But so great an idea as the equality of man
reaches down into the past by a thousand roots. The state of nature of
the savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, bore
some outward resemblance to a freeman's life; but such a condition is
rather one of private independence than of the grounded social right
that democracy contemplates. How the ideas involved came into historical
existence is a minor matter. Democracy has its great career, for the
first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its
formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale. Nothing is
more incumbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, to
handle it as often and in as many phases as possible with lively
curiosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that so
elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple. Fundamental
ideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar.
Democracy is not merely a political experiment; and its governmental
theory, though so characteristic of it as not to be dissociated from it,
is a result of underlying principles.
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