A nation that has been created for Equality, organised on Equality, and that has fought the great battle of its life for Equality, cannot reverse its habitudes except through a process constantly repeated and indefinitely prolonged. All precedents confirm the conclusion that America will complete her Equality as between Individuals, her Freedom as between Individuals and the State, her adjustments as between State and Nation, her strength and coherence as a National and Federative Unity.

It was in 1775 that John Adams spoke of that "alteration of Southern constitutions which must certainly take place if this war continues, and will gradually bring all the continent nearer and nearer to each other in all respects." The latent war of passions and ideas will continue for a time. In that war the weapons of the North and of the nation, are, in a word, all the elements of prosperity let loose during the last five years. The march of ideas and of interests, of that Education which in the last century Jefferson sought to carry into the South, the propagandism of free labour and free thought,—the Americanising of the South,—— is a process from which the South can never extricate itself save by cutting itself adrift from that continent. Free Ideas, capital and labour, will carry Equality into the heart of the South, and will overwhelm and destroy Inequality in the North, the irrepressible conflict must be settled.

The Border States are now the North, and Republicanism will be both Government and nation.

But to glance for a moment at the highest view, it must be admitted that there is after all no finality in mere politics. Democracy is more than Politics, and has to do with manhood. The development and organisation of the whole as to the Individual, and of the All as to numbers, is the completed work of Democracy, and the energies of States have finally to be transferred from old world questions of protection of rights, to those of new developments and combinations of power. We train the material, mental, and moral manhood of nations, that, having thus worked out and through political questions, we may concentrate manhood upon itself.

This then is the final justification of politics, it prepares the platform upon which man may be prepared for the Infinite.

As I have said, the steps by which nations advance are Development,-Association, Equality. What may be the struggles by which this progress is to be consummated, is with futurity; we behold, not in nations, but in HUMANITY, the final unity, in Individual and National Development, its preparation; and in the Federal Principle, its formal bond. And doubtless the completion of this first nation upon the basis of individual political Equality, secures the next great step in the series along which Humanity has to advance. REFORM CLUB,

May, 1866.

INTRODUCTION.

"THE gradual development of the equality of conditions, is therefore a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a Divine decree: it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.

The whole book which is here offered to the public, has been written under the impression of a kind of religious dread produced in the author's mind by the contemplation of so irresistible a revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of such amazing obstacles, and which is still proceeding in the midst of the ruins it has made.

I know without a special revelation, that the planets move in the orbits traced by the Creator's finger. * * * *

If the men of our time were led by attentive observation and by sincere reflection, to acknowledge that the gradual and progressive development of social equality is at once the past and future of their history, this solitary truth would confer the sacred character of a divine decree upon the change. To attempt to check Democracy would be in that case to resist the will of God."

De Tocqueville, p. 21, Introduction.

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