adulation that comes from a great and singular success. It is the
consciousness of victory over a false theory of government which has
afflicted mankind for many ages, that gives joy to the true American, as
it did to De Tocqueville in his great triumph.

When De Tocqueville wrote, we had lived less than fifty years under our
Constitution. In that time no great national commotion had occurred that
tested its strength, or its power of resistance to internal strife, such
as had converted his beloved France into fields of slaughter torn by
tempests of wrath.

He had a strong conviction that no government could be ordained that
could resist these internal forces, when, they are directed to its
destruction by bad men, or unreasoning mobs, and many then believed, as
some yet believe, that our government is unequal to such pressure, when
the assault is thoroughly desperate.

Had De Tocqueville lived to examine the history of the United States
from 1860 to 1870, his misgivings as to this power of self-preservation
would, probably, have been cleared off. He would have seen that, at
the end of the most destructive civil war that ever occurred, when
animosities of the bitterest sort had banished all good feeling from
the hearts of our people, the States of the American Union, still in
complete organization and equipped with all their official entourage,
aligned themselves in their places and took up the powers and duties of
local government in perfect order and without embarrassment. This would
have dispelled his apprehensions, if he had any, about the power of the
United States to withstand the severest shocks of civil war. Could he
have traced the further course of events until they open the portals of
the twentieth century, he would have cast away his fears of our