"There are certain signs, perhaps it might be said of the times, rather than of their peculiar political arrangements, which should make men pause in their judgment of the social state in America. The people are emancipated from the thraldom of mind and body which they consider consequent upon upholding the divine right of kings. They are all politically equal. All claim to place, patronage, or respect, for the bearer of a great name is disowned. Every man must stand or fall by himself alone, and must make or mar his fortune. Each is gratified in believing that he has his share in the government of the Union. You speak against the insane anxiety of the people to govern--of authority being detrimental to the minds of men raised from insignificance--of the essential vulgarity of minds which can attend to nothing but matter of fact and pecuniary interest--of the possibility of the existence of civilization without cultivation,--and you are not understood! I have said it may be _the spirit of the times_, for we see signs of it, alas, in Old England; but there must be something in the political atmosphere of America, which is more than ordinarily congenial to that decline of just and necessary subordination, which God has both permitted by the natural impulses of the human mind, and ordered in His word; and to me the looseness of the tie generally observable in many parts of the United States between the master and servant--the child and the parent--the scholar and the master--the governor and the governed--_in brief the decay of loyal feeling in all the relations of life, was the worst sign of the times_. Who shall say but that if these bonds are distorted and set aside, the first and the greatest--which binds us in subjection to the law of God--will not also be weakened, if not broken? This, and this alone, short-sighted as I am, would cause me to pause in predicting the future grandeur of America under its present system of government and structure of society."