The Evolution of the State. 97 



most important fact to be noted is, that the most signal 

 advances made by civilization have taken place within the 

 present centnry. Dr. Strong, in his Avidely read book on 

 our country, has said that, '' any one as old as the nine- 

 teenth century has seen a very large proportion of all the 

 progress in civilization made by the race." And Andrew 

 Carnegie, in his glowing laudation of what he calls the 

 " Triumphant Democracy," asserts that " a hundred years 

 ago, agriculture was in little better condition all over the 

 world than it was a thousand years before." 



Taking, then, our American Commonwealth as, at its 

 birth, expressing the highest type to which the State had 

 then evolved, upon what shall we find its growth to have 

 depended ? Behind it lay the ancient oligarchies, and the 

 so-called republics of Greece, the rise and temporary spread 

 of Christianity, the darkness of the middle centuries, 

 shrouding with obscurity all rights of man, all lights of 

 learning, and all hopes of religion ; the revival of brutal 

 wars of conquest ; age upon age of slaughtered human 

 life, the masses held in s'lavery and ignorance ; and at last 

 the gradual dawning of an uplifting sense of the dignity 

 of man. DeLolme had just given to the world his classic 

 panegyric of the English government when the first Presi- 

 dent of our republic took the oath of office. " Liberty," 

 said DeLolme, in his concluding chapter, " merely showed 

 herself to the ingenious nations of antiquity who inhab- 

 ited the South of Europe, and she has found six centuries 

 necessary for the completion of her work." Yet wlren 

 these glowing words were written, trial by personal contest 

 had not been abolished, and no person accused of crime 

 was allowed counsel in the English Courts. 



Our republic, at its birth, stood in all essential respects 

 for government by the governed. More nearly, then, per- 

 haps, than at any time since, the wish of Thomas Carlyle 

 was realized, and the individual citizen was weighed as 

 well as counted ; and to this end no single factor had more 

 largely contributed than the town-meeting of New England. 

 The one fundamental postulate upon which rested the 

 theory of the State, at that time, may be said to be the 

 right of personal representation. Prof. Stubbs has shown 

 that, "as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century, 

 the doctrine that the taxpayer should have a voice in the 

 bestowal of the tax, was gaining ground, but it required 



