Macaulay, the historian, wrote a striking letter in 1857 to H.S. Randall, of New York, who had sent to the author of the "History of England" a "Life of Jefferson."
The occasion seemed to Macaulay suitable for an expression of his opinion of American institutions. Accordingly he wrote at length. The Boston Transcript recently published the letter, which, in its essential parts, is as follows:
I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous.
What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness.
Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily, the danger was averted; and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone, but civilization has been saved. You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils; I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion.
Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old World; and while that is the case the Jefferson politics may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.
An Early Victorian Mother Shipton.
But the time will come when New England will be as thickly settled as Old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams; and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds and thousands of artisans will sometimes be out of work.
Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators, who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot get a full meal.
In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting; but it matters little, for here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select—of an educated class—of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order.