England was startled the other day by an earthquake.  The fast-anchored isle was astonished at such a tropical phenomenon.  It was all very well for Jamaica or Manila, but who would have thought of solid, constitutional England shaking like a jelly?  The London “Times” moralized about it in these words:—­“We see, afar off, a great empire, that had threatened to predominate over all mankind, suddenly broken up by moral agencies, and shattered into no one knows how many fragments.  We are safe from that fate, at least so we deem ourselves, for never were we so united.” “A great empire, that had threatened to predominate over all mankind.”  That was the trouble.  That was the reason the “Times” was so pleased to say, a few months ago, “The bubble has burst.”  How, if the great empire should prove not to have been shattered? how, if the bubble has not burst?—­nay, if that great system of intelligent self-government which was taken for a bubble prove to be a sphere of adamant, rounded in the mould of Divine Law, and filled with the pure light of Heaven?

England is happy in a virtuous queen; but what if another profligate like George IV. should, by the accident of birth, become the heir of her sovereignty?  France is as strong as one man’s life can make her; but what if that man should run against some fanatic’s idea which had taken shape in a bullet-mould, or receive a sudden call from that pale visitor who heeds no challenge from the guards at the gate of the Tuileries, and stalks unannounced through antechambers and halls of audience?

The “Times” might have found a moral for the earthquake nearer home.  The flame that sweeps our prairies is terrible, but it only scorches the surface.  What all the governments based on smothered pauperism, tolerated ignorance, and organized degradation have to fear is the subterranean fire, which finds its vent in blazing craters, or breaks up all the ancient landmarks in earth-shattering convulsions.  God forbid that we should invoke any such catastrophe even for those who have been hardest upon us in our bitter trial!  Yet so surely as American society founds itself upon the rights of civilized man, there is no permanent safety for any nation but in the progressive recognition of the American principle.  The right of governing a nation belongs to the people of the nation; and the urgent duty of those provisional governments which we call monarchies, empires, aristocracies is to educate their people with a view to the final surrender of all power into their hands.  A little longer patience, a little more sacrifice, a little more vigorous, united action, on the part of the Loyal States, and the Union will behold herself mirrored in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the stateliest of earthly empires,—­not in her own aspiring language, but by the confession of her most envious rival, predominating over all mankind.  No Tartar hordes pouring from the depths of Asia, no Northern barbarians swarming out