He was on his way to lead an enterprise which, if it succeeded, would prove to all the world, and for the future to time immemorial, the falsity of the contention that men were “unequal to the task of governing themselves and therefore made for a master.” That contention had, down the ages, been accepted by many of the greatest thinkers. Supposing the failure of the American experiment should seem to prove them right? How long would it be before this “awful monument” to the death of liberty would forgotten, before the experiment was tried again? And if, through inability or misunderstanding,
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The plausibility of the first democratic government...the big experiment
