Excerpt from State Rights: A Photograph From the Ruins of Ancient Greece, With Appended Dissertations on the Ideas of Nationality, of Sovereignty, and the Right of Revolution

This little book is written for all loyal and thinking men, whose minds are intent upon the preservation of the American nationality. They will see the application of the parallel, whatever they may think of the manner in which it is now presented. One merit, however, the writer would claim for the brief picture he here offers to the public. It is strictly true. It is not overdone. It cannot be overdone. If it fails, it is in falling short of the reality of that state of things which we have called a political hell. There is one thing that prevents this from being realized, as it ought to be, even by scholars. They are so much occupied with the poetry, the philosophy, the fair literature of Greece, that they neglect the details of her minute political history, and so form a very imade quate view of its political horrors. The aim of the writer has been to show this latter feature truthfully, and, at the same time, graphi cally, by selecting those points of the old Greek political life, in which it so marvelously resembles our own. The more he studied it, the more he was struck with the perfection of the parallel. If there is something which has the appearance of repetition in set ting it forth, it is to keep vividly before the mind the one idea of the book. Autonomy was the bane of Greece, the doctrine of state rights and state sovereignties, has been, and is yet, the rock of danger to the American Nationality. This idea is never lost sight of. In every seeming digression it is still remembered, and other topics are treated only to make the return to it more clear and effective. God has given us a mirror in the past. Let us not be like him who beholds his natural face in the glass, then goeth away, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.

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