty has not St. Simon pointed out to us "the taste to humiliate all," and "the special graces of obscurity and of nothingness" in the eyes of the master? And after all, must we despair of the world because this phenomenon of the humiliation or even the exclusion of the opulent or elevated classes occurs everywhere (except in England) as often as of old, by their own fault as often, and especially in our days, without there being any serious reproach to make to them? This is sad, this is painful, this is unjust; but this is nevertheless too general not to be an historic law, and the consequences of this new law are not always nor everywhere destitute of grandeur.

America astonishes the world by placing at the head of a nation of thirty millions of people men issuing from the humblest grades of society, by confiding to these obscure and ineperienced men armies of a million of soldiers, who, the war ended, return to their homes without any one being induced to see therein a danger to liberty or a resource against it-a man who was first a wood-cutter, then a husbandman, then a boatman, then a lawyer, becomes President of the United States, and directs in this character a war more formidable and above all more legitimate than the wars of Napoleon. A horrible outrage causes his disappearance, and immediately one, formerly a journeyman tailor, replaces him without the shadow of disorder or protest coming to disturb the national mourning. This is strange and novel; but what is there in it that is unfortunate or affrighting? For my part, I see in it a transformation, historic and social, as remarkable and less stormy than that which substituted through all the west the Clovises and the Alarics for the vile prefects of the Roman empire. The laborers become chiefs of a great nation, are a hundred-fold less repugnant to me than the Cæsars with their freedmen and their favorites. I see with an emotion of admiration these proletaries metamorphosed into potentates in nowise bewildered by their elevation. They continue to be prudent, mild, discreet. There is nothing in them which savors of the popular tyrants of other days; nor of those pretended envoys of Providence, who begin by violations of the laws, like Cæsar, and finish in insanity, like Alexander and Napoleon.*

*"Recall to mind that Mr. Thiers, our illustrious and national historian, has demonstrated, at the end of his great work, the folly which the exercise of full powers substituted in the spirit of Napoleon for the wisdom of his earlier years."

What rest, what comfort, to feel oneself in the presence of worthy men, simple and truthful, in whom power defined and restricted, although immense, has not turned the head nor perverted the heart. Where search for true greatness, if it be not in these plebeian souls, which, disciplined by responsibility and purified by adversity, seem to us to enlarge with their situation and to elevate political even to the heights of moral life?

Dark and sad as her future might be imagined, and were she to be buried to-morrow beneath her triumph, America will not the less have bequeathed to the friends of liberty a neverdying encouragement. Numerous and bitter as may be our own mistakes, legitimate as may be our apprehensions, she has given us somewhat to believe in and to hope for, through ages to come, in the ideal which attracted in the last century our fathers under her banner, the ideal of which they gave the only true programme in 1789, and which can only serve as a bond between the sons of the conquerors and the sons of the victims of the French revolution. Therefore it is that I have not feared to say that at the present hour the American people, coming out victorious and pure from so redoubtable an experience, will take rank amid the first nations of the earth, which does not mean to say that it can be irreproachable. It has not been so in the past, and nothing announces that it must be so in the future. Side by side with all the virtues and all the great characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race are only too distinguishable excess and gross faults, cynic and cruel egoism, fierce instincts. Behold her at the moment when these vices and defects are about to encroach on and menace her more than ever. The blindness of pride satisfied, the overweening spirit of triumphant strength, are about to expose her to the vices of power, to the depravity resulting from victory, of which democracies are as much the subjects as dictatorships. She has also much to expiate, because in the interval which has separated the war of independence from the civil war the external policy of the United States has too much resenibled the external policy of the Romans or of the English; it has been selfish, iniquitous, violent, even brutal, and characterized by absolute absence of scruples. Mexico on the one hand, on the other the native and independent races, have learned to understand all the cruel consequences of the preponderance of a race eager for gain and born for conquest.

Behold her at the decisive period of her inner life. The question to be demonstrated is whether the American people, like the Roman people at the time of Publicola and Cincinnatus, possesses the spirit of moderation which causes republics to last, or whether, like the contemporaries of the Gracchi, it would open the door which leads to proscriptions and dictatorships.

There is every reason to hope that amid the first rejoicings of victory the republican maionty will show itself as generous as resolved, in accordance with the noble speech of Lincoln in his negotiation with the south in January last. May it please God that there be no recourse after the triumph to reprisals, which have been abstained from in the heat of battle, which would also render inexcusable the prompt submission and complete dispersion of the conquered armies. The spirit of revenge would instil in the veins of the great nation a poison more fatal and more inextirpable than that of slavery abolished. Posthumous repressions, confiscations, proscriptions of the Muscovite order against the conquered and prisoners, offences against local franchises, or the sovereign independence of states, would excite universal indignation, and would change all the sympathies of the liberals of Europe against the transatlantic rivals of Mouravieff. To substitute centralization for liberty under pretext of guaranteeing the latter, would be to condemn America to become nothing but a miserable and servile counterfeit presentment of Europe, in place of being our guide and precursor in the right path.

For the rest, notwithstanding all the violence of language, notwithstanding many alarming symptoms, we may still hope that nothing will come of them. Americans will remember as their defender, Burke has said that greatness of soul is the wisest policy, and that littleness of mind does not lead to a great empire. Reconciliation should and must be brought about without humiliation, and consequently without difficulty and without delay, between parties which are not separated by any antipathies, national or religious, of creed or of language. The works and the benefits of peace, the immense industrial commercial and agricultural movement, which war itself has scarcely slackened, will seal anew the Union between north and south. But will not the reconciled belligerents carry abroad the henceforth sterile ardor? Will the warlike spirit, so quickly and so prodigiously developed, suffer itself to be reduced to and restrained within the necessary limits? From these disbanded armies will there not issue bands of adventurers and filibusters, the terror and scourge of the neighboring people? Fearful questions, of which we ardently hope a pacific solution, because our ardent aspirations for the glory and the prosperity of the United States accord with those which every friend of right should entertain for the consolidation of the new AngloAmerican confederation, in which our brethren of Canada, brethren of race and religious faith, may act a part so advantageous and so preponderant.

But our solicitudes and apprehensions are much more concentred on the domestic condition of the great republic than on its foreign relations, even much more on the dangers pertinent to all the elements of its Constitution than upon the immediate consequences of the contest which has just terminated. May it never be forgotten that the origin of its noble institutions, of its incomparable liberty, of its invincible energy, goes back to the traditional liberties and the Christian civilization, under the shelter of which the insurgent colonies of 1775 had grown

up. May it acquire the difficult secret of preserving individuals as well as public authority from that subjection to the omnipotence of majorities which so naturally moulds the hearts of men to submit to the absolute power of a single individual. Let us wish for it that susceptibility of conscience, that delicacy, "that chastity of honor," almost always wanting in democratic societies, even when they know how to remain free. Let us wish they may escape, or rather resist, one of their greatest perils, that contempt for ideas, for studies, for intellectual enjoyments, which engenders torpor or drowsiness of spirit in the midst of the noisy yet monotonous agitation of local and personal policy. Let us wish them to renounce, sooner or later, that love for mediocrity, that hatred of natural and legitimate superiority, natural consequence of the passion of equality, which carries into the bosom of democratie assemblies the spirit of the courts and ante-chambers, and there too often reproduces one of the most debasing characteristics of despotism, perfected and popularized by modern civili zation. Let us wish that there universal suffrage, more and more clothed with all elective functions, may not condemn the enlightened and superior classes to that discouragement, that political apathy, which ends by excluding them in fact, if it do not in law, from publie life; but, above all, that nothing may ever induce the Americans to weaken the federation principle which has made thus far their greatness and their liberty by preserving them from all the shoals on which democracy has made wreck in Europe. To confine the central government to functions strictly necessary, by respecting scrupulously the local liberties of the dif ferent States, is the first duty, and above all the first interest, of American statesmen. Assuredly on the day succeeding an unjustifiable rebellion, and a terrible war, undertaken in the name of an abusive and immoral interpretation of the federative principle, of federative law, the temptation to lessen and limit this principle, to tend with flowing sail toward centralizing unity, would be strong with many, but it is only by resisting this temptation and maintaining unshakable fidelity to the national, liberal, and federal tradition of the country that America will continue to be worthy of her glory and of her destiny.

That which mainly reassures us against the dangers which menace the republic, or with which she may menace the world, is the character of the American people—the nation which has learned how to pass through such terrible trials without giving herself a master, without even dreaming of it, has evidently received from Heaven a moral constitution, a political temperament quite different from that of the turbulent and servile races which know not how to secure themselves against their own blunderings but by precipitating themselves from revolution into servitude, and has no refuge or alleviation of the shame and annoyance of their domestic subjection but in foreign adventures.

What gives the best pledge of this national temperament is the personage, truly unique, whom the nation, in full possession of its free will and its natural sympathies, has twice in succession chosen as President. Everything has been said about Abraham Lincoln. He has presented to us in the ripeness of the nineteenth century a fresh example, which is not either a copy or a counterfeit of the calm and worthy from which Washington issued. His glory will not be eclipsed in history even by that of Washington. He honors human nature, not less than the country whose destinies he directed, and whose pacification he brought about with such intelligent moderation. His eulogy is everywhere, and we yield only to the imperious appeal of conscience in joining in it. But it behooves us above all, humble advocates of liberty, whose glorious and victorious champion he has been, to engrave in our souls and seal with our lives this pure and noble memory, to encourage, to console, and to bind us more and more to the laborious duty on which we have voluntarily entered. It behooves us to prove that which the study of this career, so short but so resplendent, brings especially to light, to wit, this combination of rectitude and of kindness, of sagacity and simplicity, of modesty and firm courage, which make of him a type so attaching and so rare a type that no prince, no public man of our age, has equalled or surpassed. This woodcutter become lawyer, then placed at the head of one of the greatest peoples of the earth, has displayed all the virtues of the honest man beside all the qualities of the politician. His head was no more affected than his language. Since his accession to supreme rank, no one can cite of him a single expression of menace or bravado, a single expression vindictive or extravagant. No sovereign, hereditary or elective, has spoken a language more eloquent or more worthy; none has shown more calmness and good temper, more perseverance and magnanimity.

"Let us unite," he wrote to the governor of Missouri on the 20th February last, in pointing out to him the means for pacifying that State, recently submitting but still severely agitated. "Let us meet only to look to the future, without any care for what we have been able to do, say or think about the actual war, or no matter what. Let us pledge one another to harass no man, and to make common cause against any who shall persist in disturbing his neighbor. Thus the old friendship will again spring up in our hearts, because honor and Christian charity will come to our aid."

Honor and Christian charity: is it not that which is most wanting in the action and language of politicians? What can be more touching than to look upon this "rail-splitter,' this Illinois husbandman, recalling the inspirations and vital conditions of humanity first to his own people; then, thanks to the prestige with which his death has crowned him, to the whole world, which attentively gathers up his slightest sayings to enlarge the too scanty treasury of moral lessons which the shepherds of men bequeath to posterity. Let us collect

in turn, and seek in these words, especially what bears the stamp of that Christian faith with which he was imbued, and which all the public men of America so simply and naturally confess. Orators and generals, authors and diplomatists, and, let us add quickly, northerners and southerners, without distinction, have the thought of God ever present to them, care to call Him to witness, and the duty of rendering Him public homage always inspires them. Nothing better demonstrates, in contradiction to European revolutionists, that the most energetic and unrestricted development of ideas of institutions and of modern liberties has absolutely nothing in it incompatible with the public profession of Christianity, with the solemn proclamation of gospel truth. Let us listen to his adieus to his neighbors and friends on leaving his modest residence at Springfield, Illinois, to become for the first time President of the United States:

"No one can understand the sadness I feel at this moment of farewell. To these around I owe all that I am. Here I have lived a quarter of a century; here my children were born; here one of them lies buried. I know not whether I shall ever see you again; a duty is imposed on me, greater perhaps than any imposed on any citizen since the days of Washington. Washington never could have succeeded without the help of Divine Providence, in which he ever placed trust. I feel that I cannot succeed without the same assistance, and it is from God that I also look for aid."

Listen to him in his inaugural address on his first presidency, 4th March, 1861: "Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust all our present difficulties."

After four years had passed, and four years of cruel war, which he had done everything to avoid, elected for a second term, let us hear him uttering, the 4th March, 1855, the wonderful language one wearies not of admiring and repeating:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered-that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both north and south this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphanto do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Listen to the last public remarks pronounced by him three days before his death in a speech on Louisiana, April 11, 1865:

"We are assembled this evening not in sadness, but in the joy of our hearts. The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the capitulation of the main army of the insurgents, authorizes the hope of a just peace. Our gratification at these events should not be restrained, but in these circumstances He from whom all blessings flow must not be forgotten. A proclamation for a day of national thanksgiving is purposed, and will in due time be promulgated. Let us not be forgetful of those who, undertaking the severest duties, have gained for us this cause for rejoicing, and deserve special honor. I have been to the front of the army, and have myself had the pleasure of sending to you a good share of good news, but neither the plan, its execution, nor its honors belong to me. The whole belong to General Grant, to the skill of his officers, and the valor of his soldiers."

You there see-and it is always so about this great, honest man-the same humility. the same simplicity, the same charity. I do not believe that since Saint Louis any among the princes and the great of the earth have uttered better words. Listen now to Mr. Stanton, Secretary of War, announcing to the people the news of the victory:

"Friends and fellow-citizens: In this great triumph my heart and yours are penetrated with gratitude to Almighty God for the deliverance of this nation. Our gratitude is due to the President, to the army and to the navy, to the brave officers and soldiers who have exposed their lives on the battle-field, and drenched the ground with their blood; our pity and our aid are due to the wounded and suffering. Let us offer our humble thanksgiv.