Let senatorial terms be dependent
upon changing legislative majorities. In fact, let the two legislative
houses, as being wholly useless and very expensive, be reduced to one.
Let the representative be a tongue-bound deputy, and not a free, manly,
self-acting agent. Let county boards of supervisors give way to the one
man power of the county judge. And, in short, let us go on, as we have
been going on, democratizing or popularising our institutions,
'improving,' or rather impairing and tearing down one after another of
the venerable columns of the original system, until every safeguard of
personal freedom is removed, and there shall be nothing left to restrain
the giant sway of unmitigated and unmediatized public power. Then we
shall have despotism or absolutism, pure and simple--and none the less
so because it shall be democratic.
The London _Times_ will have nothing to jubilate over if what it
mistakenly calls our 'trial of democratic institutions' shall be
unsuccessful. For in fact, our constitutional system was but the
reproduction, in a broader field and on a grander scale, of the British
Constitution, in all its essential features, differing only in what
philosophic historians call 'accidentals.' And if that system finally
fails here, _The Times_ may have a 'most comfortable assurance' that it
will fail in England. True, we have more rapidly departed from and
defaced that system than the English, chiefly because, in escaping from
the fogs of England, we left behind us that stolid conservatism, that
bulldog tenacity for the old because it is old, which are instinctive in
the narrow-minded islanders.
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