December 24, 1864.
My Dear Sumner,
— You will feel the loss of Earl Carlisle much. I sympathize with you. I do not
know whether your intimacy continued to his end, but he was, I understand, on
our side. Cornewall Lewis went before him, so we lose the few friends we have
in England fast. Serrez les rangs.
What we have to do is to fight through, and leave the rest to Him to whom all
history belongs. We are all on a battle-field. Blessed are those who fight and
fall in a righteous cause, but all must fight and fall in this life, which is
life only as far as it is struggle within and without.
The attempted interference with the foreign policy, by the
house, and the proposition of retaliation by the member from Maine, are
illustrations of the pitiful Athenian government by the agora. When such
attempts are made even by the representative government, what must be the state
of things where the multitude (not the populus) rule, or rather, can rush into
action at any moment. I am the sworn enemy of all absolutism, and I trust my
friends will remember of me this one thing, that I am the one who first spoke
of “democratic absolutism.” Until I used that term, absolutism meant
monarchical, unchecked power. It came into use under Ferdinand VII of Spain. I
spoke of democratic absolutism in presence of Judge Story, or to him, when you
were yet a Cambridge student. It struck him, and he first hesitated to allow
the term, but soon approved it. . . .
SOURCE: Thomas Sergeant Perry, Editor, The Life and
Letters of Francis Lieber, p. 354
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