What we shall offer will be far, far from sufficient.
But while leaving unsaid much that should properly even prepare
the way for the treatment of this many-sided question of political
liberty, equality, or republicanism--leaving the whole history and
consideration of the feudal plan and its products, embodying humanity,
its politics and civilization, through the retrospect of past time,
(which plan and products, indeed, make up all of the past, and a large
part of the present)--leaving unanswer'd, at least by any specific and
local answer, many a well-wrought argument and instance, and many a
conscientious declamatory cry and warning--as, very lately, from an
eminent and venerable person abroad[24]--things, problems, full of
doubt, dread, suspense, (not new to me, but old occupiers of many an
anxious hour in city's din, or night's silence,) we still may give a
page or so, whose drift is opportune. Time alone can finally answer
these things. But as a substitute in passing, let us, even if
fragmentarily, throw forth a short direct or indirect suggestion of
the premises of that other plan, in the new spirit, under the new
forms, started here in our America.
As to the political section of Democracy, which introduces and breaks
ground for further and vaster sections, few probably are the minds,
even in these republican States, that fully comprehend the aptness of
that phrase, "THE GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE
PEOPLE," which we inherit from the lips of Abraham Lincoln; a formula
whose verbal shape is homely wit, but whose scope includes both the
totality and all minutiae of the lesson.
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