AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 273 



and ready methods of Judge Lynch. It is encourag- 

 ing to observe at the present time some symptoms 

 of a disposition to return to the older and sounder 

 method of making judges. Good sense is so strongly 

 developed among our people that we may reasonably 

 calculate upon their profiting by hard experience and 

 correcting their own errors in the long run. It is 

 far better that popular errors should be corrected in 

 this way than by some beneficent autocratic power, 

 or by some set of people supposed to be wiser than 

 others ; and this, I believe, is the true theory of de- 

 mocracy. This is the vital point which Jefferson 

 understood so much more clearly than Hamilton and 

 the Federalists. 



But in the period of which I am speaking, the 

 theory of democracy was not usually taken so moder- 

 ately as this. There was a kind of democratic fanati- 

 cism in the air. A kind of metaphysical entity called 

 the People (spelled with a capital) was set up for men 

 to worship. Its voice was the voice of God ; and, like 

 the king, it could do no wrong. It had lately been 

 enthroned in America, and was going shortly to 

 renovate the world. People began to forget all about 

 the slow growth of our constitutional liberty through 

 ages of struggle in England and Scotland. They be- 

 gan to forget all about our own colonial period, with 

 its strongly marked characters and its political lessons 

 of such profound significance. A habit grew up, 

 which has not yet been outgrown, of talking about 

 American history as if it began in 1776, an error as 

 fatal to all correct understanding of the subject as that 

 which Englishmen used to make in ignoring their 

 own history prior to the Norman Conquest. We 



