It may be doubted whether this American system is practicable in any but a republican country--under a government based on equal rights, not on privilege, whether the privilege of the one, the few, or the many. Democracy, as Europeans understand it, is not based on equal rights, but is only the system of privilege, if I may so speak, expanded. It recognizes no equal rights, because it recognizes no rights of the individual at all before the state. It is the pagan republic which asserts the universal and absolute supremacy of the state. The American democracy is Christian, not pagan, and asserts, for every citizen, even the meanest, equal rights, which the state must treated as sacred and inviolable. It is because our system is based on equal rights, not on privilege--on rights held not from the state, but which the state is bound to recognize and protect, that American democracy, instead of subjecting religion to the state, secures its freedom and independence. Donoso Cortes can no more understand this than can the European democrat, because he has no conception of the equal rights of all men before the state; or rather, because he has no conception of the rights of man. Man, he says, has no rights; he has only duties. This is true, when we speak of man in relation to his Maker. The thing made has no right to say to the maker, "Why hast thou made me thus?" Man has only duties before God, because he owes to him all he is, has, or can do, and he finds beatitude in discharging his duties to God, because God is good, the good in itself, and would not be God and could not be creator if be were not. But that man has no rights in relation to society, to the state, or to his fellow man, is not true. Otherwise there could be no justice between man and man, between the individual and society, or the citizen and the state, and no injustice, for there is no injustice where no right is violated. Denying or misconceiving the rights of man, and conceiving the state as based on privilege, not on equal rights, the Spaniard is unable to conceive it possible to assert the freedom and independence of the state, without denying the freedom and independence of the church.