What can prevent such an agglomeration from falling to pieces? What can
hold it together?
Thus, with the frightful decay of Christian, and even manly
virtue--alas! too plainly visible all around us--and the entire
divorcement of morality or religious ideas from politics, what fate is
in store for us but the inevitable triumph of anarchy, and through it of
despotism? Herein lies our real danger. The great struggle is _not_, as
many assert, between aristocracy, or monarchy, or despotism and
democracy. But it is between despotism or absolutism and
constitutionalism. It is the struggle of the pagan system (revived by
the renaissance), based on the idea that 'man is his own end,' with the
Christian system based on the idea of mediation, involving the idea that
the true end of man is God. It is not true, therefore, that democratic
institutions are now on trial in the United States. Democracy, pure and
simple, precisely in the form it is assuming or has assumed in this
country, was tried long ago. It was tried in ancient Greece, and found
wanting. It was tried in Rome, and ended in the dissolution of the
empire. And in both these trials it had, to begin with, a much more
highly finished, fresh, robust, and whole-souled manhood to work with
and to work upon than that of modern democracy. More recently it was
tried in France, and for the present is blooming in the despotism of
Napoleon III.
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