and appear to be but waiting to be taken. But are these inexhaustible resources the true cause of their proportional success? Are not the natural faculties and acquired capacities of the respective persons the more immediate criterion? It seems so to us, and we think, therefore, that the immense wearing-out of human brain and nerve and muscle that is ever going on here, has its source in mistaken economics, which induce persons to deem their physical strength inexhaustible, because they are surrounded by an apparently boundless nature. It was the Indian's great fault that he never took himself into account in his private and public economy, and that is the reason why he and his ancestors have left nothing behind them, as monuments, except mounds and earthworks where they buried their dead.

Great is the country in territorial area and in its general topographical features; great in its mountain ranges, the valleys between them, and their water-courses; great in its natural fertility and mineral treasures; great in being lake and ocean girt for two-thirds of its outer rim; great also in its floods and droughts; great is the heat of its summers and the cold of its winters; and no land can say to its people with more truth, "I am your great I am!"

And yet this great country is not inhabited by an indigenous population! Even the Indian ever was and is a stepchild, and so are the immigrated English, the Scotch, the Irish, the French, and the Germans, and their descendants-pale-faced as the Indian styles them. And still more must this be said of the unbleached negro. And they are all carrying on life upon. morals, habits, and institutions that have their origin and causes in other lands. So that it is as difficult to find our true natural as it is to define our true social and political relations. In the manners and customs that are the models of our modes of life, we are European; whilst in all our wants and necessities we are American; and we cannot, therefore, be fully the one nor the other; and yet we must be the latter thoroughly before we can be the right people of this country. Who of us can say with an undivided heart

"This is my own, my native land"?

And are those, who do say it, its best inhabitants? The poet, we have already quoted from (Lessing), opens to us a wide vista to a future Americanization by the remark, "Foreign manners and usages, in which we find neither general human nature nor our special nature as a people, are soon put down;" and this means, of course, that others will rise in their place.

We know very well that the lips of those who neither under

stand themselves nor the country, can and do easily repeat to themselves: This is our land, and we are its people; but we know that the more thoughtful an American is, the more does he feel the multiplicity of his natural, social and political developments, and how various the influences are that rule his mind. And it actually seems like the perennial fate of America, that the country and its people shall never be long enough together to get used to each other. Waywardness appears to be the special characteristic of both. But in truth it is not waywardness in either; for the country has a persistency that crushes all that do not recognize and obey it. The people, too, have it in a certain sense, and would act it out on all occasions if they were not baffled by the inner multifariousness that sways their judgments. We, who claim to have read the country's last will and testament, venture to say that there is provision in it for all who do their part towards the maintenance of good American society and honest and efficient government. They render the country and the people the best possible service; for they make true what is so often sung, that America is

"The home of the free and the land of the brave."

To do so they need not only good political, but also strong physical constitutions, because only the hardy and bold can withstand the vicissitudes of American nature.

CHAPTER II.

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

"A land independent, with a people free,

That concourse I would like to see."-Goethe.

Ir is comparatively easy to determine when a land is independent, but more difficult to say when a people are free. We may assume that the first exists when no foreign power rules over it, but freedom within involves far more complicated questions. A people would seem to be unfree when any public authority need but give, as the reason of its conduct, the answer: Car-tel est notre plaisir. But in America, it appears to be held, that there may be such arbitrary power and yet freedom: provided it is exercised by the sovereign people. This idea rests on the premise that the people, or society, as political science better calls it, is its own self object and subject, and that, therefore, self-government, by an absolute democracy, is its normal public authority. We admit the premise but deny the argument, and hold that no public power is rightful that claims the right to rule as it pleases. It is only legitimate authority when it governs as it ought. The Declaration of Independence expresses this same principle when it is not satisfied with saying that the colonies "are" free, but adds, "and of right ought to be." And we insist, therefore, that to the abstract right of self-government must come the ethical qualification, to make a free people.

The question for us to settle is therefore first of all: How can a people become ethical? And the answer is, By becoming organic! They are not ethical either individually or collectively by nature, but they may acquire this quality through reflection and culture; not, however, as an inchoate mass, but through public organisms that make the perennial welfare of society their special study and work. These have indeed ever to justify their existence by proving their fitness for their respective public positions; but the abstract necessity for such organs must always be admitted, because it always exists. This

right to form a free American people is put in the Declaration of Independence on the right ground; to wit: that they had outgrown colonial conditions, and that "they of right ought to be free states." They proved their right first by the sword, but still more fully afterwards by organizing a Federal Union and maintaining law and order. They had a right, therefore, to speak of themselves in their Constitution as: We the people, because they had ceased to be inorganic masses and had an inner consciousness that they should not endeavor to be a mere demos or populus, but to become an ethnos or natio. That they chose federal institutions as the best method, for bringing this about, was indicated by their American surroundings and their general historic political development; they only obeyed their inherent necessities in doing so.

But while they enacted a constitution, that was in general outline federal, they mingled with it provisions derived from the common and also the civil law. They did so from political principles that were more specially applicable to British civic institutions. We can see this in the first seven words of the Constitution of 1787: "We, the people of the United States." We have here a national sovereignty as the constituting authority in the first three words, while the subsequent four words have a federal ring. But it is again taken from them if the latter words were merely titular and not descriptive of a political status. How can a condensed solid people be the base of a union of states? In the previous Articles of Confederation this doubt was avoided; for there the states are named as the factors of the confederation. Must there not be states before there can be "United States"? After the Constitution was made, the ambiguity contained in the first words of the preamble was continued and extended, and is also in Article X. the very one that was intended to preclude the possibility of the federal authorities construing themselves into a civil government. We cannot say, therefore, that the conception of a national American people was then, or ever has been, a clear one; it was, on the contrary, much diffused as well as confused, and there existed a great variety of ideas in regard to it, but in none of them it rose to the cognition now attained by political science as to a union of states and their organic society or people. The same must be said of the word state. That which the German political writers express by the term, Rechtsstaat, a state in which that is law (right), which should be law (right), was ever wanting. State sovereignty-their idolmeans absolute power.

The higher ethical self-understanding of the people was also

hindered by that peculiar mixture of ideas as to the source of the rights and functions of the people in government which prevailed at that period of time. Some had already imbibed the ideas, afterwards uppermost in the French Revolution; and they certainly found a place in the introductory passages of the Declaration of Independence. They were also presented by some political authors in Great Britain like Bentham. Schiller had also given vent to them in the passage

"When the oppressed can't find their rights,

When unsupportable they deem their burthens,
They boldly stretch their hands to heaven
And thence bring back their rights-eternal,

Inalienable, and imperishable as the stars themselves."

The then much-used motto, "Vox populi, vox Dei," gave to the word "people" a divine inspiration, that hid from the advocates of popular sovereignty the absolutism which was imbedded in it.

But there was another impediment to the adoption of the true idea of an ethical popular totality of the people, in the transfer to America of British modes in carrying on politics. In them the people were the perpetual agitating agency for keeping government within safe limits. They were regarded as standing outside of government for this purpose, as indeed they were; and ever ready to carry on, if necessary, an eternal offensive and defensive warfare upon it. The British mode of having an organic society was to have the people divided into two alternating hostile forces, one of which would be in power, the other a national vigilance committee. That such a dual political or partisan antagonism is incompatible with federal institutions was then and is, with us, still persistently denied, or at least ignored.

There was, however, yet another incongruity with a federal people; viz., the one that was then expressed in the much-used phrase, the Lord's people. It carried with it the law as revealed in the Bible, and was indeed identical with the kind of government expressed in the Middle Ages by the words ministerium verbi divini. It was, of course, not written down in the Constitution, but it governed more minds than that instrument, and in very many oaths, given in support of the latter, the former was the mental reservation.

The highest conception of an American people stood thus deeply in the shadows of the past, and it would never have. emerged from them, if it had not been for a stronger power than all of them together; to wit: social necessities. They were so powerful because they had the future with them, and their action.