Here we have the stout, self-reliant, sober-minded Anglo-Saxon stock, well trained in the process of the ages to the difficult art of self-government; here we have a constitution framed with the most cautious consideration, and with the most effective checks against the dangers of an over-riding democracy; here also a people as free from any imminent external danger as they have unlimited scope for internal progress. Under no circumstances could the experiment of self-government, on a great scale, have been made with a more promising start. No doubt they have a difficult and slippery problem to perform. The frequent recurrence of elections to the supreme magistracy has always been, and ever must be, the breeder of faction, the nurse of venality, and the spur of ambition. Once already has this Titanic confederacy, though only a hundred years old, by going through a process of a long, bitter, and bloody civil war, shown that the unifying machinery so cunningly put together by the conservative genius of a Washington, an Adams, and a Madison, was insufficient to hold in check the rebellious forces at war within its womb. No doubt also it were in vain to speak America free from those acts of gigantic jobbing, blushless venality, and over-riding of the masses in various ways, which were working the ruin of Rome in the days of Jugurtha. The aristocracy of gold and the tyranny of capitalists in Christian New York has shown itself no less able to usurp the public land and defraud the people of their share in the soil than the lordly aristocracy and the slave-dealing magnates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless we need not despair. The sins of American democracy may serve as a useful hint to us not rashly to tinker our own mixed constitution without waiting for a verdict on issues, which, as Socrates wisely says, lie with the gods; nor, on the other hand, is there any wisdom in ascribing to the American form of government evils which, as belonging to human nature, crop up with more or less abundance under all forms of government, and which may be specially rife among ourselves. We also have our Glasgow banks, our bubble companies of all kinds, our heady speculations, our hot competitions, our over-productions, our haste to be rich, our idol worship of mere material magnificence,--these are evils, and the root of all evil, with the production of which no form of government has anything to do, and against which every form of government will be in vain invoked to contend.