Читать книгу The Reign of Gilt онлайн

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That any in America should thus shut the eyes, say “It is night,” and grope and tremble, is more discreditable than a similar folly among Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans. Democracy has been our familiar from the very beginning, and self-government and the absence of rule are as old as our oldest settlements.

Those miserable first settlers, with minds as small and mean as their cabins, had no conception either of freedom or self-government. The tyrannies theological and tyrannies political which they set up to make life as hateful as it was squalid show that they had brought their European ideas with them. But fate was against them. They were of about the same low social rank. They were poor—and poverty is as potent a leveller as death itself. They were isolated. They had to shift each man for himself. So, deprived of rulers and forced to be free, since none cared to bind them, they began to govern each man himself. And they took the material tools which the civilization then current in Europe forced into their hands and, to save themselves from starvation, they set about the conquest of the land, not for a State as they imagined, but for themselves and their children.