It might seem singular that man should ever have found out this creed, as that physical life could invent the brain, since the struggle for existence in primitive and early times was so adverse to it, and rested on a selfish and aggrandizing principle, in states as well as between races.  In most parts of the world the first true governments were tyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was indigenous, it was confined to the race-blood.  Aristotle speaks of slavery without repugnance save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated in the northern tribes as soon as they began to be socially organized.  Some have alleged that religious equality was an Oriental idea, and borrowed from the relation of subjects to an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for it; some attribute civil equality to the Roman law; some find the germ of both in Stoical morals.  But so great an idea as the equality of man reaches down into the past by a thousand roots.  The state of nature of the savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, bore some outward resemblance to a freeman’s life; but such a condition is rather one of private independence than of the grounded social right that democracy contemplates.  How the ideas involved came into historical existence is a minor matter.  Democracy has its great career, for the first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale.  Nothing is more incumbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, to handle it as often and in as many phases as possible with lively curiosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that so elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple.  Fundamental ideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar.

Democracy is not merely a political experiment; and its governmental theory, though so characteristic of it as not to be dissociated from it, is a result of underlying principles.  There is always an ideality of the human spirit in all its works, if one will search them, which is the main thing.  The State, as a social aggregate with a joint life which constitutes it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of human conviction, desire, and tendency, with a common basis of wisdom and energy of action, seeking to realize life in accordance with its ideal, whether traditional or novel, of what life should be; and government is no more than the mode of administration under which it achieves its results both in national life and in the lives of its citizens.  All society is a means of escape from personality, and its limitations of power and wisdom, into this larger communal life; the individual, in so far, loses his particularity, and at the same time intensifies and strengthens that portion of his life which is thus made one with the general life of men,—­that universal and typical life which they have in common and which moulds them with similar characteristics.  It is by this