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, 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."

obvious, America has There is scarcely any

But, after all, the fact is altered her front to the world. 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

pride and unwisdom, her fondness for conquest, her lust of dominion, her thirst of monopoly," etc. Is it any wonder Europe laughs? And yet Franklin was a wise man-fit for Plato's republic; but hardly for the one in the middle regions of North America.

Then take Jefferson's tiresome platitudes about the people, his view of the Presidency, his view even of the Federal Government. Jefferson said that the Federal Government would never be anything "more than the American department of foreign affairs."

"Many considerations," said Madison,'" seem to place it beyond doubt that the first and most natural attachment of the people will be to the governments of their respective States." They were all wrong, these men : all but a handful of seers like Washington and Hamilton ; but they might have been right if America had continued to be the United States of their day, if America had even continued to be the Massachusetts of young Emerson's and Thoreau's day-before the shrieking Abolitionites came to set everybody by the ears, and the Irish came to replace the New England husbandmen and mechanics, and to manage their politics.

After all, the fabric as designed by the architects of the Constitution has not stood as they meant it to stand: it has not kept to the original plan. The building has gone on, and the work, as so far completed in this year of grace 1902, seems to us to bear a very strong resemblance to other and older institutions of the kind. More and more, faster and faster, does the process and assimilation go on until we now rub our astonished eyes and behold an American empire arisen, 1 Federalist, No. XLIII.

with alien races, bowing the knee to a ruler who sits at Washington, lacking the crown and sceptre it is true, because the wisdom of symbols, although dimly grasped, is not yet practised in the newer state. All the old theories are flung to the winds; all the old pretensions to simplicity. Such luxury as was never heard of in Imperial Rome is practised universally in America: the luxury and improvidence of carelessly gained wealth. An aristocracy, not as ungenerously charged, merely of money, but of manners and culture, is growing, and class distinctions are widely and properly recognized. Slowly a National Church arises from the dead level of Baptistery and Methodism. Poverty as hideous as any in the old world slinks in the slums of the great cities. Homicide and crime is commoner than in Europe. Yet, side by side with these conditions, there are the correlatives of highly organized states: scholarship, munificence, art and letters, a widespread desire for leisure and moral culture.

Briefly, then, after a long period of backwoods seclusion, of introspection-of quarantine, shall we say? -America emerges emerges more tolerant and to us more tolerable. The rough edges are being worn from her character; fifty years ago she spurned the cup as an unholy thing, but now she drinks deep of the draught of Europe, and gives the old lands that flattery which is the sincerest of all flattery, and promises us-the other nations of the earth-a boon companionship.