he finds more evenly distributed among them than among us. "The people, from top to bottom, are far more perfectly humanized than elsewhere. Equality has been such a practical education for them that even the ignorant have attained that intelligence which is the end of formal education in greater measure than the corresponding classes of the most highly educated portions of Prussia itself."
The correction, for us, which this state of affairs suggests to Mr. Brownell is a return to our own religion and philosophy of democracy and a fresh effort to fulfil its promises. "It is perfectly certain," he declares, "that but for Jefferson's French philosophy, called then as now demagogic Quixotism, we should have had as short-lived a democratic republic as Hamilton prophesied and endeavored to compass. Our next epoch made a nation of us, and crystallized the spirit of nationality in democratic forms. But nothing is more significant of the discredit into which democracy as our ideal has fallen among us than the way in which this formative period of the nation's growth has been obscured by the struggle with slavery which immediately followed it. . . . Democratic philosophy nearly perished. It ceased to be propagated among 'the best people,' as they are called. It lost its hold on the mass of intelligence, on the newspapers, on the college graduates, on all those who had not an especial capacity for keeping their heads."
Let the curious person take this chapter on
