Revolutionists, which have and can have no legitimate application
in the United States. The tendency of American politics, for the
last thirty or forty years, has been, within the several States
themselves, in the direction of centralized democracy, as if the
American people had for their mission only the reproduction of
ancient Athens. The American system is not that of any of the
simple forms of government, nor any combination of them. The
attempt to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of
government recognized by political writers, is an attempt to
clothe the future in the cast-off garments of the past. The
American system, wherever practicable, is better than monarchy,
better than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, better
than any possible combination of these several forms, because it
accords more nearly with the principles of things, the real order
of the universe.

But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other
states more than that of their own, and have succeeded in
obscuring the American system in the minds of the people, and
giving them in its place pure and simple democracy, which is its
false development or corruption. Under the influence of this
false development, the people were fast losing sight of the
political truth that, though the people are sovereign, it is the
organic, not the inorganic people, the territorial people, not
the people as simple population, and were beginning to assert the
absolute God-given right of the majority to govern. All the
changes made in the bosom of the States themselves have consisted
in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of the
majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy.
This tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with