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West Coast Times, Issue 316, 27 September 1866, Page 1 (Supplement)

American Democracy.-*- The American correspondent of the " Spectator,'' writing on this subject, says : — " It is not .democracy, but European emigration, that produces the dangerous and" demoralising element in our great towns. American democracy, which is a very different thing from that which Europeans, and even, I venture to say, the " Spectator," calls democracy,' and which has existed here for two centuries, produces towns like New Haven in Conpecticut, forMnstance, with a population of 30,000, and Newark, in New Jersey, with 60,000, both full of factories, and with two or- three lines of railway running through them, and yet so sedate, and cheerful, and respectable, and " conservative" as a Cathedral town in England. It produces commonwealths like Vermont,where, as the census shows, with a population of» 315,000 in ten years, 1850 to l#6o, there was not a- single homicide ; like New Hampshire, with 326,000 inhabitauts, where during the same period there wei-e but two, and that among a people who sent to battle in the last four years more than half their able-bodied men, who fought until more than 'one-quarter of them were killed or 1 crippled for life. These are the sort of Huns and-Vandals which, in the words of Loid Macaulay, are engendered in our own country and by our own institutions. The others are engendered iv other countries and under other institutions. Do not suppose that we —that I, at least — believe that Yankees are inherently better men than those of their own blood who have remained in the Old Home. I know better. Whatever more superiority they may seem to show in the mass, is due solely to their breeding and their circumstances, to those very institutions which Macaulay thought so dangerous. And more, this democracy is no "'American*'* discovery, neither is it an adaptation from Greece, or Italy, or France. Like everything good that we have here, whether in politics, in society, in law, in literature* it is English; it has sprung K)Ut of our English nature, it has ■ had room and verge enough, moral and material, in which to develope itself according to the la"w of its own being. It all came to us from the men of the Common.wealth. There was much ' that ' the glo^ riotfs Restoration did tfot bring' Back to us* We have kept steadily on upon the path which our fathers broke for us about ltfso. And with our democracy our Federal)^ has nothing to do whatever,"