countries, dependent upon the will of the one man, or the few men, who are charged with the functions of government, but on the will of the great mass of the people, deliberately and frequently expressed. The rule of the majority is in America no fiction, but a practical reality; and the folly or wisdom, the justice or injustice of her public acts, may, in ordinary times, be assumed as fair exponents of the average good sense and morals of the bulk of her citizens. We are not of those who charge the democratic institutions of the United States as a crime upon their people, or who think that, in separating themselves from the British crown, they were guilty of a deliberate wickedness which has yet to be expiated. Whether that separation was fully justified by the circumstances of the time, is a question upon which we do not propose to enter: but having so separated, it does not appear that any course was left open to them but that which they have pursued. Through the negligence of the mother country, no pains had been taken to plant even the germs of British institutions in her American colonies, and the War of Independence found them already in possession of all, and more than all, of the democratic elements of our constitution; while the feeling of personal attachment to the sovereign had died out through distance and neglect, and the influence of the aristocracy and the church was altogether unknown. Even in Virginia, where, in consequence of the existence of domestic slavery on a large scale, and the laws of primogeniture and entail, a certain aristocratical feeling had sprung up, a jealousy of the British crown and parliament showed itself from first to last, at least as strongly as elsewhere; and the ink of the Declaration of Independence was scarcely dry, before those laws of property were repealed, and every vestige of an Established Church swept away. Nothing then remained, in the absence of Conservative principles and traditions, but to construct their government upon the broadest basis of Democracy; accordingly, the triumph of that principle was complete from the first. The genius of progressive democracy may have removed some of the slender barriers with which it has found itself accidentally embarrassed; but it has not been able to add any thing to the force of those pithy abstractions which were endorsed by the most respectable chiefs of the Revolution, and which remain to sanctify its wildest aspirations.