The American
democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species of
barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and
placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate
authority, and made its natural association henceforth with all
civilized governments--not with the revolutionary movements to
overthrow them. The American people will always be progressive
as well as conservative; but they have learned a lesson, which
they much needed against false democracy: civil war has taught
them that "the sacred right of insurrection" is as much out of
place in a democratic state as in an aristocratic or a monarchical
state; and that the government should always be clothed with
ample authority to arrest and punish whoever plots its
destruction. They must never be delighted again to have their
government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor
to his own sovereign as the nation's guest. The people of the
Northern States are hardly less responsible for the late
rebellion than the people of the Southern States. Their press
had taught them to call every government a tyranny that refused
to remain quiet while the traitor was cutting its throat or
assassinating the nation, and they had nothing but mad
denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the Neapolitan
governments for their severity against conspirators and traitors.
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