Radical movements aiming to extend the application of higher sentiment have generally been pushed on by the common people, rather than by privileged orders, or by conspicuous leadership of any sort.[58] This seems to be true of Christianity in all ages, and of the many phases of modern democracy and enfranchisement. In American history, particularly, both the revolution which gave us independence and the civil war which abolished slavery and reunited the country, were more generally and steadfastly supported by the masses than by people of education or wealth. Mr. Higginson, writing on the Cowardice of Culture,[59] asserts that at the opening of the Revolution the men of wealth and standing who took the side of liberty were so few that they could be counted, and that “there was never a period in our history, since the American Nation was independent, when it would not have been a calamity to have it controlled by its highly educated men alone.” And in England also it was the masses who upheld abolition in the colonies and sympathized with the North in the American struggle. The common people, as a rule, live more in the central current of human experience than men of wealth or distinction. Domestic morality, religious sentiment, faith in man and God, loyalty to country and the like, are the fruit of the human heart growing in homely conditions, and they easily wither when these conditions are lost. To be one among many, without individual pretension, is in one way a position of security and grandeur. One stands, as it were, with the human race at his back, sharing its claim on truth, justice and God. _Qui quœrit habere privata amittit communia_;[60] the plain man has not conspicuously gained private things, and should be all the richer in things that are common, in faith and fellowship. Nothing, perhaps, is healthy that isolates us from the common destiny of men, that is merely appropriative and not functional, that is not such as all might rejoice in if they understood it.