here:--for sixty years now, ever since the grand or _First_
French Revolution, that fact has been terribly announced to all
the world; in message after message, some of them very terrible
indeed; and now at last all the world ought really to believe it.
That the world does believe it; that even Kings now as good as
believe it, and know, or with just terror surmise, that they are
but temporary phantasm Play-actors, and that Democracy is the
grand, alarming, imminent and indisputable Reality: this, among
the scandalous phases we witnessed in the last two years, is a
phasis full of hope: a sign that we are advancing closer and
closer to the very Problem itself, which it will behoove us to
solve or die; that all fighting and campaigning and coalitioning
in regard to the _existence_ of the Problem, is hopeless and
superfluous henceforth. The gods have appointed it so; no Pitt,
nor body of Pitts or mortal creatures can appoint it otherwise.
Democracy, sure enough, is here; one knows not how long it will
keep hidden underground even in Russia;--and here in England,
though we object to it resolutely in the form of
street-barricades and insurrectionary pikes, and decidedly will
not open doors to it on those terms, the tramp of its million
feet is on all streets and thoroughfares, the sound of its
bewildered thousand-fold voice is in all writings and speakings,
in all thinkings and modes and activities of men: the soul that
does not now, with hope or terror, discern it, is not the one we
address on this occasion.

What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the
Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these
latter days? There lies the question for us. Whence comes it,
this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the