mountains nor villages, neither elevations nor chasms, nothing but conventional marks to indicate the existence of such things.  The earth is a boundless plain, on which the prairie is as high as Chimborazo.  The observer of the real earth knows that such is not the case, and that inequality is the physical world’s law.  So was it here, to the foreign eye.  All appeared to be on the same level, when he looked upon us from his home; but when he came amongst us, he found that matters here differed in no striking respect from those of older nations.  Yet so wedded were foreigners to the notion that we were all democrats, and that here the majority did as it pleased them to do, that, but a short time before his death,—­which took place just a year before the beginning of the Secession movement,—­Lord Macaulay wrote a letter in which he expressed his belief that we should fall because of a struggle between the rich and the poor, for which we had provided by making suffrage universal!  He could not have been more ignorant of the real sources of the danger that threatened us, if he had been an American who resolutely closed his eyes, and then would not believe in what he would not see.  When such a man could make such a mistake, and supposed that we were to perish from an agrarian revolt,—­we being then on the eve of a revolt of the slaveholders,—­it cannot be matter for wonder that the common European belief was that the United States constituted a pure and perfect democracy, or that most Europeans of the higher classes should have considered that democracy as the most impure and imperfect of political things.[K]

The long and almost unbroken ascendency of the democratic party in this country had much to do with creating the firm impression that our system was democratic in its character,—­men not discriminating closely between that party and the polity of which it had charge.  Originally, some reproach attached to the word Democrat, considered as a party-name; and it was not generally accepted until after the Jeffersonian time had passed away.  Men who would now be called Democrats were known as Republicans in the early part of the century.  But the word conquered a great place for itself, and became the most popular of political names, so that even respectable Whigs did not hesitate to appropriate it to their own use.  Whatever name it was known by, the democratic party took possession of the Federal Government in 1801, and held it through an unbroken line of Virginia Presidents for twenty-four years.  The Presidential term of Mr. J.Q.  Adams was no breach of democratic party-rule in fact, whatever it was in name, for almost every man who held high office under Mr. Adams was a Jeffersonian democrat.  In 1829 the new democratic party came into power, and held office for twelve successive years.  The Whig victory of 1840 hardly interrupted that rule, as President Harrison’s early death threw power into the hands of Mr. Tyler,