Among the notable modern States three stand before us with an exceptional preference for the democratic form of government--Switzerland, France, and the great trans-Atlantic Republic. These must be regarded with curious interest and kindly human sympathy as great social experiments, by no means to be prejudged and denounced by any sweeping conclusions made from the unfortunate breakdown of the two celebrated ancient republics. The experiment in these cases, as made in altogether different circumstances and under different conditions, cannot warrant any such denunciations. The representative system which now universally prevails, and which enables a most widely-scattered and diverse-minded population to vote with a coolness and a precision and a large survey of which the urban system of Greece and Rome never dreamed; the general growth of intelligence among all classes through the action of cheap education and the large circulation of cheap books; the rapid and ever more rapid travelling of contagious thought from the centre to the extreme limbs and flourishes of social unities; and, above all, let us hope the improved tone of social feeling in all the relations of man to man, which we owe to the great Christian principle of living as brother with brother, and sister with sister, under a common heavenly fatherhood,--these are all forces largely operating in the present day which justify us in hoping that many a social experiment which signally failed with the ancients may be crowned in the centuries which are now being inaugurated with encouraging success. Of the three which we have named, Switzerland is the country in which, from topographical peculiarities, the interests of jealous, neighbours, and the traditional habits of a peasant population well trained to provincial self-government, the permanence of a democratic federation may be prophesied with the greatest safety, but at the same time with the least interest to the general march of humanity. Ancient Rome, had it continued as compact and as little disturbed by external forces and internal fermentations as modern Switzerland, might have remained during the whole course of its career as sober-minded and as stable as in the days of Cincinnatus, and the yeomanry which were displaced by huge absentee landlords, and Syrian or Sicilian slaves. The case of France is altogether different. A republic in an over-civilised, highly-centralised, bureaucratically-governed country, with a religiously hollow, hasty, violent, excitable, and explosive people, seems of all social experiments the least hopeful: and that is all that can wisely be said of it at present. But the social conditions in America are altogether different; and the experiment of a great democratic republic for the first time in the history of the world--for Rome in its best times, as we have seen, was an aristocracy--will be looked on by all lovers of their species with the most kindly curiosity and the most hopeful sympathy.