Democracy, republics: What do these words signify? What have they chan — Republic

"Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?" "A Republic, if you can keep it."

"But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans—we are federalists."

"Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination: on the contrary, that under no form of government, will laws be better supported — liberty and property better secured — or happiness be more effectually dispensed to mankind."

"You and your descendants have to ascertain whether this great mass will hold together under the forms of a republic, and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether state rights will hold out against centralisation, without separation, whether centralisation will get the better, without actual or disguised monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent bureaucracy; and as population thickens in your great cities, and the pressure of what is felt, the gaunt spectre of pauperism will stalk among you, and communism and socialism will claim to be heard."

"In truth, the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy. We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that "governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it." Hence, our first constitutions had really no leading principles in them. But experience and reflection have but more and more confirmed me in the particular importance of the equal representation then proposed."

"The Republic needed to be passed through chastening, purifying fires of adversity and suffering: so these came and did their work and the verdure of a new national life springs greenly, luxuriantly, from their ashes."