Perhaps we ought not to be surprised or disappointed.  With a congenital difference of organization, with a new theory of human rights involving a virtual reconstruction of society, with larger views of human destiny, with a virgin continent for them to be worked out in, the American should expect to be misunderstood by the civilizations of the past, based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an avalanche of revolution.  Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what liberty they have by extorting it piecemeal from their masters.  Magna Charta was forced from a weak monarch by a conspiracy of nobles, acting from purely selfish motives, in behalf of their own order.  The Habeas Corpus Act was unpalatable to the Lords, and was passed only by a trick or a blunder.  What is there in common between the states which recognize the rule of any persons who happen to be descended from the bold or artful men who obtained their power by violence or fraud, and a state which starts with the assumption that the government belongs to the governed, subject, we must remember, to the laws which make a people a nation,—­laws recognized just as unhesitatingly by the Rebel States as applying to Western Virginia or East Tennessee, as the Union recognizes their application to these same Rebel States?

Of course, it is conceivable that we are all wrong in our theory of human rights and our plan of government.  It is possible that the true principle of selecting the rulers of a nation is to take the descendants of the cut-throat, the assassin, the poisoner, the traitor, who got his foot upon a people’s neck some centuries ago.  It may be that there is an American people which will hold itself fortunate, if it can be ruled over by a descendant of Charles V.,—­though Philip II. was the son of that personage, and an American historian has made us familiar with his doings, and those of his vicegerent, the Duke of Alva.  If this is the way that people should be governed, then we are wrong, and have no right to look for sympathy from Old-World dynasties.  The only question is, How soon it will be safe to send a Grand Duke over to govern us.

But if our theory of human rights and our plan of government are the true ones, then our success is the inevitable downfall of every dynasty on the face of the earth.  It is not our fault that this must be so; the blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization, culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages.  What all good men desire, here and everywhere, is that this necessary change may be effected gradually and peaceably.  We do not find fault with men for being born in positions that confer powers upon them