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Carolina and its sister States in 1860, which plunged the country into civil strife. What more interesting feature of the history of the American Republic than this internal struggle of the forces making for nationality and solidarity against opposing tendencies?

The two movements are for ever warring, the impetus in either direction being furnished by events.' After Washington's death the band between the States becomes loosened; the novelty of the federal pact has gone; Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia have but little in common. The States have no literature; there are no national politics; there is no national purpose. What happened in 1860 would have happened a decade sooner if the principles of Jefferson and disintegration had not been suddenly checked by the war of 1812. There was only one rallying point for all the States, and that was hatred of England, "a good robust family hatred." The cry of war brought the States together again: the federal power was exalted for a time, and the States were duly depressed.

On the heels of this war, which produced pride in the Army and Navy, followed boastfulness and Stateconsciousness. Again the aggregation of States yearned

1 Mr. Bryce reminds us that a large part of the history of Europe consists of a struggle, often involving the use of force, to make the peoples give up their local prejudices and privileges for the sake of national requirements.

2 "Sir, I confess it," said Josiah Quincy in Congress in 1811, "the first public love of my heart is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There is my fireside; there are the tombs of my ancestors."-Putnam's "American Orations," i. p. 168. A majority of the people, we are told by Mr. Cabot Lodge, at the outset "turned longingly back towards the days of a shattered confederacy and sovereign states, and looked with morbid suspicion on everything, no matter what, which tended to lend strength or dignity to the Central Government."

for nationhood and international prestige. They were tired of standing aloof and inert; and the Monroe doctrine, of which our British statesman, Canning, made them a free gift, they seized upon with pleased alacrity. Again were the national tendencies in the growth of a central power checked in 1828 by Jackson; but they broke out anew in 1848 with the war with Mexico. This war was, however, in the interests of the South; and the southern planters, having tasted of the sweets of power, were not long in wishing it for themselves.

For by this time the artificial ties which kept the sections of America together had grown irksome. At the outbreak of the Civil War there was really little in common between the people of the northern and southern States; or between East and West. But the federal bond and federal power, which had grown weak, was strengthened in the majority of States by the war. Now we shall see how it has been strengthened to such a pitch in all the States that the term State really suggests little except a geographical boundary. To speak of America, as Mr. Bryce does somewhere, as a union of partially sovereign States is to cite an historical, but not an actual, fact.' We might as well speak of United Cantons of Switzerland, or the United Counties of England, or the United Departments of France, as of the United States of America, otherwise than in a purely official and nominal sense 2 (see Appendix A).

1 Mr. Bryce makes clear elsewhere, however, that the "political importance of the States is no longer what it was." "The truth is that the State has shrivelled up." ."—" American Commonwealth," vol. ii. p. 189.

2 All this was prophesied in the Convention.

"The destruction of the

After the war there came what is inevitable in public opinion, reaction.

The centrifugal forces broke out anew from 1876 to 1888, with a brief lapse or two, covering a portion. of Mr. Arthur's administration. It must be understood that manifold causes and incidents which do not affect the laws or the Constitution play their part in influencing public opinion. Thus Mr. Garfield's long illness by arousing universal sympathy kept the eye of the nation focussed on the dial-plate of national power. The country is so vast and the population so scattered, local politics so turbulent, the passion for money-getting so absorbing, that it needed these factitious aids to keep the public eye on the Federal capital. An era of peace, an unepisodical administration-such as that of Grant or Hayes, and the centripetal forces waver and weaken. The egregious Venezuelan manifesto of President Cleveland was certainly a factor in national unification. The whole country thrilled at finding itself through the action of its chief executive shaking its fist at Great Britain. But the most dramatic of all these unifying factors has been the recent war with Spain. The most dramatic-not, perhaps, the greatest. There are many causes for America's rapid, political, social, economic, and intellectual homogeneity within the present generation. Chief amongst these I am inclined to place the marvellously increased means of communication.

States as commonwealths is assured. The Central Government will gradually encroach upon their powers; it will use the federal army to overcome their resistance; will supplant them in the respect of their citizens; will at last swallow them up." "The creation of a despot in the person of the President" was also confidently predicted (see "Elliott's Debates").

Consider the following passage from Sir John Seeley in its application to America :

"Perhaps," he wrote, "we are hardly alive to the vast results which are flowing in politics from modern mechanism. Throughout the greater part of human history the process of State-building has been governed by strict conditions of space. For a long time no high organization was possible, except in very small states. In antiquity the good States were usually cities, and Rome herself, when she became an empire, was obliged to adopt a lower organization. In medieval Europe states sprang up which were on a larger scale than those of antiquity, but for a long time these, too, were lower organisms, and looked up to Athens and Rome with reverence as to the homes of political greatness; but through the invention of the representative system these states have risen to a higher level. We now see States with vivid political consciousness on territories of 200,000 square miles, and with populations of thirty millions. A further advance is now being made. The Federal system has been added to the representative system, and at the same time steam and electricity have been introduced. From these improvements has resulted the possibility of highly organized States on a yet larger scale. Thus Russia in Europe has already a population of nearly eighty millions on a territory of more than two millions of square miles, and the United States will have by the end of the century a population as large for a territory of four millions of square miles."1

We must not blind ourselves to the possibility of reaction, of repeated vacillations, of haltings, of retrocessions on the part of the American nation in its movement towards integration, solidarity, and world-power. Centralization certainly means one-man power: but even in America the political economists seem agreed that this is by no means an unmixed evil. Nowhere in the universe has one-man power attained, at least in 1 "Expansion of England," Lecture VIII.

party politics, in commerce and industry, to such heights as it presents in America. But whether the theorists agree to disagree with Jefferson and his fellow-democrats or not, it is none the less certain that human nature, its needs and aspirations, will have its way. Even that arch-radical Leigh Hunt, who was himself half an American, and was sent to prison for his passing freedom of speech, had this to say at the close of a long life

"May royalty exist as long as reasonableness can outlive envy, and ornament be known to be one of nature's desires. . Peaceful and reasonable provision for the progress of mankind towards all the good possible to their nature, from orderly good manners up to disinterestedness sentiments, is the great desideratum in government; and thinking this more securely and handsomely maintained in monarchies than republics, I am for English permanence, in this respect, in preference to French mutability and American electiveness."

But, after all, the fact is obvious, America has altered her front to the world. There is scarcely any department of her national life which has not been metamorphozed. Whether we read the literary remains of the early Americans, or the comments and descriptions of foreigners, such as De Tocqueville, the Trollopes (mother and son), even of Mr. Bryce, we are equally astonished at the changes which are revealed to-day.

Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and the rest thought they were laying the foundation of a fabric, the like of which had never been contemplated by man since Eden. Its simplicity, its sanity, its purity, its quiet, sober strength, its aloofness and loftiness were to shame the effete countries of Europe How ridiculous now sounds Benjamin Franklin's phrases to Lord Howe: "Britain's

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