Sublime

Belonging neither to the class which regarded the social revolution as an innovation to be resisted, nor to that which considered political equality the universal panacea for the evils of humanity, he resolved by personal observation of the results of democracy in the New World to ascertain its natural consequences, and to learn what the nations of

At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognized that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill.

His really sound and essential conception of Liberty, “Turning to scorn with lips divine The falsehood of extremes,” is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in the Liberal century.