his breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of
political philosophy, solemnly arguing from the precedent of some
petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose long periods of
aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward parentheses of
mob, had always taught us that democracies were incapable of the
sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-
reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatient
of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural
nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always
on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural
almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism.
Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew
democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely
from books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton,
who, having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had
written to *The Times* demanding redress, and drawing a
mournful inference of democratic instability. Nor were men
wanting among ourselves who had so steeped their brains in
London literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European culture,
and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan breadth of view,
and who, owing all they had an all they were to democracy, thought
it had an air of high-breeding to join in the shallow epicedium that
our bubble had burst.

But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid
or the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity
against any over-confidence of hope. A war--which, whether we
consider the expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into
the field, or the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be
reckoned the most momentous of modern times--was to be waged