Democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the future; it is for this reason that it has its great career. Its faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen, whose realization will be the labour of a long age. The life of historic nations has been a pursuit toward a goal under the impulse of ideas often obscurely comprehended,--world-ideas as we call them,--which they have embodied in accomplished facts and in the institutions and beliefs of mankind, lasting through ages; and as each nation has slowly grown aware of the idea which animated it, it has become self-conscious and conscious of greatness. That men are born equal is still a doctrine openly derided; that they are born free is not accepted without much nullifying limitation; that they are born in brotherhood is less readily denied. These three, the revolutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, are the substance of democracy, if the matter be well considered, and all else is but consequence.
It might seem singular that man should ever have found out this creed, as that physical life could invent the brain, since the struggle for existence in primitive and early times was so adverse to it, and rested on a selfish and aggrandizing principle, in states as well as between races. In most parts of the world the first true governments were tyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was indigenous, it was confined to the race-blood. Aristotle speaks of slavery without repugnance save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated in the northern tribes as soon as they began to be socially organized. Some have alleged that religious equality was an Oriental idea, and borrowed from the relation of subjects to an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for it; some attribute civil equality to the Roman law; some find the germ of both in Stoical morals. But so great an idea as the equality of man reaches down into the past by a thousand roots. The state of nature of the savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, bore some outward resemblance to a freeman's life; but such a condition is rather one of private independence than of the grounded social right that democracy contemplates. How the ideas involved came into historical existence is a minor matter. Democracy has its great career, for the first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale. Nothing is more incumbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, to handle it as often and in as many phases as possible with lively curiosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that so elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple. Fundamental ideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar.