So
assured seemed the event, that English journalists moralized gravely on
the inherent weakness of Democracy. While the leaders of the Southern
Rebellion did not dare to expose their treason to the risk of a popular
vote in any one of the seceding States, the "Saturday Review," one of
the ablest of British journals, solemnly warned its countrymen to learn
by our example the dangers of an extended suffrage.
Meanwhile the conduct of the people of the Free States, during all these
trying and perilous months, had proved, if it proved anything, the
essential conservatism of a population in which every grown man has
a direct interest in the stability of the national government. So
abstinent are they by habit and principle from any abnormal intervention
with the machine of administration, so almost superstitious in adherence
to constitutional forms, as to be for a moment staggered by the claim to
a _right_ of secession set up by all the Cotton States, admitted by the
Border Slave-States, which had the effrontery to deliberate between
their plain allegiance and their supposed interest, and but feebly
denied by the Administration then in power.
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