The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863, page 1 by Various Authors
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ncountered great opposition from human selfishness and ignorance.
We have also observed, that nevertheless, through the ages-long external discipline of incessant political revolutions and changes, and also by the internal influences of such religious ideas as men could, from time to time, receive, appreciate, and profit by, that through all this they have at length been brought to that religious, political, intellectual, social, and industrial condition which constituted the civilization of Europe some two and a half centuries since; and which was, taken all in all, far in advance of any previous condition.
Under these circumstances, the period was ripe for the germs of a religious and political liberty to start into being or to be quickened into fresh life, with a far better prospect of final development than they could have had at an earlier epoch. Born thus anew in Europe, they were transplanted to the shores of the new world. The results of their comparatively unrestricted growth are seen in the establishment and marvellous expansion of the republic.
Great, however, as these results have been, the fact is so plain that he who runs may read, that they would have been vastly greater but for a malignant influence which has met the elements of progress, even on these shores. Disengaged from the opposing influences which surrounded them in Europe--from the spirit of absolutism, of hereditary aristocracy, of ecclesiastical despotism, from the habits, the customs, the institutions of earlier times, more or less rigid, unyielding on that account, and hard to change by the new forces, disengaged from these hampering influences, and planted on the shores of America--these elements of progress, so retarded even up to the present moment in Europe, found themselves most unexpectedly side by side with an outbirth of human selfishness in its pure and most undisguised form. This was not the spirit of absolutism, or of hereditary aristocracy, nor of ecclesiastical and priestly dominatio