Lotteries were formerly a great inducement to gaming in Massachusetts. Prudent fathers warned their sons against lotteries; employers warned their servants; clergymen warned their flocks. Tracts, denouncing lotteries, were circulated; much eloquence was expended,—not in vain, though all sober people were already convinced, and weak people were still unable to resist the seduction. At length, a young man drowned himself. A disappointment in a lottery was found to be the cause. A thrill of horror ran through the community. Every man helped to carry his horror of lotteries into the legislature; and their abolition followed in a trice.
Freemasonry was once popular in the United States; and no one seemed to think any harm of it, though, when examined, it clearly appears an institution incompatible with true republicanism. The account given of it by some friends of mine, formerly masons, is, that it is utterly puerile in itself; that it may be dignified, under a despotism, by an application to foreign objects, but that it is purely mischievous in a republic. Its object, of course, is power. It can have no other; and ought not to have this, where the making of the laws is the office of the people. Its interior obligations are also violations of the democratic principle. All this was as true of masonry twelve years ago as it is now; but masonry was allowed to spread far and wide. One Morgan, a freemason, living in the western part of the state of New York, did a remarkable deed, for which various motives are assigned. He wrote a book in exposure of masonry, its facts and tendencies. When the first part was printed and secured, some masons broke into the printing-office where it was deposited, and destroyed as much of the work as they could lay hold of. Being partly foiled, they bethought themselves of stopping the work by carrying off the author. He was arrested for a trifling debt, (probably fictitious,) conveyed hastily to a magistrate, some miles off, who committed him for want of bail. The ostensible creditor arrived at the jail, in the middle of the night, and let him out; four or five men put him into a carriage, which made for the Canada frontier. On landing him on British ground, the masons there refused to have any concern in a matter which had gone so far, and Morgan was shut up in the fort at Niagara village, where the Niagara river flows into Lake Ontario. There he was fed and guarded for two days. Thus far, the testimony is express; and concerning the succeeding circumstances there is no reasonable doubt. He was put into a boat, carried out into the middle of the river, and thrown in, with a stone tied to his neck. For four years, there were attempts to bring the conspirators to justice; but little was done. The lodges subscribed funds to carry the actual murderers out of the country. Sheriffs, jurymen, constables, all omitted their duty with regard to the rest. The people were roused to action by finding the law thus overawed. Anti-masonic societies were formed. Massachusetts and other States passed laws against extra-judicial oaths. In such States, the lodges can make no new members, and are becoming deserted by the old. The anti-masonic party flourishes, having a great principle as its basis. It has the control in a few States, and powerful influence in others. Morgan's disclosures have been carried on by other hands. A bad institution is overthrown. The people have learned an important lesson; and they have gone through an honourable piece of discipline in making a stand for the law, which is the life of their body politic.
Thus end, and thus, we may trust, will end the mistakes of the people, whose professed interest is in a wise self-government. Some worse institutions even than masonry remain to be cast out. The law has been again overawed; not once, but many times; and the eyes of the world are on the people of the United States, to see what they will do. The world is watching to discover whether they are still sensible of the sacred value of unviolated law; whether they are examining who it is that threatens and overbears the law, and why; and whether they are proceeding towards the re-establishment of the peace and security of their whole community, by resolutely rooting out from among their institutions every one which will not bear the test of the first principles of the whole.
The other ground of hope of which I spoke as being inferential, arises out of the imaginative political character of the Americans. They have not yet grown old in the ways of the world. Their immediate fathers have done such a deed as the world never saw; and the children have not yet passed out the intoxication of success. With far less of vanity and presumption than might have been looked for from their youth among the nations, with an extraordinary amount of shrewdness and practical talent shared among individuals, the American people are as imaginative as any nation I happen to have heard or read of. They reminded me every day of the Irish. The frank, confiding character of their private intercourses, the generous nature of their mutual services, the quickness and dexterity of their doings, their fertility of resource, their proneness to be run away with by a notion, into any extreme of absurdity—in all this, and in everything but their deficiency of moral independence, (for which a difference of circumstances will fully account,) they resemble the Irish. I regard the American people as a great embryo poet: now moody, now wild, but bringing out results of absolute good sense: restless and wayward in action, but with deep peace at his heart: exulting that he has caught the true aspect of things past, and at the depth of futurity which lies before him, wherein to create something so magnificent as the world has scarcely begun to dream of. There is the strongest hope of a nation that is capable of being possessed with an idea; and this kind of possession has been the peculiarity of the Americans from their first day of national existence till now. Their first idea was loftier than some which have succeeded; but they have never lost sight of the first. It remains to be, at intervals, apprehended anew; and whenever the time shall arrive, which cannot but arrive, when the nation shall be so fully possessed of the complete idea as by a moral necessity to act it out, they will be as far superior to nations which act upon the experience and expediency of their time as the great poet is superior to common men.
This time is yet very far distant; and the American people have not only much to learn, and a painful discipline to endure, but some disgraceful faults to repent of and amend. They must give a perpetual and earnest heed to one point; to cherish their high democratic hope, their faith in man. The older they grow, the more must they "reverence the dreams of their youth." They must eschew the folly and profaneness so prevalent in the old world, of exalting man, abstractedly and individually, as a piece of God's creation, and despising men in the mass. The statesman in a London theatre feels his heart in a tumult, while a deep amen echoes through its chambers at Hamlet's adoration of humanity; but not the less, when he goes home, does he speak slightingly, compassionately, or protectingly of the masses, the population, the canaille. He is awestruck with the grandeur of an individual spirit; but feels nothing of the grandeur of a congregated million of like spirits, because they happen to be far off. This proves nothing but the short-sightedness of such a man. Such shortness of sight afflicts some of the wisest and best men in the new world. I know of one who regards with a humble and religious reverence the three or four spirits which have their habitation under his roof, and close at hand; who begins to doubt and question, in the face of far stronger outward evidence of good, persons who are a hundred miles off; and has scarcely any faith left for those who happen to be over the sea. The true democratic hope cannot coexist with such distrust. Its basis is the unmeasured scope of humanity; and its rationale the truth, applicable alike to individuals and nations, that men are what they are taken for granted to be. "Countrymen," cries Brutus, dying,
"My heart doth joy that yet in all my life,
I found no man but he was true to me."
The philosophy of this fact is clear; it followed of course from Brutus always supposing that men were true. Whenever the Americans, or any other people, shall make integrity their rule, their criterion, their invariable supposition, the first principles of political philosophy will be fairly acted out, and the high democratic hope will be its own justification.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Jefferson writes, September, 1798, "The most long-sighted politician could not, seven years ago, have imagined that the people of this wide extended country could have been enveloped in such delusion, and made so much afraid of themselves and their own power, as to surrender it spontaneously to those who are manœuvring them into a form of government, the principal branches of which may be beyond their control."