starts, as it might be, far in advance of the point which it
reached in the ages of pure military and arbitrary sway. The
celebrated saying of Napoleon, "L'Europe sera, dans cinquante
ans, ou republicaine ou cossaque," has a profound signification;
yet it must be greatly qualified to be received with safety. The
"cossaque" of the close of the nineteenth century will be a very
different thing from the "cossaque" of the days of Paul. It now
means little more than conservatism, and this, too, a
conservatism that is not absolutely without that principle of
concession to the spirits and wants of the passing moment. These
quarrels and bitter conflicts of which we hear so much in the Old
World, like some of our own, have their rise in abstractions
quite as much as in actual oppression; and the alternative
offered by change half the time amounts to but little more than
the substitution of King Stork for King Log. It may not be
agreeable to the pride, recollections, and national traditions of
the Hungarian, or the Italian, to submit to the sway of a German;
but it may well be questioned if the substitutes they would offer
for the present form of government would greatly tend to the
amelioration of the respective people.

{L'Europe sera.... = Europe will, in fifty years, be either
republican or cossack [French]; Paul = Paul I, Tsar of Russia
from 1796 to 1801; King Stork for King Log = from Aesop's Fables}

What is true in the Old World will, in the end, be found to be
true here. To us, it would seem that the portion of the people of
this country, whom we should term the disinterested, or those who
have no direct connection with slavery, on the one hand, or with
fanaticism, and its handmaid demagogism, on the other, should