Weat tee age owes to AMERIJA. 
353 
moter possibility for this nation, in its present or prospective great¬ 
ness, than in the days of its small beginnings. 
But in the freedom of the press, and the universality of the suf¬ 
frage, as maintained and exercised to-day throughout the length 
and breadth of the land, we find the most conspicuous and decisive 
evidence of the unspent force of the institutions of liberty and the 
jealous guard of its principal defenses. These indeed are the great 
agencies and engines of the people’s sovereignty. They hold the 
same relations to the vast democracy of modern society that the 
persuasions of the orators and the personal voices of the assembly 
did in the narrow confines of the Grecian states. The laws, the 
customs, the impulses, and sentiments of the people have given 
wider and wider range and license to the agitations of the press, 
multiplied and more frequent occasions for the exercise of the suf¬ 
frage, larger and larger communication of its franchise. The pro¬ 
gress of a hundred years finds these prodigious activities in the 
fullest play — incessant and all-powerful — indispensable in the 
habits of the people, and impregnable in their alfections. Their 
public service, and their subordination to the public safety, stand 
in their play upon one another and in their freedom thus maintained. 
Neither could long exist in true vigor in our system without the 
other. Without the watchful, omnipresent and indomitable energy 
of the press, the suffrage would languish, would be subjugated by 
the corporate power of the legions of placemen which the adminis¬ 
tration of the affairs of a great nation imposes upon it, and fall a 
prey to that “ vast p'atronage which,” we are told, “ distracted, cor- 
lupted, and finally subverted the Roman republic.” On the other 
hand, if the impressions of the press upon the opinions and passions 
of the people found no settled and ready mode of their working 
out, through the frequent and peaceful suffrage, the people would 
be driven, to satisfy their displeasure at government or their love 
of change, to the coarse methods of barricades and batteries. 
OUR COUNTRY TO-DAY. 
We cannot then hesitate to declare that the original principles of 
equal society and popular government still inspire the laws, live in 
the habits of the people, and animate their purposes and their 
hopes. These principles have not lost their spring or elasticity. 
They have sufficed for all the methods of government in the past; 
23—A 
