“ It is plain now that the fault was in the labour system of the South: her only labourers were slaves, and a slave who was fit for anything better than field labour was prima facie a dangerous man. The divergence had as yet gone only far enough to awaken intelligent men in the South to its existence, and to stir them to efforts as hopeless as they were earnest, to find some artificial stimulus for Southern industries. ”

“ The Abolitionists had never ceased to din the iniquity of slavery into the ears of the American people. Calhoun, Slavery and the Sections. Webster and Clay, with nearly all the other political leaders of 1850, had united in deploring the wickedness of these fanatics, who were persistently stirring up a question which was steadily widening the distance between the sections. They mistook the symptom for the disease. Slavery itself had put the South out of harmony with its surroundings. ”

“ In New York, South Carolina and Georgia a condition of civil war came sooner or later to exist. The United States, as yet, had no international status, and it would seem that that must be secured, if at all, by a series of victories which would ensure independence. But how could these be won against the greatest naval power on the globe, supported by Veteran armies of continental and British troops? The colonies had no money; the few vessels which, as a collective body, they did send out, were more like privateers than anything else. ”

“ It is not easy for the modern American to realize the poverty and weakness of his country at the inauguration of the new system of government, however he may realize the simplicity of the daily life of its people. ”

“ He who remembers the historical fact that slavery had never been more than a custom, ultimately recognized and protected by state law, will not have much difficulty in deciding about the propriety of forcing such a custom by law upon any part of a territory. But, if slavery was to be excluded from the new territory, the states which should ultimately be formed out of it would enter as free states, and the influence of the South in the Senate would be decreased. ”

“ On the 15th of May 1776, as the result of various earlier applications on the subject, and especially of one from certain Whigs in New York, the Congress recommended to the assemblies and conventions of the colonies where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs had been established, “to adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness of their constituents in particular and of America in general.” ”

“ The war and blockade had been an active form of protection, under which American manufactures had sprung up in great abundance. As soon as peace was made English manufacturers drove their American rivals out of business or reduced them to desperate straits. Their cries for relief had a double effect. They gave the spur to the nationalizing advocates of protection, and, as most of the manufacturers were in New England or New York, they developed in the citadel of Federalism a class which looked for help to a Republican Congress, and was therefore bound to oppose the Federalist party. ”

“ The locking up of the world's source of cotton supply had been a general calamity, and the Confederate government and people had steadily expected that the English and French governments, or at least one of them, would intervene in the war for the purpose of raising the blockade and releasing the Southern cotton. The conversion of the struggle into a crusade against slavery made intervention impossible for governments whose peoples had now a controlling influence on their policy and intelligence enough to understand the issue. ”

“ The shock of arms put an end to opposition in the South as well. The peculiar isolation of life in the South “Following the State.” precluded the more ignorant voter from any comparisons of the power of his state with any other; to him it was almost inconceivable that his state should own or have a superior. The better educated men, of wider experience, had been trained to think state sovereignty the foundation of civil liberty, and, when their state spoke, they felt bound to “follow their state.” The president of the Confederate States issued his call for men, and it also was more than met. ”

“ Washington, George Mason and other Southern men were almost as warm against slavery as Jefferson, and there were societies for the abolition of slavery in the South. In the Constitutional convention of 1787 the strongest opposition to an extension of the period of non-interference with the slave trade from 1800 to 1808 came from Virginia, whereas every one of the New England states, in which the trade was an important source of profit, voted for this extension. No thinking man could face with equanimity the future problem of holding a separate race of millions in slavery. ”

“ The state constitutions were democratic, except for property or other restrictions on the right of suffrage, or provisions carefully designed to keep the control of at least one house of the state legislature “in the hands of property.” The Federal Constitution was so drawn that it would have lent itself kindly either to class control or to democracy. The electoral system of choosing the president and vice-president was altogether anti-democratic, though democracy has conquered it: not an elector, since 1796, has disobeyed the purely moral claim of his party to control his choice. ”

“ Governments were instituted for the common benefit, protection and security. Officials were trustees and were accountable to the people. There should be no hereditary title to office or power. There should be no titles of nobility, and in Virginia the system of entails was swept away. Monopolies were declared to be inconsistent with the spirit of a free state. The doctrine that it was unlawful to resist arbitrary power was declared to be absurd. ”

“ Many who could not support the Greenback party in its theory that currency derived value from purchasing power based on the government's credit and authority rather than on convertibility, would, nevertheless, make larger use of paper money; while men who did not assent to the free coinage reasoning opposed the single gold standard as too narrow and too much under the influence of the speculative and banking interests, and would adopt some system of bi-metallism. ”

“ The Tennessee settlers were in insurrection against the authority of North Carolina; and the Kentucky settlers were disposed to cut loose from Virginia. Poverty, with the rigid execution of process for debt, drove the farmers of western Massachusetts into an insurrection (Shays's Insurrection) which the state had much difficulty in suppressing; and Congress was so incompetent to aid Massachusetts that it was driven to the expedient of imagining an Indian war in that direction, in order to transfer troops thither. Congress itself Of Congress. ”

“ This was the grossest political blunder in American history. The status of slavery had been settled, by the Constitution or by the compromises of 1820 and 1850, on every square foot of American soil; right or wrong, the settlement was made. The Kansas-Nebraska Act took a great mass of territory out of the settlement and flung it into the arena as a prize for which the sections were to struggle. The first result of the act was to throw parties into chaos. An American or “Know-Nothing” The “American Party.” ”

“ The development of modern industry—the so-called industrial revolution—had already begun in Great Britain. Its effect was vastly to increase the population of the British Isles and to necessitate an overflow into the unoccupied regions of the globe. Colonies therefore began to be regarded from this point of view, and the retention of Canada opened the way for the change. Henceforth, as time progressed, colonies were to be valued as homes for a surplus population quite as much as sources of raw materials and food supplies. ”

“ At the close of the first decade of the 20th century the United States was actively engaged in settling its social economic questions, with a tendency toward radicalism in its dealings with the great industrial forces of the nation. The “sweat shops” and slums of the great cities were filled with new material for American society to assimilate. To the sisterhood of states had been added Oklahoma (1907) , and in 1910 Congress empowered New Mexico and Arizona to form constitutions preparatory to statehood, thus extinguishing the last Territories, except the insular dependencies and Alaska. ”

“ This question of the interpretation or “construction” of the Constitution is at the bottom of real national politics in the United States: the minimizing parties have sought to hold the Federal government to a strict Construction of granted powers, while their opponents have sought to widen those powers by a broad construction of them. The strict-construction parties, when they have come into power, have regularly adopted the practice of their opponents, so that construction has pretty steadily broadened.
92. Popular sovereignty, then, is the basis of the American system. ”

“ The Constitution. they must do what the Constitution directs and leave undone what it forbids. The people, therefore, are continually laying their commands on their governments; and they have instituted a system of Federal courts to ensure obedience to their commands. A British court must obey the act of parliament; the American court is bound and sworn to obey the Constitution first, and the act of Congress or of the state legislature only so far as it is warranted by the Constitution. ”

“ The East began to exhibit characteristics of other long-settled countries where increasing density of population and highly developed industry are accompanied by labour troubles, and where problems of democratic society and government take the form of forcible action or political revolt, in the absence of ample outlets into adjacent areas of cheap lands and new opportunities. To capital the opening resources of the West, and the general national prosperity after 1879, offered such inducements that large scale production by corporations and vast designs became the order of the day. ”

“ The difficulties of the western emigrant, however, were still enormous. He obtained land of his own, fertile land and plenty of it, but little else. The produce of the soil had to be consumed at home, or near it; ready money was scarce and distant products scarcer; and comforts, except the very rudest substitutes of home manufacture, were unobtainable. The new life bore most hardly upon women; and, if the record of woman's share in the work of American colonization could be fully made up, the price paid for the final success would seem enormous. ”

“ No sooner Kansas. had its organization left the matter of slavery to be decided by its “people” than the anti-slavery people of the North and West felt it to be their duty to see that the “people” of the Territory should be anti-slavery in sympathy. Emigrant associations were formed, and these shipped men and families to Kansas, arming them for their protection in the new country. Southern newspapers called for similar measures in the South, but the call was less effective. Southern men without slaves, settling a new state, were uncomfortably apt to prohibit slavery, as in California. ”

“ Domestic manufactures sprang into new life under such hothouse encouragement; every one who had spare wealth converted it into manufacturing capital. The probability of such a result had been the means of getting votes for an increased tariff; free traders had voted for it as well as protectionists. For the tariff was only a means of getting capital into positions in which taxation could be applied to it, and the “internal revenue” taxation was merciless beyond precedent. The annual increase of wealth from capital was then about $550,000,000 ”

“ As often happens, democracy at least thought of a Caesar when it apprehended class control. Certain discontented officers of the Continental Army proposed to Washington that he become king, but he promptly and indignantly put the offer by. The suggestion of a return to monarchy in some form, as a possible road out of the confusion of the Confederation, occurs in the correspondence of some of the leading men; and while the Convention of 1787 was holding its secret sessions a rumour went out that it had decided to offer a crown to an English prince. ”

“ New England a majority of Democrats; and such strongholds of Republicanism as the Middle Western states of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Kansas, hitherto responsive to the traditions of the Civil War, sent Democratic or independent delegations. Looked at broadly, the movement was a rural uprising, strongest in the South and Middle West, the old Granger areas, against forces which seemed to them to threaten their ideals of American democracy. But the movement was recruited, by the silver-mining states and discontented labour interests. ”

“ The railway had “boomed” the Golden West and a cycle of abundant rains seemed to justify the belief that the “Great American Desert” was a myth. Thus settlers borrowed money to secure farms beyond the region of safe annual rainfall under the agricultural methods of traditional pioneering. Swift disappointment overtook them after 1886, when droughts and grasshoppers ruined the crops and turned back the tide of Middle Western colonists until the western parts of these states were almost depopulated, Kansas alone losing one-seventh of its population; nor did prosperity return for a decade. ”

“ It has combined elasticity with the limitations necessary to make democratic government successful over a vast territory, having infinitely diverse interests, and needing, more than almost anything else, positive opportunities for sober second thought by the people. A sudden revolution of popular thought or feeling is enough to change the House of Representatives from top to bottom; it must continue for several years before it can make a radical change in the Senate, and for years longer before it can carry this change through the judiciary, which holds for life ”

“ The course of events in the colonies by which this situation was met was the erection of a system of feeble defences about New York and the removal thither of the army of about 9000 men in the spring of 1776; the fitting out of privateers to prey on British commerce and of a few small armed vessels by the colonies and the general government to watch the coast and procure supplies; the disarming of loyalists; the opening of American ports to the trade of all peoples who were not subject to the British Crown ”