an imperative voice, and is ready to back its demands with the necessary self-taxation.  This experience our absolute faith in free institutions enabled us to anticipate as the inevitable result of our political system; but let us confess that the rapidity with which it has developed itself has taken us by surprise.  We knew, that, when the people truly realized their sovereignty, they would claim not only the utilitarian, but the artistic and munificent attributes of their throne,—­and that all the splendors and decorations, all the provisions for leisure, taste, and recreation, which kings and courts have made, would be found to be mere preludes and rehearsals to the grander arrangements and achievements of the vastly richer and more legitimate sovereign, the People, when he understood his own right and duty.  As dynasties and thrones have been predictions of the royalty of the people, so old courts and old capitals, with all their pomp and circumstance, their parks and gardens, galleries and statues, are but dim prefigurings of the glories of architecture, the grandeur of the grounds, the splendor and richness of the museums and conservatories with which the people will finally crown their own self-respect and decorate their own majesty.  But we did not expect to see this sure prophecy turning itself into history in our day.  We thought the people were too busy with the spade and the quill to care for any other sceptres at present.  But it is now plain that they have been dreaming princely dreams and thinking royal thoughts all the while, and are now ready to put them into costly expression.

Passing by all other evidences of this, we come at once to the most majestic and indisputable witness of this fact, the actual existence of the Central Park in New York,—­the most striking evidence of the sovereignty of the people yet afforded in the history of free institutions,—­the best answer yet given to the doubts and fears which have frowned on the theory of self-government,—­the first grand proof that the people do not mean to give up the advantages and victories of aristocratic governments, in maintaining a popular one, but to engraft the energy, foresight, and liberality of concentrated powers upon democratic ideas, and keep all that has adorned and improved the past, while abandoning what has impaired and disgraced it.  That the American people appreciate and are ready to support what is most elegant, refined, and beautiful in the greatest capitals of Europe,—­that they value and intend to provide the largest and most costly opportunities for the enjoyment of their own leisure, artistic tastes, and rural instincts, is emphatically declared in the history, progress, and manifest destiny of the Central Park; while their competency to use wisely, to enjoy peacefully, to protect sacredly, and to improve industriously the expensive, exposed, and elegant pleasure-ground they have devised, is proved with redundant testimony by the year and more