How would England receive such advice from us under like circumstances?
But we must cut short the utterance of our feelings on this point, that
we may make another specification,--
Which is, that our English critics see only, or chiefly, in the fearful
and momentous conflict in which we are engaged, "a bursting of the
bubble of Democracy"! Shall we challenge now the intelligence or the
moral principle, the lack of one or the other of which is betrayed
in this sneering and malignant representation--this utter
misrepresentation--of the catastrophe which has befallen our nation?
Intelligent Englishmen know full well that the issue raised among us
does not necessarily touch or involve at a single point the principles
of Democracy, but stands wide apart and distinct from them. We might
with as much propriety have said that the Irish Rebellion and the Indian
Mutiny showed "the bursting of the bubble of Monarchy." The principles
of Democracy stand as firm and find our people as loyal to them in every
little town-meeting and in every legislature of each loyal State in the
Union as they did in the days of our first enthusiastic and successful
trial of them. Supposing even that the main assumption on which so many
Englishmen have prematurely vented their scorn were a fact; we cannot
but ask if the nation nearest akin to us, and professing to be guided
in this century by feelings which forbid a rejoicing over others' great
griefs, has no words of high moral sympathy, no expressions of regretful
disappointment in our calamities? Is it the first or the most emphatic
thing which it is most fitting for Christian Englishmen to say over the
supposed wreck of a recently noble and promising country, the prospered
home of thirty millions of God's children,--that "a bubble has burst"?
We might interchange with our foreign "comforters" a discussion by
arguments and facts as to whether a monarchy or a democracy has about it
more of the qualities of a bubble, but the debate would be irrelevant
to our present purpose.
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