Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[227] convictions at last. In 1862 he wrote, ‘I am so much of a democrat; far more than I ever was before in my life.’¹ Two years later he writes,—this man of experience in many courts, —‘For one, I like democracy. I don't say that it is pretty, or genteel, or jolly. But it has a reason for existing, and is a fact in America, and is founded on the immutable principles of reason and justice. Aristocracy certainly presents more brilliant social phenomena, more luxurious social enjoyments. Such a system is very cheerful for a few thousand select specimens out of the few hundred millions of the human race . . . but what a price is paid for it’² When he wrote this, the evolution of an American was complete. Who can doubt that if Motley had lived till now he would have approached the new and even profounder problems developed by another quarter of a century with the equipoise and the fearlessness that an American should show?