being the formation of the government of one.  England’s polity is, and for ages has been, aristocratical.  Not even the passage of the Reform Bill materially lessened the power of the aristocracy; and the declaration of Earl Grey, the father of the measure, that it would be found the most aristocratical of measures,—­as he was one of the most aristocratical of men,—­does not seem so absurd now as it appeared four-and-thirty years since, when we note how difficult it now is to lower the franchise in Britain.  The firmest government in Europe is that of England, in which property has greater influence than in that of any other nation.  The conclusion drawn by aristocrats and their admirers is, that aristocracies are the most enduring of all the polities known to men, and that they are so because aristocrats are the most prudent and cautious of men.  The governments they form and control wash and wear well, and bid defiance to what Bacon calls “the waves and weathers of time.”

There is some truth in this.  Aristocracies are cautious and prudent, and indisposed to risk present advantage in the hope of future gain.  Therefore aristocratical polities often attain to great age, and the nations that know them attain slowly to great and firmly-placed power.  Rome and Venice and England are striking examples of these truths.  Yet it is not the less true that aristocracies sometimes do behave with a rashness that cannot be paralleled from the histories of democracies and despotisms.  It has been the fortune of this age to see two examples of this rashness, such as no other age ever witnessed or ever could have witnessed.  The first of these was presented in the action, in 1860-61, of the American aristocracy.  The second was that of the Austrian aristocracy, in 1866.  The American aristocracy—­the late slavocracy—­was the most powerful body in the world; so powerful, that it was safe against everything but itself.  It had been gradually built up, until it was as towering as its foundations were deep and broad.  Not only was it unassailed, but there was no disposition in any influential quarter to assail it.  The few persons who did attack it, from a distance, produced scarcely more effect adverse to its ascendency, than was produced by the labors of the first Christians against the Capitoline Jupiter in the days of the Julian Caesars.  Abolitionists were annoyed and insulted even in the course of that political campaign which ended in the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency; and not a few of the victors in that campaign were forward to declare, that between their party and the “friends of the slave” there was neither friendship nor sympathy.  One of the most eminent of the Republicans of Massachusetts declared that he felt hurt at the thought that his party could be suspected of approving the conduct of Captain John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.  Down to the spring-time of 1860, it required, on the part of the American slaveholding interest, only a