press, liberty of speech, right of assemblage, right of association.
Except in the slave States, where the national institutions have been
subjected to deplorable mutilations in fact, every citizen can express
his opinion and maintain it openly, without meeting any other obstacle
than the contrary opinion, which is expressed with equal freedom.

But there is one ground above all where we should acknowledge the
superiority of America: I mean, religious liberty. We are still in the
beginning of doubts upon the point as to where the interference of the
State should cease; in what measure it should govern the belief of the
citizens, and its manifestation. These questions, alas, are still
propounded among us. And there are countries at our doors, where men
shudder at the mere idea that the law may some day cease to decide for
each in what manner he is bound to worship God, that the courts may
cease to punish those whose conscience turns aside from the path of the
nation. Protestant Sweden but lately condemned dissenters to fine and
imprisonment; Catholic Spain daily inflicts the severest penalties on
those who suffer themselves to profess or to propagate beliefs which are
not those of the country--those who sell the Scriptures, and those who
read them.

The United States have not only proclaimed and loyally carried out the
glorious principle of religious liberty, but have adopted as a corollary
another principle, much more contested among us, but which I believe
destined also to make the tout of the world: the principle of separation
of Church and State. That believers should support their own worship,
that religious and political questions should never be blended, that the
two provinces should remain distinct, is a simple idea which seems most
strange to us to-day. It will make its way like all other true ideas,
which begin as paradoxes and end by becoming axioms. Meanwhile, the