[Footnote 1:
This expression needs explanation. It _looks_ as if Mr. Coleridge rated the
degree of liberty enjoyed by the English, _after_ that of the citizens of
the United States; but he meant no such thing. His meaning was, that the
form of government of the latter was more democratic, and formally assigned
more power to each individual. The Americans, as a nation, had no better
friend in England than Coleridge; he contemplated their growth with
interest, and prophesied highly of their destiny, whether under their
present or other governments. But he well knew their besetting faults and
their peculiar difficulties, and was most deliberately of opinion that the
English had, for 130 years last past, possessed a measure of individual
freedom and social dignity which had never been equalled, much less
surpassed, in any other country ancient or modern. There is a passage in
Mr. Coleridge's latest publication (Church and State}, which clearly
expresses his opinion upon this subject: "It has been frequently and truly
observed that in England, where the ground-plan, the skeleton, as it were,
of the government is a monarchy, at once buttressed and limited by the
aristocracy (the assertions of its popular character finding a better
support in the harangues and theories of popular men, than in state
documents, and the records of clear history), afar greater degree of
liberty is, and long has been, enjoyed, than ever existed in, the
ostensibly freest, that is, most democratic, commonwealths of ancient or
modern times; greater, indeed, and with a more decisive predominance of the
spirit of freedom, than the wisest and most philanthropic statesmen of
antiquity, or than the great commonwealth's men,--the stars of that narrow
interspace of blue sky between the black clouds of the first and second
Charles's reigns--believed compatible, the one with the safety of the
state, the other with the interests of morality.
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