attributed to its prototype." This elasticity (whether rightfully or not? we do not now inquire) the American people have taken to themselves through their political parties; and though our public men are still sworn upon our Constitutions, there is, with them all, the mental reservation of fealty to party. This happened with us, because we attempted even more than the settlers in Victoria, who only tried to fix flowing developments into positive institutions; that is to say: we incased civil government into a federal statute, and intrusted its administration to common law jurists. Germany had always failed in such efforts, and we have but followed in her wake. Those, that shall take the trouble to examine the latest Constitution of Germany, will find however, that in it there is provision, through the Bundesrath, to have elasticity and yet positive law. We hope this introductory chapter has now satisfied the reader of the propriety of our title-page. REVIEW OF AMERICAN POLITICS. CHAPTER I. THE COUNTRY. "The main fact for a people is their country."-Puffendorf. THE territory which a population occupies, its soil, climate, and configuration, as well as bearing to other lands, constitute the elementary points of its political conduct and the formation of its public will; because therein lie both the conscious as well as the unconscious motives of its actions. The political work of the great jurist, whom we quote at the head of this chapter (De Statu Reipublicae Germanicae, 1667), has such imperishable interest because he wrote it with this key in his mind. The learned blacksmith-Elihu Burritt-struck upon the same idea when he told America that it had two constitutions; a physical one as a land, and a political one on parchment. And the French American, Major Davezac-Jackson's aide-de-camp at the battle of New Orleans and afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of New York-expressed the same thought when, in advocating the annexation of Texas, he said, in 1844, in his French accent: "The geography of the country was made before the constitution of the country." Populations of countries think themselves their rulers, but as they existed before them, and outlive them, and have their inherent natural laws always in force, human government affects the countries much less than they do their populations. Folks may think themselves to be the principal object of the land they live in, but they are, in fact, its subjects. L. von Stein, Professor at Vienna University, says in a late A work: "The whole physical and economic life of man is a constant battle with elementary forces. True, they obey the intelligent and the active, but they become an overpowering danger when they break through man's economic restraints, partly because in strength and might they are too vast to permit individuals to subject them to their use; but also because the best prescience and care cannot entirely subdue them. They act often destructive on individual life, and the damages they inflict are largely the normal facts in human economy. Hence it is necessary that the powers of economical organizations should be put in counterpoise to natural forces." Malarious localities require more sanitary organs than those more salubrious; countries watered by streams like the Mississippi necessitate different regulations of water-courses than those with mountain creeks; regions with almost unlimited water power are much less dependent on manual labor than those whose wealth is chiefly created by human industry, aided by coal and machinery.. And a continent like America needs more construction of means for interior and exterior intercommunication than insular lands and countries largely indented by oceans, like Europe. The study of America's physical geography is an American's best culture. Manifold are the natural causes that act on American society and produce its social and political conditions. The southern latitudes extend to at least semitropic climates, and in the north they run close to the Arctic regions. Nearly the whole area has abnormally cold winters and hot summers, and many portions are exposed to daily, yea hourly, extremes of weather. These climatic excesses are found to have their counterpart in extravagant social habits and political eccentricities; and it seems to be sound doctrine to say, that if such a country is to be under one government and to have a free society, its people must be pervaded by an intelligently wise and virtuous collective public will, that feels it to be its duty to do all that is necessary for the common good of all sections of the Union, and to do nothing against any section which it would not think rightful to do against every other. And this collective will must rest on a public mind that recognizes these principles as public law in every part of the land, down to the smallest municipality. In the words of a modern political scientist, "The natural extremes and diversities, as well as the conflicting interests arising therefrom, must find their perpetual harmonization through a kindly public spirit, that loves not only the country, but also its society, and both, as an integral whole as well as their several parts." And in this connection it is, we think, proper to bring in the fact that, so far as the white population is concerned, it has been and is its severest task to unlearn a species of patriotism which is national, and honourably so, in Europe, but which, if applied to America, is but sectionalism. To adopt and cultivate here a wider, broader, and higher patriotism, which is the forerunner of the coming cosmopolitanism, or, if you like, the alter ego of what is on the other side of the Atlantic called Europeanism, is the true essence of Americanism. How completely this has been ignored, indeed never known, we may see in our naturalization laws. Any applicant for citizenship has to renounce all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty whatever, and particularly the prince, &c., whereof such alien may at the time have been a citizen or subject. After two years' probation he has to add to this renunciation and swear: that he will support the constitution of the United States. Where is there in these procedures the cognizance of that complex but still high patriotism-because it requires intelligent and virtuous discrimination,-which magnifies and intensifies the rights and interests of all as it makes them a national duty and obligation? An English-bred lawyer may well frame and have enacted such legal rules; but American jurists should have risen to higher conceptions, and saved the country and the new citizen the smile of derision that always comes to the judge that administers the oath, and to him who takes it, at the shallowness of the procedure. Its great fault is, that it puts on a parallel the allegiance to a prince with the faith and integrity due to a federal commonwealth. The federal spirit, not the formal oath, makes us Americans. The constant culture of that higher Americanism which means a steady approach to the highest inter-stateism, is more essential to our Union than appears on first-mere cursory— examination, because without it the formation of so large and diversified an area into one country and under one government has no ethical reason. The rightful motive of inter-state unions is the imparting of a higher civic virtue, just as the true inducement for social interhabitation is the genesis of better morals. Individuals submit to society in order to improve themselves and their existence by social co-operation; and municipalities -or, as we say, states-create a supreme authority over themselves because they feel the necessity of a superior public will as compared with their own lower and narrower sphere of thought. This ideal was poetically expressed in the oft-quoted couplet "No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, All progress in political government consists of the laying aside of local narrowness and the putting on of world-wideness, just as all progress in social rules proceeds through the putting off of the old Adam and the substitution of the social man. Hobbes expressed the latter conception when he wrote "Exeundum esse de Statu naturali; " and Burns pronounced the former view when he bid us to pray "That man to man the world o'er Shall brothers be for a' that." A large country and a great nation are proper political desires only when the result is a higher ethical development. The national grandeur must have for its substratum sub-national improvement; the sections must not have less but more means for self-enhancement; then seeming subjection will in reality be an enfranchisement, and the apprehended dangers of centralization will be set at rest through the all-distributed and well-balanced augmentations of local power. Who can look at the map of the United States and fail to read out of it, as out of a book, that, if it had speech, it would say: "All my parts are necessary to my entirety, and it again is essential to the several parts. Help yourselves, is my first word to my people; help each other, my second. The Indian never comprehended that; but you, my children of European origin, ought to see at a glance, that you have here a free field for that nationalization which your great minds have desired for Europe, but could not secure there in consequence of local historic prejudices. Establish here, what Roman civilization lacked to make it a full Europeanism. Erect here in peace what Theodoric, Attila, Charlemagne, Henry IV., and last, Napoleon, tried to secure by war, and which Dante has presented as a poet's dream; but do it in union, and perpetuate it as an ethical nationalization?" We may be told that these words are our ideality and not the country's reality. And all we can say in reply is, that if there is really not a necessity for political unity, as between the diversities that are so palpable in the country's natural configuration, that then it was wrong to constitute it as our fundamental law and to put us all into one political organization. Then New England with New York should have formed one state, with Canada for its background; Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Eastern Virginia a second, with the |