The Fall of the Great Republic (1886-88)

THE FALL OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC. BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1886.
Copyright , 1885, By Roberts Brothers. University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
BY SIR HENRY STANDISH COVERDALE ( Intendant for the Board of European Administration in the Province of New York. ) “O Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!” By Permission of the Bureau of Press Censorship. NEW YORK: 1895.


THE FALL OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC.
It is my purpose to relate the fall of the Great Republic. I shall be brief, yet shall omit no detail necessary to a perfect comprehension of the causes which underlay the catastrophe and the events through which it came to pass. I shall set forth the curious sequence of ignorance, wickedness, and folly which led to the terrible result. I shall show how the boasted wisdom of the fathers became the inherited curse of their descendants. I shall describe the political and social revolution by which in a few months a nation of grand promise, and with a history unequalled for its century of growth and achievement, was transformed into the most pitiful wreck of all time. I shall narrate the story whose outcome has proved to the world the utter futility of the experiment of popular self-government, until men shall have attained a richer knowledge and a sweeter morality than thus far exist.
The citizens of the United States felt at the close of the Civil War of 1861–1865 that they had demonstrated their ability to govern themselves wisely and successfully. They considered the experimental stage of their history passed, the volume completed and closed, the verdict rendered. They imagined the possibility of no greater strain on their institutions than had already been triumphantly endured. In truth, there was the appearance of reason in their conviction. No nation had ever more successfully passed the ordeal of civil strife. The magnanimity shown to the conquered rebels after the war, even after the assassination of Lincoln; the temperate endurance with which the country suffered the incubus of Johnson’s maudlin administration; the rapidity and ease with which the enormous war-debt was paid off; the general good-nature which averted bloodshed during the disputed election of 1876; the smoothness with which the administrative machinery bore the shock of Garfield’s murder,—all these events, coming closely after the vindication of the national idea and of personal liberty in the suppression of the Southern rebellion, convinced the people of the United States, and those of other lands as well, that “the experiment of popular self-government” had really achieved success.