ABSTRACT
Throughout the first seventy-two years of its existence as an independent nation, the United States was interesting to Europeans chiefly as the most complete and important example of democracy then in existence. Opinion was divided as it now is about Russia: it was treason among Radicals to admit defects in America, and among conservatives to admit merits. Nor was this view confined to Europe. With the exception of the federalists in early days, Americans felt themselves the bearers of progress. Jefferson, retiring from office in 1809, says: “Sole depositories of the remains of human liberty, our duty to ourselves, to posterity, and to mankind, call upon us by every motive which is sacred or honourable, to watch over the safety of our beloved country during the troubles which agitate and convulse the residue of the world.” The same sentiment, fifty-four years later, animates Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech. The common feeling of Americans was expressed by Walt Whitman:
As a theory, democracy, unlike the doctrines of the economists and Socialists, was by no means new. It had, in the modern world, two sources, one classical, the other Protestant. In the founders of American democracy, these two sources mingled: in their successors, only the Protestant source remained.
