There are formidable parties all over Europe at work to introduce what they take to be the American system; but constitutions are generated, not made--providential, not conventional.Statesmen can only develop what is in the existing constitutions of their respective countries, and no European constitution contains all the elements of the American.European Liberals mistake the American system, and, were they to succeed in their efforts, would not introduce it, but something more hostile to it than the governments and institutions they are warring against.They start from narrow, sectarian, or infidel premises, and seek not freedom of worship, but freedom of denial.They suppress the freedom of religion as the means of securing what they call religious liberty--imagine that they secure freedom of thought by extinguishing the light without which no thought is possible, and advance civilization by undermining its foundation.The condemnation of their views and movements by the Holy Father in the Encyclical, which has excited so much hostility, may seem to superficial and unthinking Americans even, as a condemnation of our American system--indeed, as the condemnation of modern science, intelligence, and civilization itself; but whoever looks below the surface, has some insight into the course of events, understands the propositions and movements censured, and the sense in which they are censured, is well assured that the Holy Father has simply exercised his pastoral and teaching authority to save religion, society, science, and civilization from utter corruption or destruction.The opinions, tendencies, and movements, directly or by implication censured, are the effect of narrow and superficial thinking, of partial and one-sided views, and are sectarian, sophistical, and hostile to all real progress, and tend, as far as they go, to throw society back into the barbarism from which, after centuries of toil and struggle, it is just beginning to emerge.The Holy Father has condemned nothing that real philosophy, real science does not also condemn;nothing, in fact, that is not at war with the American system itself.For the mass of the people, it were desirable that fuller explanations should be given of the sense in which the various propositions censured are condemned, for some of them are not, in every sense, false; but the explanations needed were expected by the Holy Father to be given by the bishops and prelates, to whom, not to the people, save through them, the Encyclical was addressed.Little is to be hoped, and much is to be feared, for liberty, science, and civilization from European Liberalism, which has no real affinity with American territorial democracy and real civil and religious freedom.But God and reality are present in the Old World as, well as in the New, and it will never do to restrict their power or freedom.
Whether the American people will prove faithful to their mission, and realize their destiny, or not, is known only to Him from whom nothing is hidden.Providence is free, and leaves always a space for human free-will.The American people can fail, and will fail if they neglect the appointed means and conditions of success;but there is nothing in their present state or in their past history to render their failure probable.They have in their internal constitution what Rome wanted, and they are in no danger of being crushed by exterior barbarism.Their success as feeble colonies of Great Britain in achieving their national independence, and especially in maintaining, unaided, and against the real hostility of Great Britain and France, their national unity and integrity against a rebellion which, probably, no other people could have survived, gives reasonable assurance for their future.The leaders of the rebellion, than whom none better knew or more nicely calculated the strength and resources of the Union, counted with certainty on success, and the ablest, the most experienced, and best informed statesmen of the Old World felt sure that the Republic was gone, and spoke of it as the late United States.Not a few, even in the loyal States, who had no sympathy with the rebellion, believed it idle to think of suppressing it by force, and advised peace on the best terms that could be obtained.But Ilium fuit was chanted too soon; the American people were equal to the emergency, and falsified the calculations and predictions of their enemies, and surpassed the expectations of their friends.
The attitude of the real American people during the fearful struggle affords additional confidence in their destiny.With larger armies on foot than Napoleon ever commanded, with their line of battle stretching from ocean to ocean, across the whole breadth of the continent, they never, during four long years of alternate victories and defeats--and both unprecedentedly bloody--for a moment lost their equanimity, or appeared less calm, collected, tranquil, than in the ordinary times of peace.
