\ HANDy GOD m ipRICAN HISTORY A / PREFACE. IN the year 1850 Prof. Henry Reed delivered two lectures on " The History of the American Union " before the Smithsonian Institute, and published them in Philadelphia. In these he tried to trace the workings of divine Providence in the welding together of the diverse and (seemingly) hopelessly divided materials of colonial America into a federal union. The reading of these lectures gave me a new point of view for the study of American history, and one which I have found useful in writing and lecturing on the subject. Out of my lectures es- pecially has grown this book, whose inadequacy I deeply feel, but I have written it with the hope that others will be led by it to cultivate the field more fully. Philadelphia, January, 1902. CONTENTS. iAPTER PAGE I. PRINCIPLES AT STAKE ... I II. THE ARENA J III. THE FOUNDERS 14 IV. FIRST WELDING . . . .22 V. THE RENDING OF BONDS , . -39 VI. THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE . $1 VII. CHAOS AND CONSTRUCTION . . 63 VIII. EXPANSION AND INVENTION . . 79 IX. THE HEGEMONY OF THE CONTINENT 92 X. THE IMMIGRANT . . . .10$ XI. THE PROPHETS OF REFORM . . 1 1/ XII. A WAR AND ITS PENALTIES . .130 XIII. THE PERIL AND TRIUMPH OF THE UNION 142 XIV. RECONSTRUCTION AND GROWTH .158 XV. THE PERILS OF PEACE AND PROS- PERITY . . . . .I/O XVI. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS . .183 XVII. THE VOCATION OF THE REPUBLIC . 199 INDEX 225 THE HAND OF GOD IN AMERICAN HISTORY. CHAPTER I. PRINCIPLES AT STAKE. WHY is it that the Bible account of a nation's history is so different from that kind of history which is written about nations in modern times? The Bible speaks of God as having a great deal to do with what was going on, and of his will as a controlling force in the movements of history. The modern history traces everything to secondary causes, mostly to the characters and the wills of leading people, to the external circumstances of the nation's existence, to the influence of great movements of public opinion, or to the influence one country exercises upon another. There are three possible explanations of the difference : a. " The writers of the Bible did not know any better than to bring God into the story, as it was their way of accounting for everything that hap- 2 THE HAND OF GOD pened. We in modern times have learned to look on these matters in a more scientific way, and to discern the sufficiency of secondary and human means to account for everything." This way of explaining the difference seems to be in the minds of many who suppose themselves believers in the Bible, but think its statements are to be taken with a grain of salt, or with large allow- ances for " oriental modes of speech," when they come upon anything that seems to imply that God is actively and personally concerned with the affairs of men. They are quite willing to allow Him large scope for action in his dealing with the spiritual interests of individual men, because they do not see how else to account for men's salvation. But when it comes to the affairs of nations and govern- ments, they adopt the attitude of the unbeliever, and reconcile their half-beliefs with the Bible," by " explaining away "what it says. There is no reason for making any such distinc- tion as this between the two spheres of the divine activity. Just as a Tyndall has to admit that all the explanations science can offer of the ways of working in the kingdoms of nature, still leave us face to face with the great mystery of the world's origination, so all that we have learned of the workings of secondary causes in the field of political IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 3 society, leaves us still face to face with the mystery of its origination. In both cases we are shut up to the view that behind the visible and concrete fact, there is a great and benevolent Intelligence at work ; and it is nothing less than absurd to suppose that He who brought this order of things into being, has ceased to interest Himself actively in its operations. b. A second theory is that " God did actively interest Himself in the social affairs of a single people for good reasons, since it was through that people He meant to achieve the great good of es- tablishing his Church in the earth, but that other nations are upon a very different footing. That was an ' elect people,' which had a great service to render to mankind, and its fate and fortunes very rightly occupied the attention of the Almighty until its destiny was accomplished. Other nations are not ' elect.' They are merely temporary and secular arrangements for accomplishing ends which are limited to this world. God has no such great purposes to work out through them, and therefore does not concern Himself about them as He did about the Jews." This view of the matter has the misfortune to be quite irreconcilable with what the Bible itself says on the subject. While it does represent the Jewish people as " elect " for a great providential purpose, 4 THE HAND OF GOD it also represents other nations as enjoying God's active attention in a very eminent degree. The Jewish prophets have their messages to every coun- try among their neighbors, and in one case a prophet is sent on a long mission to one of those countries, although at that time it had nothing to do with the affairs of the Jewish people. The calling and elec- tion of the Jewish people are said to be expressly for the sake of all the rest. When at last the position of an " elect people " is to be taken away from the Jews, it is said distinctly it is to be given to "a Nation bringing forth the fruits thereof." The notion that national life is out of direct rela- tion with the rule of God in the world, is one which churchmen in all ages and of all schools have too much favored, as a means of exalting the Church at the expense of everything else. But it is a notion which finds no support in the Bible, and none in the nature of things. The Nation is no more super- seded as a divine institution by the rise of the Church, than is the Family thus superseded by the rise of both. c. A third view, and one more in harmony with both the Bible and the instincts of mankind, is that there is no real difference between the Bible history and that of modern times, but a great difference in the way of viewing and interpreting that history. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 5 The Bible history was written by men who had the power to see below the surface of things, and who interpreted their meaning as the working out of the divine law and will in human affairs. As God is unchanging in his wisdom and goodness, He deals with modern nations in substantially the same way as He did with the Jews. He is not far off from them, nor are his hands tied by the existence of " general laws," so that He cannot act. He works indeed through secondary causes, and not by mir- acle, in any ordinary case. But secondary causes are his agents, and not forces independent of Him. If we had the eye to see it, we would find that the course of our national history is much more like what the Bible tells us that of the Jews was, than we could have imagined. Take, for instance, the history of the American War for Independence. It is possible to tell the story of that war as a matter of the operation of secondary and human causes from beginning to end. If there was a man among the patriots of that time who was likely to take that view of it, it was Ben- jamin Franklin. He had grown up in the Deistic belief that secondary causes and general laws are sufficient to account for everything that happens, and that God plays no part in human history except as the author of those general laws. He had been 6 THE HAND OF GOD confirmed in this way of regarding the process of affairs through his scientific studies, which accus- tom a man to seeing intently and distinctly the facts which lie near his eyes, and disuse him from looking farther. As our envoy to France he was well placed for studying the course of events in a calm and philosophic spirit, and in a human environ- ment not of the devout kind. Yet Franklin declared that what he had seen in that war had satisfied him of the active participation of God in human history, and had shattered his Deism to pieces. And that he was not an isolated observer of this is shown by the action of the legislature of Pennsylvania, which abolished slavery in that commonwealth as an act of thanksgiving to God for the successful outcome of the war. It is not close contact with great events which weakens men's convictions of the nearness and activity of God. This has been shown by the testi- mony of many of the great men of history, and of this testimony some will be quoted in the following pages. Those of them who, like Franklin, saw this in our own history, will be our willing witnesses to the truth that God's hand has shaped the course of our national history for his own great ends. " The more a man is versed in business," said Lord Chatham, " the more he finds the hand of Providence everywhere." IN AMERICAN HISTORY. CHAPTER II. THE ARENA. KARL RITTER, in his great work on Comparative Geography, points out that the earth's surface is divided naturally into areas, which are specially adapted to serve as the home of national societies. The direction of the mountain ranges and the sweep of the great rivers, as well as the bounds which separate ocean and land, are the natural boundaries which sever people from people, and constitute the arenas within which nations live their life and achieve their destiny. Without these separations, there could have been no strong devel- opment of the national peculiarities which are the contribution each country makes to the general advancement of mankind. In Europe and Asia the areas thus constituted are generally small, and confined to a single climate. The great mountain ranges run east and west, and carry the migrations of the peoples along the same parallels, so as to stamp upon them the characters of a single dominant temperature. In the New 8 THE HAND OF GOD World the mountain ranges run along the meridians, not the parallels. They unite and mingle peoples of different climates, and hint at the development of a national life of far greater richness and variety than the Old World has seen. This is especially true of the area occupied by the American Nation, which runs from north to south about twelve hundred miles, from latitude 24 30' north to 49 24' north. Lying entirely within that North Temperate zone which has been the field of all the great developments in human his- tory, it embraces all the variations of climate which belong to that zone, except the most northern. Its area (exclusive of Alaska and other dependencies outlying) is slightly less than three million square miles. This is larger than the area of the Roman Empire in the days of its greatness, and is by far the greatest share of the earth's surface that has ever been brought under the active rule of a free national government. Russia embraces more land within her military empire ; Great Britain has in her national domain, her colonies and her dependencies, an area about as large as that of Russia; but in each case the properly national territory, occupied by a homogeneous population, is far below our own. In each case the greater part both of the area and the population controlled by the imperial government IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 9 consists of conquered territory and of its residents, who neither are nor can be admitted to equality of rights with the nation proper. The natural resources of our three millions of square miles are such as to constitute this the most valuable division of the earth's surface possessed by any people. While all parts of it are not of equal value, it contains more land capable of human cul- tivation, more navigable waters in its lakes and rivers, more extensive mineral deposits, and larger pastures, than does any other national area. Yet it was despised and neglected by the first settlers and conquerors of the New World, as not worth the taking. Only one Spaniard of that earliest time trusted himself within its interior, and he in search of the fabled fountain of perpetual youth. The Spaniard and the Portuguese sought gold and silver as the most satisfactory rewards of conquest. They pressed westward to the mountain regions, where the strata containing the precious metals had lifted these up within the reach of man ; and they used up the native population in forced labor in the mines, until it was but a seventh of what they had found it. Yet the entire product of the mines of Potosi would not buy the annual crop of hay or corn in our country, or pay for the yearly output of our iron furnaces and mills. For natural io THE HAND OF GOD products owe their value to the industry and capac- ity of the people into whose hands they fall, and the best of them are accessible only to the industrial power which comes of numbers, intelligence and united toil. To those who wanted to become rich by a hur- ried process and without personal labor, a more at- tractive field was to be found in the parts of the continent which lay nearer to the equator, and they passed by the region which now exceeds all the rest of the continent in the numbers of its population, its accumulations of wealth, its diffusion of intelli- gence, and its high standard of living. Providence seems to have kept the most valuable thing in the New World from notice, until the fit people was ready to occupy it. Similarly, He seems to have kept the whole con- tinent from discovery until Europe had reached the point of social development at which its people were competent to become successful emigrants. Whatever we may think of the claims of others to have been the finders of America before Columbus, there is no room to doubt that the Northmen reached the coast of what is now Massachusetts as early as the ninth century. But while they found the country, they did not discover it did not lay it bare to the wondering eyes of the Old World, as IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 11 Columbus did on his return to Spain in 1493. In this there was a wisdom from the heart of things, for Europe was still in the state of land-communism, and had not yet developed that individuality of energy which was needed to fit it for the industrial conquest of the western world. If settlement had been begun and carried forward under the con- ditions which then existed, the best result would have been a number of communistic groups along the Atlantic coast, feebly holding their own against the aborigines. The aboriginal population of America came hither from Asia, Mr. Payne thinks, during the later periods of the Ice Age, when the ice heaped on all the continent east of the Rocky Mountains lay so deep as to deduct greatly from the depth of the oceans. Under those conditions, the American and the Asiatic continents would be connected by a great breadth of land, occupying what is now the upper Pacific, Behring Sea, and the adjacent parts of the Arctic Ocean. On this area an Asiatic people would naturally settle, to be driven either back to Asia or onward to the coast of America, by the advance of the ocean as the ice thawed. This im- migration, he thinks, took place when language was still in a very elementary stage, and number was but coming into recognition. Unlike their kinsmen of 12 THE HAND OF GOD Asia, the Americans developed a numerical system, based, not on the fact that man has ten fingers, but that he has twenty fingers and toes. Pressed by the necessity of finding food, the aborigines crossed the Rocky mountains into the regions the ice had melted from, but in still greater numbers to the southern and warmer parts of the continent, where they developed a much higher degree of material civiliz- ation, and attained a considerable amount of astronomical knowledge for the construction of the cultivator's calendar.* This southward trend of the early migrations left what is now the Republic of America compara- tively unoccupied, and awaiting European settle- ment. All the early observers agree on this point, French as well as English. The Jesuit fathers, who had the best means of judging, estimated the native population in the Mississippi valley and the regions eastward to the Atlantic coast, at about 250,000, or less than it is to-day, after all the ravages of war, small-pox and " fire-water " on the Indian population. And with the natural resources which now support 84,000,000 in comfort, to say nothing of immense exports of food, this quarter * History of the New World called America, by Edward John Payne, Vol II. (Oxford, 1899.) IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 13 of a million suffered from recurrent famines and still more frequent hunger. The points at which fish could be had in unlimited quantity the lakes of central New York, the Des Moines district on the Mississippi, and the valley of the Columbia river were the only places which sustained a considerable population. The condition of these northern aborigines must have been still worse before the trading Carib Indians brought them the maize plant, 'which had been evolved by human selection from a species of wild grass in southern Mexico or Yucatan, and on the banks of the La Plata simultaneously. Even with this aid to fight famine, the native population never reached a figure at which they could be said to possess the country, so that Europeans needed to dispossess them in settling it. Such was the condition of our country when the first white settlers tried to effect a footing on the coast of North America. It was the fisheries on that coast which furnished a preliminary step before actual settlement. 14 THE HAND OF GOD CHAPTER III. THE FOUNDERS. THE eagle stirs up its nest when the time has come for the eaglets to trust their own wings and shift for themselves. It was from a stirred and troubled Europe that the settlers of the New World escaped to find a home beyond the Atlan- tic. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was the breaking away of Teutonic Christendom from the tutelage in which it had been held for centuries by the Latin Church. Just as Greek Christendom had first derived its knowledge of the Gospel from that of Syria, and had declared its independence of Syria in the great Councils, and as Latin Christen- dom had derived from that of Greece and had declared its independence of that in the great quarrel of the Papacy with the Eastern Empire, so the Teutonic nations had received their Christian- ity at the hands of the Latin or Romance nations, and in a form rather Romance than suited to their own genius. As they grew mature, they also began IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 15 to feel the trammels of a type of Christianity unsuited to their character, and if Luther had never been born, they would yet have broken away from Rome. In this case the break was attended by more severe struggles and more violent collisions than in either of the other cases parallel to it. The rule of Romance sovereigns over Teutonic peoples, the strongly established power and prestige of the Roman Papacy, the dread of the deeply implanted individualism of the Teutons running out into mere crankishness, and the organized power of resistance in the monastic orders, all combined to make the movement one of tumult, and " garments rolled in blood and burning as with fuel of fire." Nor was the disturbance confined to the great division between Romanist and Protestant. Among the Protestants there arose differences as to the extent to which the departure from Romance tradi- tion should be carried, resulting in the formation of Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican communions, each antagonistic to the others, and frequently carrying this antagonism to the point of persecu- tion. It was a time when men were sifted by the windstorms of controversy and persecution as never before, except in the great struggle which preceded the overthrow of paganism and the establishment of Christianity as the religion of Europe. It evoked 16 THE HAND OF GOD a heroism like that of the early Christian martyrs, and developed an earnestness of conviction which shrank from no sacrifice or suffering. In the great struggle begun by the Roman Cath- olic Church for the recovery of its hold on the Teutonic countries, it was the Reformed Church which bore the brunt. France, Holland and the Rhine valley, which looked to Geneva for their ideal of a Christian community, were the especial fields of conflict ; and the same Genevan ideal took hold of the Scotch people and of a large part of the English, with an earnestness very displeasing to the representatives of the Anglican conception of the right state of a Church and its relations with the State. To the Presbyterians of the one country and the Puritans of the other, the model commu- nity of the Christian world was Calvin's city, where godly discipline and orthodox teaching united to train the people in the ways of the Gospel. As- sociated with this admiration for the ecclesiastical character of Geneva, was a liking for the ways of free government which were found in Switzerland and in Reformed Holland. This last was all the keener from an antagonism to the alliance of Angli- canism with Stuart kingship, and the assumption that kingship and episcopacy were natural allies. Thus the Reformed or Calvinistic movement came IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 17 to be identified with the demand for free, popular government in every part of the European world, giving some force to King James's saying, " No bishop, no king." It was out of a Europe thus rent apart by dis- ",' putes over the greatest and most exciting questions, that the first settlers of our country came ; and for the most part they came from the communities and the classes which had passed through the fires. Even the French settlements were begun by the Huguenots, and it was through these Protestant adventurers that the French government was led to see the possibilities of a colonial empire beyond the Atlantic. The Puritan influence so predomi- nated in the first settlement of Virginia that King James abolished the Company which had it in charge, as " the seminary to a seditious Parliament," and made it a royal colony to get rid of this in- fluence. The settlement of New England, begun by Separatists, who rejected all national churches, and owned no larger ecclesiastical assembly than the local congregation, was continued by the Eng- lish Puritans, who sought the New World, not for liberty of conscience, but for the realization of Cal- vin's ideal of a godly community under Christian discipline. The Dutch, fresh from the great strug- gle with Spain, colonized the Hudson and the Del- ,, i8 THE HAND OF GOD aware. The persecuted Roman Catholics of Eng- land made a home and a refuge for themselves in Maryland. The Scotch, having as a nation no rights in Eng- lish America, were surprisingly slow to colonize the New World ; but their colony in Ulster began to seek homes in America as early as the time of Charles I., and were found in considerable numbers in Maryland in the reign of Charles II. They came to escape from the intolerance of the English bishops established over Ireland, among them the author of " The Liberty of Prophesying ! " The last great movement in colonizing centres in Pennsylvania. Thither came the English Friends, to prove to a doubting world that the rule of the Inward Light was capable of better things than the orgies of the Anabaptists of Miinster, and that without the use of carnal weapons it was possible to establish and maintain an orderly and prosperous state. They were followed by the (Reformed) " Palatines," who had witnessed the frightful des- olation of the Pfalz electorate by the French troops acting under the orders of Louvois; by the Dutch Mennonites, who had won toleration and respect through long and patient endurance of proscrip- tion ; by the Pietist Lutherans of Frankfurt and Altoona, who refused to share in Spener's com- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 19 promises with the worldly church of his day ; by the Dunkers (" Brethren " or German Baptists), who had been gathered in the Rhine country by Alexander Mack, in his effort to establish a pure church, separate from the world ; by the Behmenists of the Hermitage (on the Wissahickon) and of Ephrata, who sought to produce a community based on the theosophic theories of the Gorlitz shoemaker ; by New-Mooners, who blew trumpets once a month ; by the " Stille im Lande," who at- tended no public assembly, but practised religious worship in their families ; and by the Schwenk- felders, driven finally from Silesia by two centuries of Lutheran and Romanist intolerance, and aided by the Mennonites of Holland in making their way to the New World. Penn's travels in Germany had made him familiar with many of these sects, and their inwardness in religion as well as their quietness in civil society, made him and his successors welcome them to his new colony. Nor were they less welcome to the far-seeing founder of Pennsylvania for being in many cases well practised in those industrial arts which he desired to see established in his new col- ony as a necessary supplement to its agriculture. The Quaker experiment in Pennsylvania as regards many of its distinguishing features was brought to 20 THE HAND OF GOD an end by its Scotch-Irish settlers from Ulster, who had been disappointed in their hopes of religious equality from the Revolution of 1688, and who, between 1715 and 1750, poured across the Atlantic in myriads. One current sought New England, establishing itself in Boston and some of the towns of eastern Massachusetts, but mostly in Maine, New Hampshire and (afterwards) Vermont. The much greater body turned to Pennsylvania, settling both east of the Appalachian mountain chain, and within its valleys. Following the trend of that mountain region, they moved southward through Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee, reaching northern Alabama and Georgia. In this larger American Ulster there are at least three descendants of the old Ulster Colony for one left at home, and from it have come the most characteristic represen- tatives of the stock. This enumeration of the classes and kinds of American settlers should remove the common impression that the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of the Middle States were the only classes of American colonists who had been under the harrow of persecution before they emigrated to America. In every part of America were found those who had endured trouble for their loyalty to conviction, but who had made a conscience of their IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 21 liberty in refusing to bow before the mandates of either monarchs or mobs. It was a picked and sifted element which God chose for the hard labor of creating a new country out of the wilderness, and establishing a more perfect order of free gov- ernment under new skies. America drew the eyes of all who were suffering in the Old World, not, as in our day, from military exactions and the depression of poverty, but from the demand that the individual should submit to the established beliefs and usages, whatever his con- victions as to their truth and wisdom. Out of all the classes that have been enumerated, and also from the persecuted Salzburgers in New York and Georgia, and the exiled Huguenots in New York and New Jersey, was built up the structure of a new society, with every racial and national characteristic of northern Europe entering into the complexity. " I always," wrote John Adams, " consider the settlement of America with reverence, as the open- ing of a grand scene and design of Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipa- tion of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth." 22 THE HAND OF GOD CHAPTER IV. FIRST WELDING. THE variety of elements which were gathered into the thirteen colonies of itself seemed to threaten the permanent disunion of the country. The colonial Americans were sundered by differences of nation- ality, differences of religious belief, differences of political theory v Puritans in the north, Cavaliers in the South, Quakers in the middle ; English, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Dutch, Germans, Swedes and French. The difficulty was greater than such a difference would offer in modern times, for it was an age when national distinctions were a source of much sharper antagonism than in our day of con- stant international intercourse ; and it also was a time when religious differences were regarded as con- stituting between communities a barrier which hardly could be got over. To this was added a large contempt on the part of the earlier settlers for those who had come later. Thus the arrival of the Scotch-Irish settlers was everywhere unwelcome. The selectmen of Boston IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 23 ordered them to leave the town. The solid citizens of Worcester turned out and tore down the Presby- terian church they were building. The Quakers of Pennsylvania regarded with natural distrust a class which looked into the Book of Joshua for an Indian policy, and which finally deposed themselves from the control of the commonwealth founded by William Penn. There was a similar indisposition to accept as American colonists the many German settlers who thronged into the middle colonies with the encouragement of the British government ; and one large body was so roughly handled in New York, that it floated itself down the Susquehannaon rafts, to find a resting place in Pennsylvania. Another element of separation was found in the disputes between the colonies as to their common boundaries. The grants made by different Euro- pean countries to adventurers naturally overlapped, being based on conflicting claims as to priority in discovery. So also did the grants made by the British government at different dates, either through carelessness or through ignorance of the geography of America. As this in many cases af- fected private ownership of lands, it could not but prove a source of sharp feeling and even of open strife. Nor were these disputes entirely settled until the adoption of the Constitution created a 24 THE HAND OF GOD tribunal for the entire republic which was compe- tent to pass upon them with authority. That out of all these warring elements was created an American nation, was the result of a providen- tial discipline as clearly exhibited in history, as that by which the twelve tribes of Israel were welded into a Jewish nationality. " The will to be one people, as a body politic, in distinction and separation from all other peoples," is what constitutes a nation. The Nation exists in the mind of the people. Some one quoted to Frederick Maurice the saying, " The kingdom of heaven is within you." " Yes," he replied, " and so is the kingdom of England." So is the Republic of America. It is not in our having a recognized plan of government, or lawfully chosen officials, or an effective police and army, that we are one people, but in the will-to-be-one, which would outlast the loss of all these, if that were inflicted upon us by the power of a successful invader. Italy was a nation, although destitute of a com- mon government for over a thousand years, and taunted by one of its oppressors with being " merely a geographical expression." Germany was a nation, when divided among over a hundred sovereign gov- ernments, each vested with the power to wage war, coin money, levy taxes, and suppress every expres- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 25 sion of national sympathies in its subjects. It used to be said that fly-specks could not be tolerated on the map of Germany, else some of its microscopi- cal principalities would disappear ; and a neighbor of mine was accustomed to take his morning walk across the territories of two sovereign princes and back again. But all the time there was the will-to- be-one in the German heart, waiting for a Bismarck to achieve its emancipation from '* kleinstaterei" In creating this will-to-be-one-people in the mind of any section of our race, Providence makes use of ail kinds of secondary agencies, whose effects we can trace in some degree, although none of these, nor all of them together, are sufficient to account for the result. They are the indications of a prov- idential purpose, but not the complete disclosure of its methods. It is therefore instructive to ob- serve by what means of this kind the process of welding together the colonial elements into a na- tional brotherhood was furthered. a. Sympathy between the different colonies was fostered by the common perils and difficulties of their position. It is hard for us to realize the hardships which the first settlers endured, and which brought to nought more than one promising attempt at colonization. The vulgar notion that a body of intelligent people landing in a new coun- 26 THE HAND OF GOD try, armed with all the knowledge and some of the apparatus of the civilization from which they come, have "all the world before them, where to choose," is contradicted by the experience of every colony established on this continent. Such a body is almost necessarily a small one, and therefore destitute of the industrial strength which comes of numbers and their industrial association. It is weak in the presence of Nature, and can make but feeble demands upon her resources. Its first efforts at cultivation are necessarily confined to the thin and comparatively barren soils which require no drainage, and can be tilled with the simplest implements and the smallest outlay of human effort. That the crop will be proportionally scanty, goes without saying. The standard of living in colonial days, not at the beginning only, but down to the last century, was such as the American of to-day can hardly conceive of. Not only the luxuries, but even the comforts of our time, were beyond reach ; and the feeble and sickly among the early inhabitants had a hard time to exist, especially as medical aid was to be had only at a few favored points. When the pastor of the First Church in Hartford fell ill, he had to proceed to Boston through the unbroken wilderness to find a doctor. Outside the few large IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 27 towns, which, as late as 1790, contained not three per cent, of the population, there was a total absence of even the ordinary appliances of the civilization of that day ; and this was all the more severely felt as the settlers carried with them to the New World an acquaintance with these things, and a demand for them, which could not be met under their ex- isting conditions, b. Along with these privations went the especial perils of their position, as the occupants of a new and hardly broken and therefore highly malarious country, under a climate far more severe in both its winters and its summers than that from which they or their fathers came, and in the presence of wild beasts and poisonous reptiles from which Europe had long been freed, and the still more deadly presence of wild men who regarded their coming as a personal wrong. It is a mistake to assume that William Penn's treatment of the Indians with kindness and justice was an isolated fact in colonial history. The Puri- tans anticipated him in buying from the red men the lands they desired for settlement; and in one case the General Court of Massachusetts set aside a bargain made with them by a new town, on the ground that it was unfair to the Indians. But the contact of the higher and the lower races in the 28 THE HAND OF GOD extension of settlement by the former, has, in every land and every time, been an occasion for strife, in- justice and bloodshed. For this the body of the people and their rulers have often not been respon- sible, as wrongs inflicted by irresponsible traders have let loose the violence of savage warfare on un- suspecting settlers. In America the peril was complicated and in- creased by two circumstances. The first was the existence of disputes as to territory among the Indians themselves, involving those who made pur- chases of one party in hostilities with the other. The other was the presence of the French on the northern and western borders of the English colonies, and the recognized rule that war between England and France at home carried with it a requirement to wage war in America also. Had this war been confined to military operations in which only European settlers were engaged, and if it had been divorced from the bitterness and the mercilessness which always attend wars of religion, the results might have been less destructive. But the enmity between opposite creeds, which had deluged Hol- land, France and Germany with blood, was in America extended to the colonists, who indeed re- presented the struggle of the two creeds for the possession of America, and were more interested in IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 29 that struggle than any one in Europe could be. With this bitterness went the readiness on both sides to invoke " the tomahawk and the scalping- knife of the savage " to maintain the superiority of Protestantism to Romanism, or the opposite. Women and children on both sides the line were cruelly butchered, or carried into a captivity worse than death, by way of evincing the superiority of one type of Christian teaching to its rival. Out of this evil, however, God brought good, in that it forced the English colonists into a closer association for common defence, and began the work of consolidating isolated settlements into larger political units. Even where this was not done, the news of disaster falling upon the people of one colony from a source which might prove equally prolific of harm to every other, must have fostered a sympathy with the Protestants of common speech and allied if not identical faith, who had thus suf- fered at the hands of the common enemy. That word " Protestant " was a potent spell in colonial times, and finds an echo in Chatham's great speeches on the American problem. It expressed what was the common element in the creed of all but a few of the British colonists, and the contrast between them and their French rivals. c. Economic necessities, growing out of differ- 30 THE HAND OF GOD ence of climate and soil, helped to weld the colonists together by fostering commercial intercourse. Thus from the first, New England was unable to feed her population, and exchanged her tar, pine- lumber, fish and fish-oil for the corn and wheat of the colonies to the southward. Long Island Sound was very early a channel of commerce of the greatest importance to the country, and the Yankee skipper became a familiar figure in every port on the Atlantic coast down to Savannah. This natural commerce, growing out of differences of climate and productive capacity, fostered no rivalry, and accustomed men to see and know each other as human beings. They felt that they were creatures of the same blood and had neither hoofs nor horns to mark a difference of species. Local prejudices were broken down, if not for the mass of men, at least for the wealthier and more influential class among them ; and a readiness for cooperation was established, which was of the first value in the critical years which preceded the struggle for independence. d. A great uniting force was found in a common religious interest, which sprang up before the middle of the eighteenth century. While religious zeal had been a controlling force with many, if not most, of the settlers of British America, there had been a marked decline in the interest in such matters in IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 31 the generations which succeeded them. This has been a very common attendant of extensive migra- tion in every age. The fine threads of association with long established usage and habit, like the deli- cate roots on which many plants depend for their nourishment, are broken in transplanting. Unless the habits of religious observance are rooted very deep in heart-piety, there is apt to be a relapse into careless and indifferent ways, and a loss of hold on the unseen reality. Even among the Puritans of New England there was a marked cooling of the religious atmosphere with every generation, in spite of the " reforming synods," which were convened to counteract it. Such contrivances as the " half-way covenant " had to be devised, to keep the children and grand-chil- dren of the first Puritan settlers from falling utterly away from church connection. The same difficulty was felt everywhere among the Dutch Reformed of New York, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Presbyterians of the middle and border colonies, and the Episcopalians of New York and the South. It seemed likely that the American was to become a shrewd and wideawake trader or cultivator, with a sharp outlook on the world he lived in, but no uplook to any other world whatever. His religious- ness had become too generally a compliance with 32 THE HAND OF GOD traditional forms, and a fervor of partisan interest about the matters in which he differed from his fellow-Christians, rather than about the much greater matters on which he professed agreement with them. From this peril of utter decay and desolation in spiritual matters, the country was saved by the Great Awakening. From its general coincidence with the Methodist movement in England, and from the prominence of Whitefield in its later devel- opments, this very commonly has been regarded a part of that vast revival. But America takes precedence of England in the matter by a good many years. The " Holy Club " was not gathered at Oxford until 1729, and it was ten years later that John and Charles Wesley underwent the change which brought them " peace in believing " and made them preachers of " salvation through faith." But the Great Awakening began in 1719 in northern New Jersey, under the preaching of a Dutch "dominie," Jacob Frelinghuysen, and ex- tended to the neighboring Presbyterian church in New Brunswick in 1729, through the earnest preaching of Gilbert Tennent. Five years later, in 1734, it showed its power under the preaching of Jonathan Edwards in the Connecticut valley. It was not until the arrival of Whitefield at Phil- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 33 adelphia in 1739, that the two movements really came into touch and their substantial identity was perceived. Edwards and Tennent recognized in the eloquent English preacher a powerful promoter of the spiritual transformation for which they were laboring, and one whose eminence as an orator and other qualities would give him access to many who would not give them a hearing. As a clergyman in English orders he was acceptable to many who dis- liked " dissenters." As a staunch Calvinist, he was welcomed by the orthodox Congregationalists and Presbyterians generally, though by no means uni- versally. As a speaker of wonderful voice and power over the emotions, he reached many who had no prejudices of a theological kind to be either conciliated or ruffled. Even the Friends flocked to hear a man who spoke from his heart to the hearts of men, and who could not be classed as a hireling for his acceptance of salary or stipend of any sort. His wonderfully successful mission thus worked to break down or weaken the sectarian feelings which had tended to isolate Americans from each other, and to bring to the front those matters about which all Christians were in agreement. He gave men of various ways of thinking and believing a common interest in the work he was doing, and a new standard of judgment by which to estimate the lesser things about which they differed. 34 THE HAND OF GOD For social and national purposes the Great Awakening was no less important, as tending to draw men out of their colonial isolation, and make them feel they had a common country. The news that reached them from other colonies as to the progress of the revival was read with a lively emotion, which became a source of interest in those colonies. Preachers crossed colonial boundaries, as Whitefield had done in his progress from Boston to Savannah, to proclaim the good news of God. Gilbert Tennent went to Boston at Whitefield's request, and preached there for months with great acceptance and success. Shubbael Stearns and Daniel Marshall left Connecticut to labor among the poor whites of the southern colonies, and there gathered the Baptist churches, which were to become the nucleus of the strongest religious body in those states. In this way men were raised up to form personal centres of public interest for the whole or various parts of the country, while the people were kept from sinking into mere animalism through spiritual decay. e. The next uniting force was found in the rise of native Americans to eminence, which made them objects of social pride and congratulation to the people of every colony. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 35 Benjamin Franklin naturally takes the first place in this series. A native of New England, but an adopted citizen of Philadelphia, then the chief city of the country, he already belonged to more than a single colony. His public spirit identified him with every plan for the improvement of the community in which he lived, and his scientific investigations gave him a European fame, of which his countrymen were justly proud. His possession of a style at once graceful and popular, and his shrewd sense of American needs and faults, enabled him to become the popular philosopher of America ; while his freedom from theological bias of any kind commended him to many who had no relish for Whitefield or Tennent. As if to make his personal influence more effective, the British government gave him the appointment of postmaster-general for the colonies, thus bringing him into official relations with the whole population from Maine to Georgia, and into personal contact with very many of them. Franklin was a man to make the most of this. Of a sociable disposition, ready to meet every man on his own ground, and skilful in conciliating regard, he soon impressed Americans generally with the shrewdness of his judgments, the breadth of his sympathies, and his devotion to what he 36 THE HAND OF GOD early called " my country," meaning not England, nor any single American colony, but the unity of them all. The preeminence he thus held, Franklin yielded without objection or complaint to another American, whom he and other discerning men recognized as the first in the land. The Hebrew historian says, " The Lord raised up judges, which saved them out of the hand of them that spoiled them." And in no way is the good providence of God more clearly manifested in a country's behalf, than in the appearance of the needed man at the crisis which calls for him. George Washington was the man " raised up " for the American people, and for the day of trial in which he appeared. His greatness did not lie in versatility of intellect, or in wide knowledge of what men had thought and done in the past. Men of much greater mental force and practical capacity for solving the problems of the statesman, sat in his cabinet, but never overshadowed their chief. It was his weight of character, his un- compromising devotion to duty, his readiness for any sacrifice that his country asked of him, and his unswerving integrity, which commanded for him the reverence of his contemporaries, and have led posterity to give him the foremost IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 37 place among the modern world's great men. When other men failed the country, and the clay mixed with iron showed itself in the composition of their characters, nothing but the pure gold of a heroic manhood was seen in his. His personality was a tower on which the state rested with safety, and he never stooped, as did vulgar conquerors, to use his influence or his popularity for his own aggrandizement. He gave himself without reserve to his country, and he asked nothing in return but the satisfaction of being a free citizen of the land he had made free. In his personality we see much that he owed to the traditions of the country from which he cut America loose by his sword. English characteristics pre- dominated the colony of his birth, and found a sen- sitive field of influence in his character. Englishmen of like spirit with himself helped to mould his thought. Tradition points to the writings of Sir Matthew Hale, the judge who created the standard of that high office for the English-speaking race, as having exercised an especially marked influence upon young Washington. He naturally relished the best and the noblest of what the old country had to offer him, and absorbed it into his character. But from the first, he was an American in his sym- pathies as in his activities, and the actual specimens 38 THE HAND OF GOD of English character with whom he was thrown into contact must have helped to make his Americanism more pronounced. The bumptiousness of the Eng- lishman never found a fuller exemplification than in the insolence with which Washington's superior knowledge was scorned on Braddock's expedition. In Franklin and Washington, America began to see her destiny indicated. The severance of the people from English standards, which began with the restoration of the Stuarts, was coming to be a generally recognized fact of the situation, and col- onial America was becoming conscious of a higher vocation than that of a dependency upon a Euro- pean power. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 39 CHAPTER V. THE RENDING OF BONDS. PHILOSOPHY and science alike warn us against the supposition that great changes are suddenly effected. "Nil per saltum" the great saying of Leibnitz, is as true in the sphere of human as of natural development. The separation of the British colonies from Great Britain was the outcome of causes whose operation we can trace with some degree of distinctness for more than a century before the crisis was reached in 1775. Up to the return of the Stuarts in 1660, America was merely a copy and appendix of England, reflect- ing the spirit and mind of its various parties in various sections of our country, and originating nothing of its own, except Roger Williams' mani- festoes in favor of absolute toleration of religious differences. But, as Carlyle well says, the Restora- tion marks the date at which England definitely turned its back on Puritan ideals, and abandoned the expectation of creating a community whose 40 THE HAND OF GOD governing principle should be the will of God. In America there was no Restoration, except in a super- ficial sense. There was no great victory of an anti- Puritan party, and no alteration of the standards of right. Virginia and Maryland indeed passed from Puritan to Cavalier rule, but Puritanism always had been an external thing in those colonies. New England, by far the most important and populous section of America, and that in which alone an intellectual movement independent of England had been begun, and had been secured by the establish- ment of an adequate machinery of education, remained Puritan as before. It is true that there was a decline of religious fervor, which might have proved fatal if it had continued ; but there was no change in the standard of conduct which was before the mind of the people ; and when religious zeal revived, that standard reappeared as vigorously as before. This Puritanism has become a characteristic fea- ture of the American mind. It has pervaded the religious and social life of the whole country, reach- ing those bodies which seemed the most remote from the influence. The canons of the Roman Catholic synods of the Archdiocese of Baltimore exhibit its influence, no less than the resolutions adopted by the conferences and assemblies of IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 41 Protestant churches. It has left its trace on our literature and art, which are freer from lubricity of every kind than those of any other modern people. The beginnings of an American literature are another indication of the development of a national spirit. Much was written and printed in New England during the Commonwealth period, but it was little else than an echo of what was said and thought in England. Roger Williams is the excep- tion, as already said. After him, the first really American man of letters is the much abused Cotton Mather, whose wearisome pedantries and fussy pieties have robbed him of the honor due to him, and made him a favorite target for depreciatory biography. It is Fitz-Greene Halleck who points out that Cotton Mather possessed one very notable literary gift the power to draw a pen-picture of a man in such a fashion as to make him conceivable and intelligible. To his facile pen we owe such portraits of nearly one hundred and fifty of his contemporaries, and men and women of the pre- ceding generation in New England. If these had been portraits on canvas, thus recognizable, how- ever roughly drawn, they would have been highly valued. But his most notable book, and the one which best expresses what was characteristic of the new America, is his " Essays to do Good." It has 42 THE HAND OF GOD Franklin's testimony to its importance, in that he told Mather's son that it had exercised a decisive influence over his own life. Without ignoring John Woolman, in whose one book the long series of Quaker journals blossomed into a thing of beauty, we must see in Franklin the next notable representative of the American spirit in literature. America was his country. He felt his relation to the whole land as no other men did as yet. Whether it be his " Poor Richard," or his " Essays," or his " Autobiography," we see the man of sympathies and interests no longer insular, and least of all provincial. His repeated visits to England but served to make him less English than other men, and to wean him from the childish loyalty to kings and nobles which was cherished by the femininely-minded of his time, as by the same class in our day. It was, however, England herself that was the chief agent in severing the bonds which bound the thirteen colonies to her. The first step she took in removing their apprehensions of the French domi- nation, by overthrowing that power in Canada. So long as the St. Lawrence was in French hands, the American colonies were obliged to cherish the con- nection with Great Britain as a protection against France. With Wolfe's victory at Quebec their IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 43 hands were free as regards their relations with England, and some Englishmen at the time were shrewd enough to see this. " If the people of our colonies," wrote one, " find no check in Canada, they will extend themselves almost without bounds into the inland parts. They will increase infinitely from all causes. What the consequences will be to have a numerous, hardy, independent people, pos- sessed of a strong country, communicating little or not at all with England, I leave to your own reflec- tions. ... A neighbor that keeps us in some awe is not always the worst of neighbors. By eagerly grasping an extensive territory, we may run the risk, and at no very distant period, of losing what we now possess." The war with France for North America brought with it another evil for England, in that it led to the most exaggerated notions of the wealth of the colonials, and along with these the purpose to make them contribute to the cost of maintaining the British Empire. The officers who came back from America brought with them accounts of the admirable style in which they had been entertained in American homes, of the table silver and naperies, the throng of black servants, the fine clothes of both sexes, and the like. The truth is that the colonial American was fond of show, and especially 44 THE HAND OF GOD so when there was somebody from the Old World before whom to exhibit his possessions. He liked finery, and he was commonly in debt for it. The country was one of large hopes and expectations, somewhat like a " boomer " town on our western frontier. Most people were rich in land only, and they came to be called " land-poor." They were going to be wealthy some day through the sale of their lands, and in the meantime they might afford a little extravagance. Joshua Gee, writing in 1750, with the insight into American conditions afforded by an acquaintance with the ledgers of the London traders, declared the colonies to be poor and in debt, and only need- ing a little encouragement to continue so. " Not a fourth part of their products redounds to their own profit, for out of all that comes here, they only carry back clothing and other accommodations for their families. . . . All these advantages we receive by the plantations, besides the mortgages on the planters' estates and the high interest they pay us, which is very considerable ; and therefore very great care ought to be taken that they are not' put under too many difficulties, but encouraged to go on cheerfully." In the struggle with the colonies over the propo- sition to tax them without their consent, the British IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 45 government naturally relied on the tenor of laws passed at various times, in which the supremacy of King and Parliament over the colonies was asserted or assumed. If the question were to be settled by legal precedents, Americans had no case whatever. It is a weakness of the English mind to assume that legal precedents are adequate for such a pur- pose. But a state of facts had arisen in America, which those old formulas could not cover, however well stretched for the purpose. From the struggle with America, England herself learned the necessity of adapting the formula to the fact in another fash- ion, and of recognizing that a high-spirited people, competent to assert their equality with the best, will not submit to be kept in leading-strings by a " mother country," when they have grown strong enough to walk alone. Another lesson administered by the American resistance is that there are other precedents than those of law. Most of the laws evoked from the statute-book for the confusion of Americans, had been ignored or violated by them with the full knowledge of the British government, almost from the dates of their passage. Sir Robert Walpole laughed at the idea of enforcing the laws which for- bade the direct trade between English colonies and those of France and Spain in the West Indies, 46 THE HAND OF GOD declaring that England's interest was in winking at its development, since only thus could Americans obtain the silver needed to pay for their purchases of British manufactures. Smuggling had risen to the rank of legitimate trade in America, employing the ships of such men as John Hancock, when the British ministry, in the interests of the revenue, undertook to suppress it. Collision under such circumstances was unavoidable, and English blun- dering thus managed to array the most timid and conservative class in the community on the side of independence. There were others who desired independence for reasons very different from those which animated John Hancock. Religious liberty was felt to be im- perilled by the continuance of the connection with Great Britain. The position of the Church of England in its re- lation to the State was very different in 1775 from what it has been for the last forty years. No per- son not of her communion was allowed to fill even an office in an English municipality, and every member of Parliament must take the communion at her hands before he could take his seat. A tithe- charge for the support of her clergy was levied on the produce of English land, and in the cities " Easter dues " were collected as a substitute for IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 47 this, and enforced by distraint. The bishops' courts had sole jurisdiction over marriages, divorces, wills and some other matters ; and a large part of the Scotch-Irish emigration was due to the refusal of these courts to acknowledge the validity of a marriage not solemnized by an Episcopal rector or a Roman Catholic priest. The principle universally recognized on the con- tinent at this time, that the religion of the ruler is that of his country Cujus regio, ejus religio, was accepted also as regards the parts of the British empire. A Protestant Church was maintained in Ireland at the expense of the Roman Catholic pop- ulation, and in defiance of their wishes. Nothing but the " resistance unto blood " of the Scotch peo- ple had availed to force the British government to abandon the plan of assimilating the Church of Scotland to that of England ; and the pledge given at the union of the two countries for the mainte- nance of the liberties of the Kirk had been shame- lessly broken by the establishment of patronage, in place of the free choice of ministers by the con- gregations. In America this principle had been applied as far as possible, in the establishment of the Church of England in Virginia, Maryland, New York, New Jersey and the Carolinas. In all these colonies the 48 THE HAND OF GOD property of men of all creeds was taxed for the sup- port of an Episcopal clergy. A law passed by the legislature of New York to provide public support for the Protestant clergy, had been interpreted by the royal governor to mean those of the Church of England only, since that was the king's church, although the intention of the legislature had been entirely different. And while the sentiment in fa- vor of religious equality had grown with every year of the eighteenth century, there had been little or no abatement of the claims of the Episcopal Church to supremacy over all others. The thirteen colonies were by law annexed to the diocese of London, and left to the care of this single English bishop. Three times a beginning had been made toward establishing a bishop in America, and three times it had come to nothing, in a way which the " dissenters " naturally thought providential. The first time it was defeated by the downfall of Archbishop Laud, at the outbreak of the troubles between Charles I. and the Long Par- liament. After the Restoration, Lord Clarendon, who quite equalled Laud in his devotion to Anglican interests, had the matter in hand and the necessary papers almost ready for the king's seal, when his downfall at the hands of the royal harem prevented it. Queen Anne, as a zealous Anglican, was favor- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 49 able to the scheme, and the papers were again ready for the great seal, when her death stopped it. The first two Georges cared nothing for the Church of England ; but the accession of George III. seemed to open the way for action. He was a fervent churchman, and the Archbishop of Canter- bury, Dr. Seeker, was greatly interested in the con- dition of the Church in the colonies, as was Dr. Porteous, Bishop of Chester (after 1787, of London), a native of Virginia. Under these auspices, the plan for an American bishop was revived, with the assurance that nothing more was intended than to furnish the American churches of that communion with proper oversight, to establish canonical discip- line for the clergy, and to make it possible for Episcopalians born in the colonies to obtain episco- pal confirmation without undertaking a costly and dangerous sea-voyage. The sincerity of these assurances was not called in question by those who took part in the loud and very general protest against the measure. The ground of the protest, in which many Episcopalians, especially in Virginia, joined, was that the appoint- ment of a bishop might be followed at any time by an act of parliament conferring upon him all the powers and privileges within his diocese which were 50 THE HAND OF GOD enjoyed by his prelatic brethren in England and Ireland. Bishops' courts, a universal tithe, test and corporation acts all these might follow in his train ; and so long as the British Parliament enjoyed the power to legislate for the colonies in such matters, there was no security against the imposition of these and similar restraints upon religious liberty in America. The Puritans and Presbyterians of New England and the middle colonies took the leading part in this resistance to an American bishopric, and cor- responded with the English dissenters in keeping watch upon the movement. For ten years they held a joint-convention of delegates every year to concert measures for the prevention of the step. And they naturally welcomed the final outbreak of war for independence, as disposing of this as well as other perils. After independence had been secured, the new government cooperated with American Episcopal- ians in obtaining bishops for their independent Church. It was not against bishops, but against English prelacy and its apparatus for exercising authority over dissenters, that the objection lay. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. CHAPTER VI. THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE. AMERICA never had a " revolution." The great- est change which occurred in our history was not a break with the past. The spirit of destruction for destruction's sake never took hold of the American people. The government they cast off in 1776 was already become an alien force, and in no way in- dispensable to the maintenance of the public order of the country. In the main, Americans were al- ready a self-governing people, and they rose against the power of Great Britain rather to preserve this liberty than to acquire it. Very little change was made either in the personnel or the methods of po- litical rule by the patriotic party. The laws re- mained unchanged, and their enforcement was in the same hands as before. Except in giving an indefinite leave of absence to the royally appointed governors of some of the colonies, there was not much alteration even in the forms employed, and still less in their substance. The expulsion of Great Britain, however, from 52 THE HAND OF GOD the business of collecting customs and managing military affairs, was not effected without great difficulty, and this was the greater because the con- tinuance of British rule was earnestly desired by a considerable body of the colonists, who arrayed themselves on the royal side openly, or gave sym- pathy and secret support to it. Even without this divided condition of American opinion, it seemed as if the attempt at establishing independence were premature, and therefore must end in failure. The population of the colonies in 1754 had been estimated at 1,428,003, of whom 263,000 were negro slaves. As immigration had come to a pause about that time, the increase in the following twelve years cannot have brought the number up to 2,000,000. That of England and Wales alone must have been four times as great. The colonials had an advantage in being ac- customed to the use of fire-arms, but in most cases their weapons were of antique make, while the supply of gunpowder was small and precarious. They were also unused to discipline, and indisposed to submit to it, while England possessed at least the skeleton of a great army, which had won dis- tinction in recent wars ; and, besides recruiting at home, she could draw upon the German states for a supply of men. The conformation of the country IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 53 left America open to attack at a score of places along the coast, while the military route by Lakes Champlain and George and the Hudson River sug- gested an advance from Canada. Especially great were the difficulties of America from the lack of the manufactures needed to equip and support an army. They had no cloths to make uniforms, no canvas for tents, no shoes and no leather to make them, no cannon save such as they could borrow or buy in Europe, no gunpowder for either large or small arms, no bunting for flags. Twice the patriotic women of Philadelphia searched their household stores, and sent every blanket they could spare to Washington's forces ; and the awn. ings from the shops, the sails from the ships, and the contents of the sail-lofts went to make tents. It was a conflict between the first manufacturing country of the world and a merely agricultural community, just such as has been waging in South Africa between Great Britain and the Boers. At the outset of colonization, indeed, the settlers of BritisK America had purposed to make the col- onies as complete and well equipped as the mother country, and several of the colonial governments had encouraged manufactures, either by premiums or by enforced labor in spinning and weaving. Against this England had worked with great sue- 54 THE HAND OF GOD cess through her Board of Trade and Plantations, through laws to discourage American manufactures or positively forbid them, and through the influence of the royal governors. With this the colonial love of finery had cooperated, and on the first prospect of a conflict with the mother country, they awoke to the fact that they had not the industries re- quired for conducting such a struggle. Even the supply of salt had come from England, and the cessation of importations produced a salt-famine throughout the colonies. Another great obstacle to success was the people's lack of the habit of cooperation for common ends, which had unavoidably resulted from their com- parative isolation from one another. They were much less Americans than Pennsylvanians, Virgin- ians, and so forth. In the first fervors of popular enthusiasm the colonial lines were all but forgotten, but only to emerge again when the feeling of a common interest had diminished. The leaders of the nation, who had to bear the burdens of the war, had no such body of steady enthusiasm behind them as supported Lincoln and Grant in a later struggle. The heroic temper was not wanting in individuals, but it did not characterize the mass of the people. As Mr. Lecky says, we have to look to 1861-65 for the heroic period of our history. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 55 While there were those who from the first pre- dicted the success of the American cause, this con- fidence was by no means universal. It was with sinking of heart that many American patriots faced the struggle in which the judicial blindness of the English government had involved them. In that hour men turned to God as their refuge and their strength, and rested their hope of a good issue upon Him. " We must fight," said Patrick Henry to the legislature of Virginia ; " an appeal to the God of hosts is all that is left us." At the opening of the Continental Congress at '} Philadelphia, September, 1774, Rev. Jacob Duch6 was invited to invoke the blessing of God upon it and the country. As an Episcopalian he read the psalm appointed for the day (the Thirty-fifth) to men who had just received the intelligence of the Boston massacre. Its words must have seemed to many an encouraging voice from on high : " Plead thou my cause, O Lord, with those that strive against me : and fight thou against them that fight ag^'nst me. "Lay hand upon the shield and buckler, and stand up to help me. " Bring forth the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me : say unto my soul, I am thy salvation." 56 THE HAND OF GOD Had the race been to the swift and the battle to the strong, Washington and his associates might have ended on the scaffold, as did the Canadian insurgents of 1837, an< ^ as did Kiel and his asso- ciates thirty years later. But Providence is not always " on the side of the heaviest battalions." The course of events was such as to impress this truth on even Benjamin Franklin, who, with all his social virtues, was as unlikely to anticipate divine aid as any man in America. Yet it was he who said to the Constitutional Convention of 1787: " In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace upon the means of establishing our future national felicity. I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proof I see of this truth that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid ? " * * Madison Papers, II, 984-985. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 57 It is not permitted for any one to play privy councillor to the Almighty, and to trace all the operations of his guiding hand in any historical crisis. But a few things we may indicate as less recondite and more obvious than others ; and the first of these is the raising up of men to bear the nation's burdens in its day of trial. Washington was God's unique gift to America. There was very little in our situation that was cal- culated to produce and foster a man of such lofti- ness, simplicity, and devotion to the public good, and at the same time a man who was capable of taking his place among the great commanders of all time, though by no means in the first rank. The arena in which breadth of view is developed is not that of a colony, separated by half the earth from the great states of the civilized world, and isolated from its neighbors by local jealousies. He was not the creature of his environment. Indeed we never have succeeded in creating an environment which will account for him. He stands out as the realized ideal of i\ ler, citizen and patriot before the Ameri- can mind, as Sir Matthew Hale is the realized ideal of the judge. From that day to this we measure every man who is called to the chief magistracy, consciously or unconsciously, by his moral dimen- sions. The American people will never be satisfied 58 THE HAND OF GOD with less unselfishness or less wisdom in its rulers, than was found in him. When he took command of the Continental army in 1775, he was at once felt to be the adequate head of the national forces. He saw with clearness through the plan which the British would follow, of cutting the confederacy in two, or perhaps in three, by sundering the Middle from the Eastern States on the one side, and from the Southern on the other. To meet this he had nothing but irregular forces, an army-chest more often empty than full, a divided country behind him, and a united and powerful enemy in his front. Nor was he seconded with ability by his next in command. Except Greene of Rhode Island, Sullivan of Massachusetts, and Wayne of Pennsylvania, it is impossible to point out a general who appreciated his plans and fully seconded them. Nor was he in a position to dismiss others from the places they so inadequately filled. He had to work with such tools as he had, and he achieved our independence in spite of their defects. His hold upon the confidence of his soldiers was the stronger for his appealing to the very highest motives. In his first General Order to the army, he used words afterward quoted by Lincoln in a General Order of 1864: "At this time of public IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 59 distress men may find enough to do in the service of their God and their country without abandoning themselves to vice and immorality. The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavor to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier, defending the dearest rights and liberties of \ his country." He was signally aided by the blindness which Providence seemed to have inflicted on the enemy. The condition of the public services in Great Britain was at the lowest ebb. George III., in his eagerness to rid himself of those constitutional re- strictions on kingship which had been imposed at the Revolution of 1688, had introduced a reign of favoritism and corruption. Before the war broke out, men had been entrusted with important places in the colonies whose only claim to office was their subserviency to the king. It was due to them in good measure that his rule became so intolerable to the colonists. The Parliament which made succes- sive experiments in shearing the wolf by taxing America^ was the very worst that ever bore the name in English history. That which existed throughout the war had been specially chosen for the support of the royal policy of " No Compromise," and while better than some of its predecessors in point of morals, was not a whit less subservient or unwise. 60 THE HAND OF GOD The selections made for the command of the British armies in America were worthy of such a ruler and such a government. It was well for us that James Wolfe lay in his grave at Greenwich, and that no masterly eye, such as that of Chatham, was at the king's service to pick out such men for commanding places. Cornwallis was the only officer on the British side who showed real ability, and an appreciation of what a campaign in such an extensive country must mean, and he was hampered by incompetence in his superior officers. It was Howe's folly that sent him to Yorktown, to be " bottled up " by Washington and Rochambeau, instead of allowing him to continue his northward march to join the main body of the forces. As for the rest Gates, Burgoyne, Howe, Carleton they take rank in history with Braddock, without the tragic ending which half redeems his stupidity. It is said that on one occasion some one talked to Washington of a plan to drive Howe out of the country. " Do not think of such a thing," he re- plied ; " they might send a man with some brains in his place." It is proverbially bad policy to " despise your enemy ; " but the Americans were driven to it by the sight of an enemy in command whose most characteristic achievement was the slow torture of the prisoners confined in the prison-ships IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 61 in New York harbor, and whose personal vices were the jest of both friend and foe. Nor were Washington's allies less a peril to be faced than his foes. The alliance with France, into which the quarrel with England drove America, may have been, and probably was, indispensable as a means to independence ; but it certainly was not from any affection to America, or desire to increase the number of republics, that the French took up our cause. It was to avenge the defeats sustained in the previous war, and if possible to recover Can- ada to the French crown. It needed all the weight and determination of Washington's character to prevent the struggle being diverted to that end, and to keep the French employed to bring to a speedy end the war, whose prolongation would have better suited their plans. The restoration of French rule on our northern frontier would have been a distinct calamity to the young republic, and especially so if Canada ten years later had fallen under the power of the French revolutionists. They would have obtained a basis of operation against us, which they would have used with as little scruple as they did their neighborhood to the republics of Holland and Switzerland. Such a peril could not have been foreseen by Washington in 1781, but his conviction that Canada would be better in English than in 62 THE HAND OF GOD French hands, and that the close of the war should not be delayed to secure its reconquest by France, proved a deliverance of the country from great em- barrassments in the near future. Thus ended a struggle, of which Thomas Pown- all, who had negotiated the cooperation of the colonies with England in the French and Indian War, and who afterwards had governed three of them in succession by commission from the Crown, wrote to Franklin : " I write this to congratulate you on the establishment of your country as a free and sovereign power, taking its equal station among the powers of the world. I congratulate you in particular, as chosen by Providence to be a principal instrument in this great revolution, a revolution that has stronger marks of Divine interposition, superseding the ordinary course of human affairs, than any other event which the world has experi- enced." IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 63 CHAPTER VII. CHAOS AND CONSTRUCTION. THE rejoicings over peace had hardly closed, when elements of disorder appeared in the new republic which threatened its destruction. The dis- content of the soldiers with the Continental Con- gress, which had no money to pay them off, brought the peril of a military usurpation. Fortunately for the country, there was no ambitious soldier of suffi- cient eminence to accept the position of king in the face of Washington's resolute purpose to keep king- ship at a distance. It was to him that the discon- tented were obliged to make the proposal, and from him it met with a reception which put an end to it. Nor was this the only quarter from which the peril of personal government threatened the re- public. Americans generally had grown up under the shadow of a throne, and it was not only the Tories who resented the proposition to substitute government by the people. A very considerable portion of the American people, especially in the cities, regarded monarchy as the only workable 64 THE HAND OF GOD scheme of government. They looked for a speedy termination to "the republican experiment," pre- dicted the establishment of an aristocracy as well as of kingship, and in fancy distributed the honors of the new system among themselves. The candi- date for the American throne was even selected, being the son of the King of England who wore the Hanoverian title of Bishop of Osnabruck. And it did seem as if the republic were unable to weather the storms which began to gather around it in its youth, and must give place to some plan of stronger government. The Articles of Confedera- tion, under which it was managed directly after 1781, were a loose compact among the states for the maintenance of a general legislative body with very limited powers. Congress (a term consecrated by long use to the meeting of diplomatic represen- tatives from sovereign states) was allowed to declare war and to make peace, to maintain an army and navy if it could get the money for this object from the states, to regulate weights and measures, and to issue paper money, but not to raise funds for its redemption. There was no general executive except boards and committees created by Congress, and no general judiciary, except an admiralty court to punish piracy and condemn prizes taken by American ships. Above all, there was no national IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 65 revenue, except such as could be obtained by assess- ing the states ; and experience had shown this to be a very uncertain source of income. An attempt to enlarge the powers of Congress to the collection of duties on imports was defeated by the veto of a single state very fortunately. Between the states there were incessant quarrels over their tariff arrangements, over mutual trade, over the fisheries of the Chesapeake, and over other matters. Within the states there were signs of grave disturbances, and in some cases active insurrection against authority. The condition of the currency made it impossible for men to pay their debts, and those against whom executions had been issued were liable to spend in a debtors' prison the time and the strength needed for the support of their families. Hence " Shays' Re- bellion " in Massachusetts, which was an uprising of the poorer class to prevent the sitting of the courts and the enforcement of the laws. The country always had been poor, and its poverty had been deepened by the ravages of the war, and by the diversion of labor from farming to military service. Yet the war itself had brought some compensations by stimulating the growth of small industries for the supply of articles shut out from coming from Europe. These manufactures 66 THE HAND OF GOD were ruined by peace, which was at once followed by an inflow of English goods out of all proportion to the ability of the people to pay for them. Naturally this deepened discontent. It was com- plained that " the arm which had prevailed on the field of battle, was paralyzed in the workshop," and a demand arose for a national authority to give American labor that degree of protection which was at that time extended by national governments everywhere. Expert observers declared that the economic difficulties of the country would force it to retrace its steps and abandon its independence. Lord Sheffield the friend and literary executor of Edward Gibbon published a book on American Commerce, which went through several editions. He claimed to prove that America had ruined itself by withdrawing from the British Empire, as it had lost the English market for ships and ships' supplies, was shut out from trade with the English colonies, and had not within itself the natural resources needed for the establishment of manufactures. Tench Coxe, the highest American authority on industrial statistics, answered the book in a half-hearted and timid way, which showed how little the best-informed Americans knew of the possibilities of their country, and IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 67 what serious apprehensions were entertained by patriotic citizens. Rev. Josiah Tucker, the Dean of Gloucester, who in 1774 had proposed the summary ejection of the American colonies from the British Empire as an alternative to war, now mocked at our dreams of political unity : " As for the future grandeur of America, and its being a rising empire under one head, whether republican or monarchical, it is one of the idlest and most visionary notions that was ever conceived, even by writers of romance. For there is nothing in the genius of the people, the situation of their country, or the nature of their different climates, which tends to countenance such a supposition. . . . Above all, when those immense inland regions beyond the back settle- ments, which are still unexplored, are taken into account, they form the highest probability that the Americans never can be united into one compact empire, under any species of government what- ever. Their fate seems to be a disunited people till the end of time." The British government did its best to make the prophecies of Lord Sheffield true. It took every pains to prevent the emigration of skilled laborers to America, and forbade the export of machinery. It used its recent conquest of Bengal 68 THE HAND OF GOD to compel the peasantry of that country to cultivate the indigo plant. It thus ruined the indigo industry of our Southern States, which were forced to look around for another staple to take its place, and had almost decided upon cotton. By these difficulties Providence was forcing the American people to lay aside their colonialism, and to come together in a more perfect union. It was the dispute over the Chesapeake fisheries which furnished the occasion, as a meeting of conference at the home of George Washington led to the proposal to have a constitutional convention called by the Continental Congress. When this body actually met in Philadelphia in May, 1787, the outlook was hopeless enough. The small states wanted to continue the plan of a weak confederation in which every state had an equal vote. The large states wanted a strong government based directly on the people of the whole country, in which states would have a weight proportional to their wealth and population. Some preferred a centralized government, with a single legislature, like the British Parliament. Others would keep the state legislatures intact, and retain in their hands nearly all the powers of government. So keen were the differences that the heat of discussion became intense. Some IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 69 members withdrew, and Franklin shared with many others the fear that the meeting of the Convention had only served to accentuate the differences which divided the mind of the country. It was under these circumstances that Franklin made the memorable speech which has been already quoted in part. The whole, as recorded in Mr. Madison's " Papers," is worth repeating here : " Mr. President : The small progress we have, made after four or five weeks' close attendance and continual reasonings with each other, our different sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as many noes as ayes, is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the imperfection of human un- derstanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those republics which, having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist. And we have viewed modern states all round Europe, but find none of their constitutions suitable to our cir- cumstances. " In this situation of this Assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has 70 THE HAND OF GOD it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings ? In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have ob- served frequent instances of a superintending Provi- dence in our favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend ? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance ? I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings, that ' except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it.' I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests ; our projects will be confounded ; and we ourselves IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 71 shall become a reproach and by word down to fu- ture ages. And what is worse, mankind may here- after, from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom, and leave it to chance, war and conquest. " I therefore beg leave to move, that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to busi- ness, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service." The motion was rejected, but not on its merits. Many who would have voted for it if it had been offered at the opening of the Convention, thought it inexpedient to make the change at this stage of the proceedings, as they feared it would expose the body to ridicule. But it probably helped to the graver consideration of the party differences, by reminding members of their responsibility to an authority higher than their constituents, and of a wisdom more profound than their local preferences and prejudices. Out of these disputes came the Constitution of the United States, through a compromise of oppos- ing theories as to what kind of a government the country needed and would accept. Nobody had his way in framing it, and nobody was satisfied with the 72 THE HAND OF GOD result. The colonial party thought it went much too far ; the national party accepted it as the pro- verbial " half a loaf." Some refused to sign it, but most showed Franklin's wisdom by waiving their objections, and remanding their fears to the silence of their own breasts. Any of them would have been astonished if they had been told that the greatest English statesman of the coming cen- tury would declare it the greatest document of its kind that ever sprang from the mind of man, and that it would prove the model after which nearly every free government which was to originate in that century would be fashioned. " They builded better than they knew." This despised compromise proved a new step in the development of government organization, of hardly less importance than the establishment of the principle of representation by the Teutonic peoples in the Middle Ages. As that made it possible to combine personal liberty with the extension of an effective authority over a whole nation, so this made it possible to combine local freedom of initia- tive and action with adequate national authority. It thus secured to the American people the reten- tion of the colonial subdivisions which were identi- fied with the history of the country, and the crea- tion of similar institutions as the national domain IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 73 extended and a free population occupied it ; and it yet established a national authority as effective for national purposes as any in the world. It showed that centralization is not the secret of effect- ive government, but a just division of powers between the centre and the other (and lesser) points of authority. Especially admirable, as Sir Henry Sumner Maine points out, was the security given in the Constitu- tion against sudden shifts of popular feeling, and snap judgments on vital questions. It always pro- vides for an appeal " from Philip drunk to Philip sober," from the people carried away by excitement to the people in their moods of reflection. The constitution of the Senate from members chosen for a long term and not directly by the people, the veto power of the President, the restriction on the power of amendment, and especially the authority of the national judiciary as a coordinate power with the executive and the legislature, serve to this end. Up to this time, judges and courts had always been held to be subject to the authority of the other branches of government, and their highest function was to interpret the enactments of the legislature, or to enforce the commands of the executive. But the erection of a body of funda- mental law in written form, with grave restriction 74 THE HAND OF GOD on its alteration, and the delegation from the people to the judiciary of the power to interpret this law with authority, involved the creation of tribunals of a new order. It gave the country courts which could efface a law of Congress from the statute-book as " unconstitutional," or interpose an injunction to prevent the executive itself from transgressing the bounds set by the Constitution to its activity. It is this which makes the Supreme Court of the United States " the most august tribunal known to mankind." The new Constitution needed all the friends it could obtain to secure its adoption in the conven- tions called by the several states to ratify or reject it. The degree of distrust it excited is indicated by the violence of passion which attended the dis- cussions. Some of the foremost in the measures which had led to independence, such as Patrick Henry in Virginia, were most resolute in oppo- sition. Mr. Henry stigmatized it a " golden trap," into which the states were to be enticed, and he warned Virginia that if she ventured into it, there would be no way out of it. It is noteworthy that Franklin found an analogy for this resistance of the Anti-federalists in the rebellion of the Children of Israel against the leadership of Moses in the Exodus. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 75 It was the economic necessities which operated to force the adoption, as they had caused the drafting, of the Constitution. The mercantile interests of the country could not maintain themselves under a loose confederation such as that of 1781, as they could not be protected by commercial treaties. The workingmen were suffering severely for want of employment, and were unable to support them- selves and their families at even the low level which was then their standard of living. It was a delega- tion of workingmen, led by Paul Revere, which secured the support of Samuel Adams for the new plan of government, and thus went far to secure the approval of Massachusetts. The other kind of economic necessity was illustrated by New York, which elected a convention hostile to the Constitu- tion, and yet gave it an approving vote, largely through the influence of Alexander Hamilton, who showed them what would be the position of their state outside the Union, after the Constitution had been adopted by the number necessary to set it in operation. When the ship was launched, the men were found to man her. The unanimous choice of the Amer- ican people called Washington to the presidency, and for eight years that high office was filled by one who stood first among the rulers of the century, 76 THE HAND OF GOD not by dint of genius for organization or adminis- tration, but through high principle, sterling good sense, and absolute fearlessness. This last quality was to be as necessary to him in civil as in military office. No act of his military career was as much the expression of his intrepidity in the discharge of duty, as his signing Jay's treaty with Great Britain ; and no campaign of the War for Independence re- quired finer generalship or greater firmness, than did his handling of Citizen Genet, who came to America with the evident purpose to take charge of the country, as did the agents of revolutionary France in the weaker nationalities of Europe. From first to last, Washington, the great first Pres- ident, was as equal to the demands of a most dif- ficult situation, as had been Washington the Gen- eral. He was ably seconded, especially by Alexander Hamilton, of whom Barthold Niebuhr said to Francis Lieber that he was the greatest statesman of his age. No other man had contributed so much to effecting the adoption of the Constitution, es- pecially through the " Federalist " papers. No other was to stamp himself so permanently on the actual framework and policy of the government for which it provided. In his own department the national Treasury business is still done in the IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 77 forms he devised. In his public measures for the assumption of the war-debts of the states and the establishment of a national bank, and in his advo- cacy of a protective tariff, he indicated the lines on which the national policy was to run in the main for a century and more. Yet neither Pennsylvania nor New York has followed the example of Massa- chusetts in erecting a statue to his memory, while many much smaller men have been thus honored. But, as Cato said, it is more honor to have it asked why there is no statue, than why there is one. After the eight years of Washington's presidency, the great man bade farewell to public life, having reached his sixty-fifth year, and desiring to spend his closing years in those rural occupations for which he had so keen a relish. His retirement it- self indicated his confidence that the government was now satisfactorily launched, and would make head against all contrary winds and currents. But this confidence was not so great as to leave him entirely free of apprehensions. His Farewell Ad- dress, prepared with the help of Hamilton, indicates his sense of the peril the country ran of being drawn into the whirlpool of European disturbances, at a time when England and a coalition of Conti- nental states were seeking the overthrow of the revolutionary government of France. 78 THE HAND OF GOD So violent were the contrary sympathies in this country at that time, that an English traveller re- ported that he had found a great many English- men and a great many Frenchmen in America, but no Americans ! There was an American in the presidency, and his final words to his countrymen were an exhortation to be Americans above all things. He pointed them to the future opening on them under their new plan of government, and in- vited them to believe in their country as an adequate object of patriotic interest, and to cherish those mutual regards which alone would suffice to obliter- ate local jealousies and partial interests, and bind them together in a true national brotherhood. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 79 CHAPTER VIII. EXPANSION AND INVENTION. THE shift of power in 1801, from the party of Washington to that of Jefferson, seemed a fatal step to many good people, and probably so to the major- ity of the earnestly religious element of the nation. Jefferson, in their view, was not only the representa- tive of French irreligion, but the patron of theories and tendencies which must lead to revolutionary violence and anarchy. He was the Robespierre of the New World, and he would abuse the powers given him by the Constitution, to subvert religion, to assail property and to advance the most illiterate- of the land to power. This bugbear figures in various printed sermons, commentaries on the Apocalypse, and pamphlets of the time. But even men who took a view of Jeffer- son based on observation of his career and study of his character, were distressed at the election of such an "unsafe man," supported by all the most un- desirable people in the country, and so given to theorizing about ideal social conditions that no one 8o THE HAND OF GOD could tell what he would try to make of the govern- ment. They were also convinced that the Consti- tution was not yet past the dangers of youth, and that as " the proper nurse for Moses is Moses' mother," so the proper guardian of the new plan of government was the party which was the chief agent in establishing it. Jefferson and his party did indeed come into power with a sufficient load of questionable theo- ries. Their saying, " He governs best who governs least," for instance, has all of modern Anarchy im- plicit in it. But actual responsibility is a fine cor- rective to theories, which flourish nowhere so well as in parties permanently excluded from power. The experience England has had with Irish national- ist leaders, whose defects of leadership she ascribes quite wrongly to defects of race, shows what we might have made of the Jeffersonian party if the Federalists had been strong enough to keep them out of office for half a century. It was the good providence of God which left the Adamses and others of the Federalist party so much to themselves that by their Alien and Sedition Acts, and other proofs of distrust of freedom, they blundered them- selves out of office and their opponents in. And when the change of parties took place, there was the usual refutation of the partisan notion that one IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 81 half of the American people is unfit to take charge of the national interests. The fears of Jefferson's enemies were not fulfilled, although he made some blunders, and showed by no means the genius for government his friends had hoped. It was the especial contention of his party that the national government must keep itself strictly within the limits of power prescribed for it by the letter of the Constitution and its " strict construc- tion." It must leave to the states all the powers not therein clearly granted it. But Jefferson was to have his principles severely tried in this respect. In the very first year of his administration Spain re-ceded the Province of Louisiana to France, after having held it since 1763. This was done by the secret Convention of San Ildefonso in 1801 ; and the public treaty at Amiens, a year later, which terminated for a short time the hostilities that had devastated the European continent, seemed to leave the French in easy possession of the Missis- sippi valley. Our American government was naturally alafmed at the country being thus shut in between England on the north and France on the west, with disputes as to boundaries pending on both frontiers. Jefferson, although the head of the party of economy and peace, and that which had been accused of partiality for France, used language 82 THE HAND OF GOD which distinctly pointed to war, unless the French would sell us Louisiana. But the situation was changed materially by 1803, when the refusal of England to evacuate Malta, in accordance with the terms of the treaty of Amiens, showed that a return of hostilities was at hand. Napoleon saw that he could not hold Louisiana against the British fleet, and therefore offered it to our government for $15,000,000. The offer was closed with. The purchase was completed just twelve days before the British minister left Paris, and sixteen before war was declared by England. By it we got possession of what are now the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, most of the Indian and Oklahoma Territories, Kan- sas, Nebraska, the Dakotahs, a large part of Colo- rado and the greater part of Wyoming, besides Montana, and (some say) Oregon and Washington. The purchase certainly more than doubled the national area, embracing as it did at least 800,000 square miles of territory, and much of it the most fertile lands in North America, including all of the famous " wheat-belt " but the two ends. The treaty of purchase, like the Jay treaty of 1796, had due regard to the people of the territory. It provided : " The inhabitants of the ceded terri- tory shall be incorporated in the Union of the IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 83 United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal Constitu- tion, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States, and in the mean time they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion they profess." It was not an addition of subjects to the dominion of an empire which Jefferson accomplished, but the admission of citizens to a free republic, and on equal terms with the citizens already possessed of self-government. In less than nine years after the purchase, the greater part of these people were erected into the self-governing State of Louisiana, with the Code-Napol6on in place of English com- mon law, and their old subdivisions into parishes instead of counties. Their French language remained in use in legislative and judicial proced- ure, and has been only slowly, and without any compulsion, superseded by English. To this annexation they offered no resistance. They would have preferred, no doubt, to have remained under the government of France, but they knew that to be impossible. It was a choice between admission on equal terms into the Ameri- can Republic, and incorporation as subjects into the British Empire. Between the two alternatives they 84 THE HAND OF GOD could not have hesitated for an instant. Some of them grumbled, but not a hand and hardly a voice was raised against the establishment of our govern- ment. Englishmen indeed flattered themselves that their rule would be more acceptable than ours, and this notion seems to have suggested the inva- sion of Louisiana in 1816. They were undeceived. No assistance was given them by the French-speak- ing citizens, and the state government cooperated heartily with General Jackson in his measures for the defence of New Orleans, and thus aided Americans in obtaining a victory which went far to compen- sate the general failure of our operations by land during the second war with Great Britain. That war had the effect of bringing the national and the provincial or colonial tendencies in our political system into clear view, and securing a sub- stantial victory for the former. The bad repute into which the Hartford Convention brought the Federalist party, causing its rapid extinction in spite of its great services to the country, might have been a warning to Nullificationists and Seces- sionists of a later day that the growth of national feeling had reached a point at which the mainte- nance of the Union was the first postulate of Ameri- can politics. It showed that no party which sub- jected itself to a charge of disloyalty to the Nation IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 85 would be able to hold its own in the suffrages of the American people. President Jefferson earned the gratitude of Amer- icans for all time by the good sense with which he let theories of national power stand aside when he made this purchase, which secured us the Mississippi and all its tributaries. But he Jhad great searchings of heart over the constitutionality of the transac- tion, and proposed to Congress to amend the Con- stitution so as to legalize it. His friends of the " strict construction " party were in control of both House and Senate, but they did not act on his sug- gestion. They took for granted that the purchase was all right as the Supreme Court afterwards decided it was and that no amendment could make it right if it were not. The opposition to the purchase came from his opponents, the Federalists, especially those of the New England States. They objected to the clauses which provided for the erection of the newly ac- quired territory into states of the Union, as this would involve the shift of the nation's centre of gravity westward, and would deprive New England of her proper weight in the national councils. To an annexation of territory and subjects, the oppo- nents of the Louisiana Purchase would have had no objections. It was to Jefferson's pledge of equal rights to the annexed that they took exception. 86 THE HAND OF GOD There must have been some who shrank from the expansion of our national territory on the ground that it was a simple impossibility for the country to extend an effective control over so large an area, although its entire extent was very imper- fectly realized at that day. A free government, with sharply defined responsibilities to the people and to the law, could not bear rule over outlying territories in the rough fashion used by despotisms. How could our government be responsible for dis- tricts lying two thousand miles from the seat of government, even if they were connected with the capital by highways, canals, and such other facili- ties for travel as then existed? Would not the country go to pieces through its unwieldy bulk, and break up into a number of confederacies in course of time ? Even as it was, the magnificent distances of America stood very much in the way of effective government. It took months to transport to Bed- ford the troops required to suppress the Whiskey Insurrection of 1794. How long would it take to gather forces needed to maintain peace and order on the upper waters of the Missouri ? So even the friends of the young republic rea- soned. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had planned to lead 'an ideal community to the banks of the Susquehanna in President Washington's second IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 87 administration, and who always defended our na- tional character against English criticism, said in 1833 : " In fact the Union will be shaken almost to dislocation whenever a very serious question be- tween the states arises. The American Union has no centre, and it is impossible now to make one. The more they extend their borders into the In- dians' land, the weaker will the national cohesion be. But I look upon the states as splendid masses, to be used, by and by, in the composition of two or three great governments." Not that he welcomed the dissolution of the Union. He says : " The possible destiny of the United States of America as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see -ft realized ? " But before Mr. Coleridge spoke, a way of escape from this difficulty had been prepared through those inventions which have put every part of our national area into closer relatipns with the govern- mental centre than were the nearest in 1805. First came Robert Fulton's steamboat, the first success in that kind after a century of experiments the " Clermont " of 1807. This invention was to con- vert the rivers and lakes of America into splendid 88 THE HAND OF GOD highways for cheap and rapid travel and traffic. Then came Robert Stephenson's locomotive, the " Rocket " of 1830, another final success after many experiments, including his own in Northumberland in 1816. This was to supersede for America all other modes of land-travel, to bind ocean to ocean and state to state, and to place it in the power of the Nation to make its authority tangible in every part of the land. Next came Samuel Morse's mag- netic-electric telegraph, in 1844, a third successful outcome of prolonged experiments. It brought every important centre of population into almost immediate communication with Washington, en- abling the government to follow the course of events in each as closely as that in the capital itself. Thus, step by step, the difficulty of maintaining a government over three million square miles, with- out granting an excessive discretion to officials or weakening the responsibility at the centre, has been overcome. Centralization has ceased to be the con- dition on which effective government exists, and physical conditions have been created which cor- respond to federalism, with its elastic liberties for districts and localities. It is anticipating later events, but it is worth while to observe how another invention came to the aid of the Union at a critical time in its history. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 89 Up to the year 1845, the grain crops of the country were reaped with the hand-sickle, a laborious and back-breaking work, and one which required the presence of the whole people of the farm in the grain-field. In or about that year* the "cradle," with long and light fingers of wood mounted above the blade of the scythe, came into use, to the great alleviation of the farmer's toil. But there had been on the market for ten years previously Mr. McCor- mick's reaper, which would have done the work more expeditiously and cheaply than the cradle did. The American farmer, however, did not believe in farming by machinery, and he would have none of the reaper. It was brought to perfec- tion in 1846, and five years later it was given a medal at the London Exhibition of 1851, but attracted little attention. In 1855 the second International * The date I have given for the invention and general use of the " cradle " is challenged, and it is asserted that it was in com- mon use before the invention of the " reaper." I use the author- ity of observant persons whose memory includes the methods of our agriculture before the war for the Union, but will be glad of specific correction, if they are wrong. There was a still earlier type of cradle invented in Scotland, made of metal with very much shorter " fingers," and this was introduced into America. But the long-fingered cradle of wood is quite another contrivance, and of much greater practical value. 90 THE HAND OF GOD Exhibition was opened in Paris, and there the reaper got its first real opportunity. As in the case of the steamboat, the locomotive and the electric telegraph, experiments had been going on fora century or less, with a view to making a practical reaper. The most common idea was to revolve a sharp edge of steel against the grain, push- ing this ahead of the horses. This was sure to be blunted by the silex of the wheat-stock before it had cut half the field. Mr. McCormick's reaper was the first that was constructed on the principle of a row of scissors. At Paris in 1855 there were fields of wheat on the Emperor's model farm at Compiegne await- ing the competitors. The American machine was given the first chance, whether from courtesy or cu- riosity. When it had cut its first ridge or swathe of wheat, all the other inventors withdrew from the competition, acknowledging its superiority. This unqualified triumph naturally attracted attention at home, and during the rest of the decade the American farmer was coming to use the reaper. By the time the war for the Union broke upon the land, it was as well established among our farm- tools along with the mower and the horse-rake as were the hoe and the spade. When the war car- ried off the middle-aged and young men to fill the ranks of the army, the boys, women, and even girls IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 91 mounted the driver's seat in the place of those who were gone. The crops could not have been gathered without these new adjuncts of farming, and must have rotted on the ground. More than once I remember to have heard it said in those years, that the country simply could not have got on without these inventions, in view of the demand of the army for food, and of foreign countries for our wheat. It was a favorite saying with Mr. McCormick that the Democratic party and the Old School Presbyterian Church were the two hoops which held the Union together. It was his good fortune to have added a third. As a Scotch writer says, there is a " theology of inventions," and our own history illustrates it. These things came just at the moment when they had become indispensable to our national existence, and they brought such good to no other country as to ours. The hand of God was in them, and no sec- ondary causes should hide that hand from us. 92 THE HAND OF GOD CHAPTER IX. THE HEGEMONY OF THE CONTINENT. TWENTY years after the extension of the repub- lic to the shores of the Pacific by the purchase of Louisiana, America had to decide upon her rela- tions to the whole continent. During the Peninsular War, the Spanish colonies in America began to throw off the yoke of Spain, and to declare themselves independent republics. Between 1810 and 1823 they had so far succeeded in this, that in the latter year our government ac- knowledged their existence as sovereign states. The Spaniards had not yet given up all hopes of effecting a re-conquest, and in several parts of Cen- tral and South America troops were still in the field for Ferdinand VII. Spain had forfeited all claim to American sympathy by her general treatment of her American possessions, and by the barbarities which characterized this war. The Spaniards were never properly colonists of America, or of any of their foreign possessions. Through the expulsion of the Jews and the Moris- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 93 cos from Spain, its population had been reduced so much as to make it impossible to occupy America with a large force of Spaniards. Nor was this de- sired by the Spanish government. It looked upon America chiefly as a source of revenue, and gave especial attention to the mines of silver and gold. To work these it had established or tolerated a sys- tem of forced labor, by which the greater part of the young men of the Indian villages throughout the great Viceroyalty of Peru were taken to the mining districts for a term of years, and there com- pelled to carry on the mining operations in the rude and exhaustive fashion of that day. They came back to their villages worn out with toil, pre- maturely aged, and infected with the vices of their Spanish masters. As a result the Indian popula- tion of the Viceroyalty fell from 8,000,000 to 608,912, between 1575 and 1794. The European population of officials, soldiers, priests and traders was never numerically large in any part of the Spanish dominions, and it was divided in feeling as to the continuance of Spanish rule. There was, indeed, stubborn resistance offered in every country which took part in the change of government, but everywhere except in Cuba the revolutionists had their way, and they emerged from the struggle with bitter resentment of the measures taken by 94 the Weylers of that day to keep them in their co- lonial dependence upon a government which had done so little for them and had exacted so much from them. Before this struggle on our side of the Atlantic ended, the wars in Europe had reached their con- clusion at Waterloo. Spain was freed permanently from the yoke of France, and in 1823 Ferdi- nand VII. effaced the last trace of the revolution- ary period by abolishing the Constitution under which his subjects had fought for the liberation of their country in his absence. In this he was actively supported by the Holy Alliance, a formal compact of the continental sovereigns to maintain that arrangement of the map of Europe which they had made at Vienna, and to uphold " legitimate " power everywhere, not excepting that of Turkey over her Christian subjects. Under the authority of the Holy Alliance, France sent an army into Spain to put the Spanish people under the feet of Ferdinand VII. , the perjured king who had sworn to maintain the Constitution. The success of the Alliance in Spain itself natu- rally suggested the restoration of " legitimate " authority in the Spanish colonies by a similar ex- pedition. Here their plans came into collision with British interests. Under the colonial regime IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 9$ Spain had carefully reserved to herself the trade of her colonies, as was indeed the policy of England and other European countries. The insurrection had thrown the Spanish-American ports open to British commerce, and the reduction of the colonies to obedience would mean the closing of those ports and the loss of a large trade to England. It was in these circumstances that George Canning, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs under Lord Liverpool's administration, suggested though Ben- jamin Reed, our minister in London, to John Quincy Adams, our Secretary of State, that Amer- ica should interpose her veto to this project of the Holy Alliance. Reminding our rulers that we were " the first power on that (this) continent, con- fessedly the leading power," he asked if it were possible that we could see " with indifference their fate decided upon by Europe." " Has not a new epoch arrived," he said, " in the relative position of the United States toward Europe which Europe must acknowledge ? Are the great politi- cal and commercial interests which hang upon the destinies of the new continent, to be canvassed and adjusted in this hemisphere, without the coop- eration, or even the knowledge, of the United States ? " The proposal commended itself to President 96 THE HAND OF GOD Monroe and his cabinet, and in his Annual Message to Congress of December, 1823, the " Monroe Doc- trine " was formulated as follows : " We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable rela- tions existing between the United States and those Powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as danger- ous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European Power, we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose in- dependence we have, on great consideration and on just princi- ples, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any manner their destiny, by any European Power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." As the part of the President's Message which deals with foreign affairs is the work of the Secre- tary of State, these are the words of Mr. Adams, and not of Mr. Monroe except by adoption. They sufficed for their purpose. Although our country had not come out of the recent war with Great Britain with untarnished glory, except on the sea, the syndicate of nations composing the Holy Al- liance did not choose to try issues with us. The population of the republic was about 10,600,000, and its condition was far from prosperous. Yet not IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 97 only were the Spanish colonies left to work out their own destiny, but Spain concluded a treaty with us defining her American territories as not ex- tending north of the 42nd parallel. By this step America was conceded the leading place on the western continent, and was allowed to assume so much of a protectorate over her sister republics, as secured them from European invasion and encroachment. She did not undertake to secure them from the other consequences of any quarrel or even war which they might have with a European nation, nor did she assume any right to interfere in their domestic affairs. But as European govern- ments at that epoch were emphasizing their unity of action in a compact state-system, America de- clared that the western world was not to be drawn into any relations with that system which might result in an extension of the power of European governments over American territory not already possessed by them. Mr. Adams hoped to go still farther, and to establish an American state-system, through which peace throughout the continent should be secured and intimate commercial relations established. His plans were frustrated through the violent political dissensions of what is called ironically, surely " the Era of Good Feeling." Not even commercially 98 THE HAJMD OF GOD did we profit by the situation we had created, and England continues to reap the harvest of Canning's keen diplomacy. We have held the wolf, but England has shorn the sheep ; and in every part of South and Central America she emphasizes the part played by Canning in the matter, quoting his boast : " I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old." The benefit came to us in the effect which our new responsibility exercised on the national char- acter. It aided the friends of the Union to main- tain its claims on every patriotic American, by the view it offered of evil consequences to the whole continent if we failed to uphold our unity as a republic. It counteracted the commercial tendency in our diplomacy, by committing us to a task from which we derived no commercial advantage what- ever, and by asspciating that undertaking with the national honor to such a degree that no American calls the obligation in question. With the growth of the lust of conquest and an- nexation in Europe, our attitude towards European aggression in the New World has gained in impor- tance and worth. We have run the wall of fire around the Brynhild of the West, through which no adventurous Sigurd will leap on any errand. When the third Napoleon took advantage of our Civil IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 99 War to set up an empire in Mexico, the restoration of the Union was at once followed by a demand for the withdrawal of his troops, and that the demand was complied with showed that the most ambiti- ous sovereign preferred the loss of his prestige with Europe to a collision with our power. And when the alarming growth of British Guiana threatened the absorption of the republic of Venezuela into the Queen's dominions, it was in the name of the Monroe Doctrine that we interposed, and obliged the successor of Mr. Canning to assent to a peace- ful arbitration of all claims. Whatever the merits or defects of the decision, it put a stop to the proc- ess of absorption, and shut England permanently from the coveted Orinoco. In these things we have played an entirely unselfish part for the vindication of American liberties and the maintenance of Amer- ican integrity. It has been doubted whether the game is worth the candle, since it gives us no better result than the independence of a number of republics, which may be free but are not always orderly. Even the countrymen of Canning have expressed their doubts of the worth of that new world which he expected to redress the inequalities of the old, and have de- scribed us as playing the part of the dog in the man- ger, since we neither will undertake to coerce the ioo THE HAND OF GOD Spanish and Portuguese of our continent into " civ- ilized " methods, nor allow anyone else to do so. It is quite true that great hopes were excited by the republics to the southward, which have not been confirmed by later history ; but those hopes were unwarranted by the circumstances which attended the emancipation of those countries from Spanish control. Their people had had no experi- ence in self-government, and they are taking no longer time to learn that art, and are making no grosser blunders and creating no wilder disturbance in acquiring the lesson, than did our forefathers. It was not at a bound that the free and self-gov- erning peoples of Europe emerged from the condi- tion of serfdom, and even slavery, into personal liberty. It was not in a day that even our own country attained that degree of order which we are demanding of those who started with none of our advantages. Spanish misrule left behind it a bitter inheritance of racial enmities, local antagonisms, and strife of classes, along with traditions of governmental dis- honesty and official peculation, which are not to be outgrown in a day. It left behind it a vast mass of ignorance and superstition, on which designing men in both State and Church have prac- tised for their own advancement, to the injury of the community. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 101 Not less undeniable than these evils, however, has been the real advance of our sister republics toward stable and efficient government, and at the same time toward responsible liberty. They have not advanced equally, but they all have advanced. Mexico, stimulated to more active patriotism by its struggle with the French Empire, has been the finest instance of what a Spanish-American country can attain to under good government, and the instance is the more striking as the republic owes so little to European influence or initiative, and has never given her destinies into the hands of a ruling class. What Mexico is to-day, the rest will be to-morrow. The same forces are at work in all of them, and their growth in the direction of order and prosperity proceeds along parallel lines, such as history discloses in the development of the cities of the early Greek and Roman world. Our own share in this development of our sister rep ublics has been far less than it ought to have been. First by our indifference, then by our ag- gressions in the interest of the extension of negro slavery, through wild talk about our " manifest destiny " to rule the whole continent, and more recently through our exciting suspicions that we may take advantage of our power to extend our rule over them, we have been kept at a distance 102 THE HAND OF GOD from them even commercially. Our public opinion has had less weight with them than that of Europe, and they have even refused our good offices for the maintenance of peace throughout the continent, because they suspected some private ends in our diplomacy. If we are to discharge the responsi- bility of our relations to them in accordance with the divine purpose in imposing it upon us, it must be through our being kept above the suspicion of wrongful ambitions. Never was a nobler task laid upon any country than that of maintaining the free and independent evolution of the political life of this New World, and never was a public respon- sibility bestowed that was more certain to bring with its faithful discharge ample returns of the highest value to the people who received the trust. As already said, the Monroe Doctrine is criticised and challenged by European publicists, as an ex- cess of authority which has no warrant in interna- tional law, and as a false policy in view of the best interests of the continent itself. These criticisms are not mere " academic " utterances of opinion. They express the impatience which is felt by European countries with the restraints the Monroe Doctrine imposes upon their plans for annexation and colonization, driving them to the unwholesome, densely peopled and comparatively barren regions IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 103 of Africa, while the rich lands of America are shut to their advances. American policy, however, im- poses no restriction on European immigration to any part of the New World, as is shown by the large German and Italian settlements in South America within the last fifty years. It imposes no restraint on the development of any part of the continent by European intelligence and capital. It deprives Europe of no basis of supply of food, hides, wool and other raw materials, nor of any market for its manufactures; and experience has shown that in all the more valuable portions of the continent, the security to life and property is suf- ficient to make safe every kind of industrial activity that Europeans may find it profitable to engage in. If the course of trade has not been uninterrupted by wars, it is alleged, with much show of truth, that trade, as is usual with it, has had its share in provoking the worst of these wars for its own in- terests. As for the Monroe Doctrine having no sanction in international law, that criticism comes too late. It was accepted without protest by the European powers, whose action it blocked in 1823. Its op- eration has been allowed by both England and France in situations where neither their interests nor their prestige were advanced by submission. 104 THE HAND OF GOD And what the America of 1823 laid down as a prin- ciple for the public relations of this continent, the America of a later date, with eight times the pop- ulation and ten times the power of 1823, is not likely to recede from. Nor is it otherwise than desirable that we should stand our ground. Central and South America have very little to gain by having their natural de- velopment interrupted by European aggression, and by having ideas and methods alien to their character imposed upon them by force of arms. It will be time to consider the desirableness of that when these European countries have a single country to show, in which their conquests and col- onizations have been beneficial in any but the most superficial way to the peoples they have deprived of self-government. Their own subjects have pros- pered as traders and adventurers in such countries, but to the conquered peoples they have carried rather their vices than their civilization. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 105 CHAPTER X. THE IMMIGRANT. AMONG the novelties of our national Constitution was its requirement that a census of the people should be taken every ten years, in order that membership of the House of Representatives, and the electoral vote for President and Vice-President, might be readjusted according to population. The example thus set has been followed by European countries generally, England taking her first census in 1801. When the figures of our first census in 1790 were published, our government was concerned for our standing among the nations, and Jefferson, as Secre- tary of State, wrote to our representatives at the European courts about it. He instructed them to say that the less than four millions reported as the total of the American people did not correspond to the actual number. The first census had been taken with less thoroughness than could be wished, and the next would show a great difference. The first census, however, was shown by its sue- 106 THE HAND OF GOD cessors to be as accurate as any. Even in 1800 the population had not risen much above five millions, nor had it reached ten by 1820. America, in the important matter of population, ranked among the lesser states of the civilized world, and was treated as such in the game of international politics. The insolence of Napoleon's Milan Decree and of the British Orders in Council would never have been perpetrated on a power of the first class. The same means that had been used to effect the founding of the republic, was now employed by Providence to procure its enlargement into the greatest of civilized nations. European troubles and disturbances have always inured to the benefit of America in this respect. The French Revolution itself contributed directly to the augmentation of America. The white settlers of Hayti, driven out by the upset of all social relations in that island, made their way to Philadelphia, then the seat of govern- ment and the chief seat of culture in this country. For like reasons, many Frenchmen of eminence in politics and literature found a home in that city. A future king of France first taught his native lan- guage in a girl's boarding-school, and then sought a quieter life in the bidding crowd of the corn-ex- change. An ex-king of Spain made his home at IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 107 Bordentown in New Jersey, and thus conferred the cant name of " Spain " on that state. Many of these foreigners were birds of passage, but others came to stay, casting in their lot with a republic in which liberty and order were reconciled, and whose citizenship was open to all comers. The new emigration reached a more respectable volume though the measures of repression which were employed in the British islands and elsewhere to check the growth of sympathy with the revolutionary party of that time. From all the three " united kingdoms," and especially from Ireland after the failure of the " United Irishmen's " uprising of 1798, there poured to America lovers of liberty, who fled, as did Priestley, from the Tory mobs, or from their patrons in the govern- ment. The return of peace to Europe only increased the numbers, by giving full rein to the repressive policy both in Great Britain and on the Continent. The "Six Acts "of 1819 reproduced in England the policy of the Holy Alliance on the Continent ; and even our former fierce critic, William Cobbett, had to take up his residence in America a second time, and learn to revise the opinions he had formed of the republic, and published as " Peter Porcupine." In this way Providence again sifted Europe io8 THE HAND OF GOD for the best elements for the new nation. It sent us the men whose hopes for human liberty and equality had not been crushed by disaster and defeat, and who were sometimes fitter than many Americans of that day to appreciate the possibilities of their adopted country. For among the con- servative class of Americans there was no welcome for such radicals and progressives from Europe. After the cessation of immigration about 1755, there had been a disposition to assume that the Americans already on the ground had certain rights of monopoly, with which a renewal of immigration would interfere. They were content with a little America, which they could have all to themselves. They had small faith in the assimilative powers of their nationality, and they had no desire to see it enriched by new elements from any other quarter. In 1798 President Adams refused to allow some of the leaders in the Irish uprising of that year to be sent to this country by the British government, on the ground that America had already sympathizers enough with French revolutionary principles, and that the Irish in America who were mostly Presbyterians were too much disposed to take France as their political model. As the suffrage in America at that time was confined to property-holders, there IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 109 was room for the opinion that a little of the French doctrine of equality would do no harm. But the pressure created by European conditions was too much for the conservatives. In spite of them, Providence was sending the New World the means to obtain a position very different from that which it held during those stormy years which closed the eighteenth century and opened the nineteenth. If the country had depended for its growth on the natural increase of its population, it never would have become a first-class power, as European countries, with the exception of France, derive as much from natural growth as we do, and they always would have kept themselves ahead of us. By natural increase the population doubles in about forty-five years. If that alone had been our dependence, the population of the Union would have reached 15,718,868 in 1880, and 21,645,032 at the close of the century. We should have had less than half the population of any of the European kingdoms which rank as first-class powers, and much less than half the wealth of such a kingdom, for it has been the presence and cooperation of vast numbers that have made possible such a con- quest of nature's powers and resources as has taken place in America. With every increase in no THE HAND OF GOD the numbers, the standard of living has risen, until a country which starved a quarter-million of Indians, has food and to spare for three hundred times as many people, besides its exports of meat and grain. Worse still, this scanty population obtained by mere natural increase would have been equally divided between the free and slave states, and the institution of negro slavery would have been fastened upon this country in perpetuity. It was the immi- grant who made America free, as well as strong and rich. He would not make his home in a slave state, because as a rule he had to live by his labor, and he could not compete with slaves. Immigration poured into America by northern ports, and made its way westward along the parallels of latitude, building up new free commonwealths and increasing the strength of the old ones, until slavery was outvoted, first in the House of Representatives and then, in 1859, in the Senate, and began to feel that its day was over inside the Union. And when the original Americans of the South tried to break up the Union, the immigrant took his full share in showing them that the day for secession was over also. So far from weakening the American sense of nationality, the immigrant as the late Prof. John- ston of Princeton says really evoked it more IN AMERICAN HISTORY. in strongly. The early American was colonial rather than national. He was a Virginian, or a Pennsylvan- ian, or a Massachusetts man, before he was an American. These local distinctions were the more valued because they were limited to a smaller number than was nationality, and because they were associated with historical recollections, in which the citizen or his family had had a part. The immigrant was an American simply, from first to last. It was not Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or Massachusetts, whose name had been the attraction which drew him across the Atlantic. He came to America, to a free country, where " one man was as good as another," and where he had a share in governing it that made sure that he would be oppressed by no class interests, such as he had felt the burden of at home. His very lack of familiarity with the intricacies of a federal government left him free to ascribe every advantage he enjoyed to the national government at the centre. He had no associations with " states' rights " or with " state sovereignty " in any shape, and he left those things to his American friends to quarrel over. As his influence grew, these things fell into the background in the states of the North, where he found a home ; and when the South under- took to make them the controlling principle of na- 112 THE HAND OF GOD tional life, he met this with a stolid indifference which presaged his resistance to disunion. The immigrant also served the country in the enlargement of its range of intellectual interests. For the first third of a century after Washington's inauguration, America was still a sort of replica of England, and sought literary models in her writers. Irving, Bryant, Cooper, Halleck and the rest moved within the bounds set by English taste and culture, generally reproducing some one Englishman in a fainter copy. But the next generation went to school to France, Spain, Italy, even Sweden, and above all Germany. Not a single influence, but those of all Europe, affect our thought and our art. The dominance of a single literature over our own has disappeared, and the freedom of movement which comes of the knowledge of many has taken its place. In this work the immigrant has played and is still playing a useful part. A Charles Follen, flying from the Holy Alliance and finding a tutor's place at Har- vard, not only brought us the gymnastic of the Ger- man Burschenschaft, but infused a wider interest in Germany and its thought. So men like Rauch, Schaff and Kapp brought us an atmosphere of Ger- man philosophy. A single Italian infected a group of American scholars with the passion for Dante, and added three new worlds to our own. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 113 If I have said more of what the immigrant gave than what he got, it is because the former is the neglected side of the matter. But the assimilative energy of America was grandly displayed in the transformation of these floods of Europeans into citizens. This was the more easy through the removal of the aristocratic restrictions on the elec- tive franchise, which was effected by the Jeffer- sonian party. During its unbroken control of the national government from 1800 to 1830, and its tenure of official responsibility in most of the states, it had abolished the limitation of voting to free- holders, and had established manhood-suffrage in nearly every state of the Union. At the end of five years' residence the immigrant might become a citizen, and could be chosen or appointed to any office in the land, except the two highest. The effect of this on the man's personal respect was immediate and impressive, and contributory to stability in many directions. He was a man now as he never had been before. Government, which in the Old World had stood over against him as an alien force, and one it was well to avoid, was now a thing in which he had a part and a responsibility. The policeman and the soldier were no longer hos- tile powers, but citizens like himself, appointed for the public service. The flag was his flag, to be dis- ii4 THE HAND OF GOD played on the Fourth of July from his window as freely as from any rich man's palace in the land. The dualism of ruler and ruled vanished out of life, out of thought. And thus the great Republic took many of the most unlikely elements in Europe and ground them into orderly and active citizens, full of loyal attachment to the constituted authorities of the land. The younger generation underwent a still swifter transformation through the public schools. They learnt the history of the country as told by that much abused book, the school history, and they acquired a sense of what America stood for. They grew up with American boys and acquired the American point of view ; or if they showed any reluctance in this, their Old World notions were summarily pummelled out of them. They had it impressed upon them that they were in a country whose people loved it with an intense devotion, and valued its public order almost as a divine endowment of the land. The very discipline of the school showed them the difference between the Old World and the New. They escaped the brutal punishments which generally disgraced European school-systems, and they found in the teacher, not a distant and repellant " master," but a kindly friend, who punished with reluctance and moderation. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 115 Their self-respect was not crushed in them by a tyrant of the ferule or the " taws." Their mothers and sisters profited no less by residence in a country which surpasses every other in courtesy to women, and which guards their rights by law more carefully than it does those of the other sex. The Irish woman had not so much to gain in this respect ; but those from Great Britain and the continent of Europe were put in the way of many advances in their condition by becoming Americans. Especially, from the time of the revo- lution begun by Emma Willard and Mary Lyon, they were offered advantages in the matter of edu- cation, such as Europe did not then afford to young women. The improved economic condition of the laborer through his immigration made it possible for him to profit by these educational advantages. At home in Europe, it was necessary for the whole family to labor for their support. In America, the father earned such wages that his wife and the younger children could dispense with toil. In the relations of capital and labor, indeed, the older aristocratic attitude long prevailed even in America, and it was taken for granted that in any collision the workmen were in the wrong. The laws, or at least the applications of English common law by u6 THE HAND OF GOD the courts, sustained this view. Men were sent to prison for the simple offence of striking for higher wages or shorter hours, when no violence had been used to either their employers or the workmen who had taken their places. A strike was treated as a " conspiracy in restraint of trade," and as such, a misdemeanor. Gradually a state of opinion more in harmony with republican ideas became dominant ; but the older notion is by no means extinct. A similar improvement in public feeling swept away the laws which permitted the imprisonment of insolvent debtors. The man on whose labor a family depended for bread, might be taken from them and immured in a prison for the failure to pay a trifling amount ; and men who stood with the best in church and market showed no scruple in using this cruel power. The " rights of property " were a paramount consideration, and society applauded any course which maintained them as a measure of social safety. The superior value of persons as compared with things is an element in the republican creed, but the monarchical and aris- tocratic tradition clung for a time to the American mind. Thus ran the give and take of America and the immigrant, in which his services have been too much overlooked. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 117 CHAPTER XI. THE PROPHETS OF REFORM. WE are beginning to do justice to the Hebrew prophets as teachers of present duty, and not merely or even chiefly predictors of things to come. They were men of ideals, who fought against the feeble compromises of their time, and insisted that to do God's will was the calling and purpose of the Nation. They were nearly always repaid with abuse, frequently with stoning, and sometimes with worse still. But they had a sense of a divine calling to hold up the ideal standard of duty before the people, and to proclaim its obligations as infinite because divine. No nation can dispense with prophets. They are a part of the national outfit of a well furnished people, as much as police and road-makers. For the greatest peril to a nation's life is in the dry rot, which comes with peace and prosperity, and which undermines the public edifice before an alarm is given. The prophet is by profession an alarmist, who rouses the people to the existence of those un- ii8 THE HAND OF GOD seen perils which more endanger the national life than do any armed forces that might invade its ter- ritories. And no age has been more fertile than our own in men who have been called and anointed to this high office, although few of them have dis- charged it with that regard to the greatness of the great, which makes the Hebrew prophets the models for all time. Of the prophets who have labored to amend the evils of social life in America, the enemies of slavery take precedence of all others. Their work began when the little handful of German Quakers, in 1688, sent up their protest against man-stealing from the Germantown meeting to their Monthly Meeting, which in turn sent it on to the Yearly Meeting. There it was pigeon-holed and forgotten, to be fished out of the dust of nearly two centuries in our time, and given to the world. And that protest did not die out until slavery was at an end. It was taken up by John Woolman and Anthony Benezet in the next century, with the result of banishing slave-holding from the Society of Friends, and of fixing attention on the horrors of the Guinea slave- trade. As a cognate matter, the reforming spirit took up the abuses practised upon poor emigrants, and the wrongs suffered by " redemptioners," many of whom were kidnapped by dishonest shippers, IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 119 ahd sold into a slavery worse in some respects than that of the negro slave. Finally, the slave-trade was forbidden, and the bringing of " redemptioners" was stopped by the law. Hardly less important to the life of the nation was the Temperance reform, which began in 1825, and went forward with notable vigor and lasting re- sults for thirty years thereafter. At the opening of the century it really seemed as if the manhood of America were about to be drowned in strong drink. The cheapness of untaxed intoxicants rum, whiskey and apple-jack made by anyone who chose to undertake the business, and sold at every gathering of the people without reference to the age or sex of the purchaser, had made drunkenness almost uni- versal. Samuel Breck, at the close of the eighteenth century says that in his time it was impossible to secure a servant white or black, bond or free who could be depended upon to keep sober for twenty- four hours. All classes and professions were affected : the judge was " overcome " on the bench, the minister sometimes staggered on his way to the pulpit. When a church had to be built, it was cal- culated that the cost of the rum needed would be greater than that of the lumber or the labor em- ployed. When an ecclesiastical convention of any kind was to be entertained, it was a question how 120 THE HAND OF GOD much strong drink would be required for the rev- erend members. Almost from the beginning of the century the public conscience was giving signs of concern about this evil, but no effective way of working was pointed out before 1825. Temperance societies in- deed were formed, such as the one Albert Barnes established in his first pastorate at Morristown, which pledged its members to confine their con- sumption to a pint of apple-jack a day, the usual allowance being a quart ! At last Lyman Beecher had his soul stirred within him by the sight of the evil rum had done in a family of his own congrega- tion at Litchfield, Conn. He wrote and delivered his " Six Sermons onlntemperance " in 1825, and the next year they were printed. He had the prophet's capacity for feeling intensely the evils of his people, and his prophetic word found a response everywhere. The stolid farmers of his parish were his first con- verts to temperance, and his sermons went over sea, after touching America, and became the message to men's consciences which started the movement in the British islands. Within five years, and purely through voluntary associations of various kinds, there had been effected a great change in the social habits of the American people. An opinion had been formed IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 121 which stamped drunkenness as sinful and shameful ; liquor had been banished from the tables of all earnest people. Temptation was thus taken out of the way of the young. As time went on, sentiment hardened into a demand for total abstinence, and about 1836 American Temperance became "tee- total." As yet the actual drunkards were left un- heeded for the most part ; but the" Washingtonian " movement, set on foot by themselves in 1840, spread over the country like a prairie fire, until some 600,000 of this class had signed the pledge. And even if it be true, as Mr. Gough says, that the great majority of those who had been reached by this excitement, went back to the bottle, still great and lasting good must have resulted. The effect has been to endow American opinion with that wholesome prejudice against intoxicants, which makes ours the most temperate of the civil- ized nations. This was the more desirable as the stimulating climate of America, and the consequent nervousness of its people, render intoxicating stim- ulants not only less needful to health, but more harmful to it. " The whiskey is in the air " of this country, and the rapidly increasing consumption of fruits of all kinds meets the craving which else- where is met by the use of alcohol. Parallel with the temperance reform was the sue- 122 THE HAND OF GOD cessful effort for the suppression of legalized lotter- ies, which flourished greatly in the first quarter of the century. The use of this means for raising money for objects of general advantage was very common in the eighteenth century. A ticket for a lottery in aid of a road, to be constructed from eastern to western Virginia, has been found with the signature of Washington as treasurer of the en- terprise. The spire of the. church he attended during his presidency, had been erected by a lot- tery. But especially the canals, which were under construction in great numbers, were allowed by the legislatures to set up lotteries, as in other times they might have obtained a grant of land or of money. The authorizing acts indeed fixed a limit for the extent of the drawings, but none of them ever seemed to reach this limit, and it looked as though they were to go on forever. The gambling temper was thus cherished and fostered among the people with the highest civil sanctions, and the weak-minded poor often laid aside regular industry to try for a living by lucky guesses at the winning numbers. By wise agitation of the question and proper memorials, the legisla- tures were brought to stop these abuses, and to ban- ish lotteries from the country. Nor were the reformers indifferent to other forms IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 123 of gambling, which were then plied much more openly than now. The palatial steamboats on the western rivers had apartments set apart for games of chance, and the proprietors levied tribute on the professional gamblers who frequented the boats to fleece the greenhorns. In California, at the begin- ning of its Americanization, the gambling hells opened on the streets as frankly as did the shops for the sale of the necessaries of existence. In Washington the risks of the gaming-table were treated as an unavoidable adjunct of public life; and when the owner of the most luxurious estab- lishment of this kind reopened his place after re- pairs and refitting, he invited the President and Vice-President, the members of Congress, and many highly placed officials of the government. The Cabinet was represented on the occasion, and so many Congressmen had gone to sample his cham- pagne that the regular sessions had to be suspended. But that was " before the War." The greatest of all reforms, as the first, was the opposition to the extension and permanence of slavery. All the fathers of the republic were op- posed to slavery, especially Jefferson, himself a slave-holder. Washington emancipated his slaves at his death. When the Constitution was under discussion, slavery was disappearing from one 124 THE HAND OF GOD Northern state after another, and the general ex- pectation was that it would vanish from American soil by the act of the slave-holders themselves. The very word was excluded from the Constitution, and the periphrasis by which slaves were referred to " persons held to service or labor " was noteworthy as asserting for them just that rank as persons which their enslavement practically denied, as the slave laws treated them as things or chattels, not as persons. Until about 1830, the expectation was general, even in the South, that emancipation would not be long in coming. Emancipation societies in that section were counted by the hundred, and they held a national convention to promote the good work. But suddenly the South seemed to change its mind, and to repudiate the understanding which had existed for over forty years. The North began to hear first that the black man was not fit for any other condition than slavery ; then that the pros- perity of the South, and indeed of the nation, was bound up with the existence of slavery ; and finally that slavery was a condition ordained of God for a large part of the human race, according to South- ern expositors of the Scriptures. This right-about-face on the South's part made a great change in the attitude of a large body of the IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 125 American people. Not that there was any unity of opinion and action among those who continued to detest slavery. Some argued that under the con- stitutional law of the country it was a purely local matter, and that a Northern man was no more re- sponsible for the condition of slaves in South Caro- lina or Mississippi, than for that of slaves in Cuba or Brazil. They would go as far as their constitu- tional responsibility permitted, as in abolishing slavery in places directly controlled by the nation, and in preventing the extension of slavery into the territories, and the acquisition of new slave states by any process. They made their battle against slavery first in opposing the annexation of Texas, and then in the struggle which made Kansas a free state. The more extreme party took the ground that our inclusion within the same national unity with the slave states made a vast difference in our^re- sponsibility. They denied the power of any con- stitution to limit that, asserting that the nature of a nation and the responsibility of its citizens are determined by a much higher authority than a con- stitutional convention, or the people voting to ratify its work. And as the American government had been constructed on the denial of that higher authority in this matter, they became " political 126 THE HAND OF GOD dissenters" from the nation, refusing to vote, to hold office, or to take any oath of allegiance to it. The strength of the supporters of slavery lay in the severance of these two parties, but they took a course which was sure to unite them. They used their power in Congress, in the executive, and in the national judiciary to make slavery national. They claimed for every slave-holder the right to take his slaves into every territory of the United States. They secured the passage of a new Fugi- tive Slave law, which deprived the colored man, seized as a fugitive on Northern soil, of a trial by jury for his liberty, and sent him to lifelong slavery on the single judgment of an official, who got a fee for every slave he sent South, but none for those black men he pronounced free. The same law re- quired every citizen of the country, whatever his opinion about slavery, to act .as a slave-catcher when called upon by the officials appointed to en- force that law. Then came the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, effectually establishing slavery throughout the whole country, by declaring that the slave-holder's right to his slave was not impaired by his taking him into a free state and keeping him there for years ; and also that, as the law stood, the black man had no rights which the white man was IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 127 bound to respect ! This policy was another instance of the judicial blindness which Providence inflicts upon the supporters of an evil cause. Step by step the champions of the system alienated the sympathies of even the conservative classes at the North, and strengthened the -hands of its enemies. Had the slave-holding interest been as cautious and careful as in the earlier days of the republic, the overthrow of the institution might have been delayed for another century. Nor would that overthrow have been so easy if the institution had been placed under reasonable restrictions by state laws. If the slave had been given those permanent family relations which the serfs of the Middle Ages enjoyed ; if he had not been debarred by law from the enjoyment of the smallest educational advantages ; and if cruelty and murder by his master had been punished by law as in the case of a white man, the continuance of slavery might have been pro- longed. But as an actual social arrangement, slavery would not bear looking into ; and Mrs. Stowe showed a woman's keen tact when she selected the " domestic slave-trade," with its rend- ing husband from wife, mother from child, as the especial target of criticism in her " Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852). She thus produced a much more 128 THE HAND OF GOD powerful effect than did books which depicted slavery in much more lurid colors, and which represented all planters as Legrees. More than once it seemed as if the anti-slavery reform had spent its force. Even Garrison at one time diverted his Liberator to the discussion of other questions, and talked as if the cause of emancipation were hopeless. But always the slave-holders and their friends came to the rescue, arousing fresh antagonism to the institution by their demands in its behalf, and making it evident that there could be no bounds set to those demands short of either the assimilation of the whole country to Southern standards, or the erection of the South into an independent confederacy. Lincoln put the case with his usual penetration when he said : " A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. It will become all one thing, or all the other." " I am not unaware that this government has endured eighty-two years half-slave and half-free. I believe it has endured because during all that time the public mind did rest in the belief that slavery was in course of ultimate extinction." The innovation came from the South, which about 1830 began to proclaim the permanence of IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 129 slavery. From that time until Mr, Lincoln's election, the South used its influence in Congress and on the executive to secure one measure after another which embodied the new purpose to perpetuate human bondage within the republic. It thus forced even those who were willing to leave the whole matter to the states, to recognize it as a national question ; and when that point was reached, the institution was doomed. It was impossible to bring the people of a country not directly and selfishly interested in slavery, to admit the rightfulness of treating and classifying persons as " chattels," as cattle. 130 THE HAND OF GOD CHAPTER XII. A WAR AND ITS PENALTIES. THE hand of God in a nation's history may be seen as clearly in the penalties which fall upon it for its sins, as in any other national experience. The Old Testament history of the Hebrew nation is very explicit on this point. While the nations roundabout believed that their gods were bound, by kinship to the peoples who worshipped them, and by identification in honor and dishonor with them, to take their part in any situation, the law- giver and the prophets of the Hebrews assert the contrary in the case of Jehovah's relations to his people. He has entered, they say, into covenant with them, and promises them his all-sufficient pro- tection so long as they walk in his ways and keep his commandments. But when they cease to do so, he, so far from thinking their disasters a reflec- tion on himself, will himself bring those upon them. The word " IF " is written over the whole book of the law and the prophets, and the latter especially rebuke those who talk as if the Hebrew nation were IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 131 " the Temple of Jehovah," and could presume on that fact to do as their lusts and ambitions sug- gested. In the history of the American republic there are passages in plenty which remind us of this prin- ciple. The Hebrew " IF " is written on our history also, and there is no greater folly than to suppose that we have an exemption from the penalties which attend national wrong-doing. The war with Mexico, and its relations with the war for the Union, are an instance of the reaping what was sown, evil for evil. For the first fifty years of the American republic, its relations with the sister republics of the New World were thoroughly beneficent. The American people rejoiced to see the peoples of Central and South America take advantage of the disturbances of the French Revolution to establish their own freedom, and organize governments after the model of our own. When peace left the Holy Alliance of European monarchs at leisure, and gave them the chance to overthrow the liberties of Spain, our Monroe Doctrine prevented it from extending its malevolent activity to the New World in the re- duction of the Spanish republics to the rule of Ferdinand VII. The attempt to follow up that great declaration by the organization of a " state 132 THE HAND OF GOD system " for the western continent was defeated, not by any unwillingness of our sister republics to enter into an agreement of that kind, but by the personal jealousies of what is called our " Era of Good Feeling." A chance was thus lost which may never return to us, and its return became all the more unlikely through our subsequent attack on the integrity of one of those republics. The Louisiana Purchase gave America an outlet on the Pacific on the northwest, and opened a range of territory from ocean to ocean, which was growing rapidly into free states, while the west- ward advance of slavery was barred by the position held by Mexico, which then embraced what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Colorado, and a part of Kansas. By the treaty with Spain of 1819, by which Florida was ceded to us, America accepted the Sabine and Red Rivers as her western boundary, and Spain ac- cepted the forty-second parallel as her northern boundary. Soon after came the independence of Mexico, with Texas as its eastern province, in suc- cession to the rights possessed by Spain ; and in 1829 slavery was abolished throughout that country. But an organized movement for the settlement and seizure of Texas by Americans was begun at once after Mexico obtained its independence ; and IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 133 by a grave oversight the Mexicans at first rather encouraged this by grants of land in the eastern part of the state. By 1830 there were 30,000 Americans settled there, and they paid so little re- spect to Mexican law as to carry negro slavery back into the country which had been freed from it. Disagreements with the Mexican government, growing out of differences between Mexican meth- ods and our own, and the decree of President Santa Anna abolishing local self-government in the prov- inces of Mexico, led to collisions, which ended in the Americans in Texas declaring the province in- dependent. In the war which followed, the Mex- icans behaved with great barbarity. The " out- landers " of course secured much sympathy through- out the South, which led to companies of filibusters going to their support. The Mexicans had the worst of it, and from 1837 to 1845 Texas was an in- dependent country, recognized as such first by America, and then by France and England, but not by Mexico. Slavery was now reestablished by con- stitutional law, and the original plan of annexing the country to the American Republic was pressed by the South. In 1842 Senator Calhoun declared that the annex- ation of Texas was essential to the extension of slavery, and that the extension of slavery was nee- 134 THE HAND OF GOD essary to preserve the balance of power between the North and the South, which in turn was neces- sary to the maintenance of the Union. A year earlier Senator Webster had declared against annex- ation for the reason that it would extend slavery within the Union. The election of 1844 turned on this question, and President Folk's frank support of the proposal, as contrasted with Mr. Clay's trying to be on both sides at once, and thus dividing the opposition, de- termined the result. Having got so much, the pro- slavery interest naturally pressed for more. Even the acquisition of Texas did not equalize the two types of industrial civilization in their prospect for controlling the country. Although that is a country much bigger than France, it was far smaller than the area which lay open to free labor in the northwest. To secure everything to the Pacific ocean was the programme of the party. As Mexico had acquiesced in the admission of Texas into the Union, there was no cause for war un- less one could be devised, and this was found by claiming the Rio Grande river as the western bound- ary of the new accession, and opening fire upon a fort which occupied part of the intermediate area an area never occupied by Texas. This was followed by the invasion of Mexico, and the annexation of IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 135 her northern provinces to the American territory. If our country had been industrially homogeneous, through that gradual extinction of slavery which the founders of the republic confidently expected, no such war would have been waged and no such annexation sought. From the first settlement of Texas by Americans to the conclusion of the treaty with Mexico, the whole was done in the interest of the extension of slavery, and every step taken by our government was a concession to the pro-slavery party. The result, however, was vastly disappointing to the party in question. They soon found that nothing that had been acquired from Mexico by the war was available for the extension of slavery. With the exception of California, the annexed region is arid and difficult to an intelligent agri- culture, and utterly worthless to such slovenly till- age as can be achieved by slave labor. Even Cali- fornia slipped out of their grasp. Between our military occupation of the state and its formal cession to us, gold was discovered in such quantity as drew thither a flood of free settlers, as many as 80,000 arriving in a single year. Less than two years after annexation, California made application for admission into the Union as a free state; and the South received this news, as also that of the 136 THE HAND OF GOD impossibility of carving slave states out of the rest of the new territory, in no amiable spirit. It was with the purpose to conciliate the slave-holding interest at this crisis that the new Fugitive Slave law was enacted, and that, in 1854, the limit set by the Missouri Compromise to the northward exten- sion of slavery was removed, and the whole of our western territory was thrown open to its advances. Thus the whole later relations of slavery to the Nation took character from the Mexican War. The permission of such a war on an unoffending republic, and upon a pretext which afforded it no justification, was a fatal step. It encouraged the slave power to proceed in its demands, until our national attitude for the first time became one of entire unconcern as to the difference between bondage and freedom in the laborer. It fostered a temper in the Southern States which rendered it morally certain that they would attempt the dissolution of the Union. Mr. Clay told Miss Martineau that he did not think his compromise measures of 1851 including the new law for the rendition of fugitive slaves without trial would avail to save the Union. All he hoped was to postpone the final crash during his own life. " Aprts moi la dtluge ! " And while the ruling class of politicians seemed ready to concede anything for the maintenance of the Union on such terms as the IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 137 South would accept, these aggressions of the slave power undoubtedly hardened Northern opinion into a more general antagonism to slavery, and led to the resolve to put a stop to its advances outside the slave states. The opposition crystallized around the " proviso " offered by Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania in 1846, as an amendment to the bill for the establishment of territorial governments over the territory acquired by the Mexican War. In 1787 the Congress of the Confederacy had passed a law for the organization of the Northwest Territory, embracing what the country then possessed north of the Ohio. It enacted that " Slavery or involuntary servitude, except for crime," should not exist in the new territory. Mr. Wilmot offered this as an amend- ment to the bill in hand, and the " Wilmot Pro- viso " became the watchword of the moderate and constitutional opponents of slavery, who thus ap- pealed to the fathers of the republic. The " pro- viso " was of course voted down, but a very large part of the American people made up their minds to exercise with regard to all the territories the policy of 1787. The South, however, with the aid of their friends among the politicians of the North, moved in the opposite direction. The compromise measure by I 3 8 THE HAND OF GOD which Missouri had been admitted as a state in 1820, provided that so much of the Louisiana Pur- chase as lay north of 36 30' should not be open to the establishment of slavery. When in 1854 the question arose of organizing into territories the part of that Purchase which lay west of Missouri, as a first step to the erection of new states, Senator Douglas secured the passage of a bill, which did so on the basis of abolishing the compromise of 1820, and leaving slavery free to extend northward, if it could not do so westward. The struggle practically turned on the possession of the first territory thus thrown open to the exten- sion of slavery. This was Kansas, and as it lay entirely west of Missouri, there seemed no more climatic reason for the one being slave territory than the other; while the facilities enjoyed by the pro-slavery party in Missouri for either settling the territory by migration thither, or by crossing the line to vote in territorial elections, seemed to promise that Kansas would become a slave state. The national administration of Mr. James Buchanan gave the Missourians more than all the support that could be extended to them within the bounds of the law. Twice he changed the governor of the territory in the vain hope of finding a man who would take the responsibility of making Kansas a IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 139 slave state, the last appointed being a Missourian and a slave-holder. Emigration to Kansas set in from both sections, but the South was speedily outnumbered. The North possessed a much greater population, and one much more mobile, besides commanding greater wealth. It was the first visible test of the effective worth of the two systems, and slavery had the worst of it. Kansas was peopled with genuine free settlers, and even its Missourian governor had to report that slavery had been distanced in the strug- gle. Meantime something like a civil war had raged for two years, at least two hundred men had been killed, and millions of dollars' worth of prop- erty had been destroyed. Not a step had been taken by any political party which imperilled the continuance of slavery in any state which chose to adopt it as its industrial sys- tem. Interference with it in those states was dep- recated by the political parties opposed to slavery as unconstitutional and therefore wrong. But the growth of the free states through immigration, and the failure of the slave states to secure a field for the westward extension of their system, fore- shadowed the day when the South would have shrunk into political insignificance, although it had exercised more than its share of influence over the 140 THE HAND OF GOD national government for seventy years. Such a sit- uation was intolerable to many at the South, and it was they who planned the dissolution of the Union, in the hope of establishing a new confederacy of " sovereign states, " to embrace not only the South- ern and Border States, but also to secure enough of the adjacent free states to make their confederacy more important than the Union, without imperil- ling Southern supremacy. In the North, especially in the great commercial centres, there were many who were ready for such a reconstruction. Commerce and the prophets never have maintained friendly relations, as this interest resents any agitation of the public mind which may disturb the markets. It was pretty solidly on the side of slavery in the decade before the war for the Union, although there were noble and high-minded men in business life, who stood by their faith in human liberty, and " whose silks were for sale, not their opinions," as one Philadelphia merchant wrote to his Southern customers. If " Commercialism " had controlled the public mind of that day, as it tried to do, the South would have been given all it wanted, and human bondage would have extended over at least half the Union. When the war came, a just nemesis befell the commercial class who had sacrificed principle to IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 141 profits. It was they who had the monopoly of Southern trade, and it was they to whom the Southern planters owed the vast bulk of debts, which were an almost unvarying feature of planta- tion economy. On them therefore fell the losses which attended the virtual repudiation of those debts on the outbreak of hostilities ; while those of their rivals in business who had figured in the "black lists" of the Southern newspapers, escaped all such losses. 142 THE HAND OF GOD CHAPTER XIII. THE PERIL AND TRIUMPH OF THE UNION. IN 1850-60 there was a very widespread impression that the dissolution of the Union was only a ques- tion of time. The temper of the South was growing more sectional and less national with every adminis- tration, and the sentiment against slavery as a per- manent feature of American life was spreading in spite of the conservatives. That the South would attempt to withdraw at some early date was gener- ally expected. The break-up of the American na- tion was a matter of such apparent certainty that it affected our weight and influence in international affairs. Had it not been for this expectation, such a treaty as that between Sir Henry Bulwerand Mr. Clayton with regard to the neutralization of any possible canal in Central America for connecting the two oceans, never would have been ratified, even under the pressure brought to bear by the commercial class. What was uncertain to every one was, what the American people would do when the critical mo- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 143 ment arrived. The talk about " state sovereignty" and " delegated powers " was so general, and fol- lowed so closely the language of the earlier theo- rists on American politics, as to obscure from obser- vation the growth of national feeling which had taken place during the half-century. As usual, the noisiest in the debate were supposed to most exactly represent the chief body of opinion ; and the Abolitionists on the one side and the Fire-eaters on the other were both ready to treat the Union as a temporary compact, whose termination was rather to be wished than deplored. Anti-slavery orators talked Disunion as loudly as did Mr. Yancey or Mr. Davis. Mr. Garrison loved to apply to the Constitution the prediction of Isaiah (Chap, xxviii, v. 18): Your covenant with death shall be disannulled, And your agreement with hell shall not stand. There is no doubt that the dissolution of the Union would have been fatal to the slave-holding interest. It would have given to the slaves facilities for escape far beyond those which irritated the South into declaring that the " federal compact " had been violated, as it would have put everything north of Mason and Dixon's line, if not of the Poto- mac, into the same relation with slavery that Canada sustained before the war for the Union. It would 144 THE HAND OF GOD not only have swept away all legislation for the return of fugitive slaves, but it would have left the Northern government in the hands of men hostile to slavery, and therefore not interested in prevent- ing organized efforts for its overthrow. For this and similar reasons, the merely anti-slavery body called Abolitionists, were ready to welcome the dis- solution of the union of states as the best way out of their difficulty and that of the country. A wise Providence, however, had better things in store for the nation than its dissolution into a num- ber of independent states and loose confederacies, with all the international jealousies of the European " state system," and others of its own, to deal with. That better thing came indeed in a terrible form, as a judgment upon the nation's unfaithfulness in its dealings both with the slaves, and with a sister repub- lic, whom we had sacrificed to the interests of the slave-holders. It came in the shape of Civil War, prolonged over years of bloodshed, suffering and desolation, until some 400,000 lives were sacrificed as the purchase of national unity and the liberation of the bondsman. War came as the alternative to passive acquies- cence in the dissolution of the Union, when at last the firing on Fort Sumter, on the I2th of April, 1861, brought the American people face to face with the IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 145 problem of their national existence. That act of war was meant to " fire the Southern heart," and to precipitate into the Secession movement others than the six states of the extreme South from South Carolina to Louisiana which had already formed the " Confederate States of America." Its immedi- ate result was to " fire the hearts " of the eighteen Northern States, which had either abolished slavery or had never tolerated it within their bounds. No one who lived through that day, even as a schoolboy, will ever forget the change it wrought on the spirit and purpose of the Northern people. The day before, all had seemed uncertain, and no one knew what his neighbor would do, 'or what he himself would do. All that was positive was that six states had gone, and that others were hesitat- ing whether to go or to stay. Outside his own section and his personal friends, the new President hardly commanded confidence. His qualities as ruler and leader were still uncertain. So were the resources for meeting in military resistance the states most military in their temper, most familiar with the use of saddle-horses and fire-arms, and ap- parently more on fire with the confidence of popular enthusiasm. All that had been felt was the neces- sity of taking no step that would widen the range of the Secession movement, by driving others of the 146 THE HAND OF GOD Southern and even the Border States into the arms of the new confederacy. This indeed had been the tone of Mr. Lincoln's Inaugural Address. At once, when the news came that the flag of the Union had been fired on, all reserves, all cautions were thrown to the winds. At once the slowly growing sentiment of loyalty to the Union at any cost, was crystallized into a popular passion with- out parallel in American history. At once the North became the resolute and impassioned partner to the great controversy, for which the arbitration of war had been invoked. The least military of peoples proceeded to resolve itself into a great army, and all previous divisions among the people were buried under the flood of Union sentiment. Even the Abolitionists forgot their willingness to have the South go, and Wendell Phillips, for the first time in his life, spoke under the flag and for the preservation of the Union. Such fervor could not last for four years, or for one. It was " mounting up on the wings of an eagle," which is the first step in every great national enthusiasm. The times that try men's souls are when that first fervor has worn itself out, and it comes to " running and not being weary," and still more when even running seems at an end, and it is a question of " walking, and not being faint." IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 147 Through those three stages, the nation passed dur- ing those four years, the " heroic years of American history," as Mr. Lecky truly calls them. First it v/as " On to Richmond ! " until we realized that there were in the way men of our own race and blood, whom we were fools to despise. Then it was expected that some great coup, by some still undis- covered general, would bring the South to its senses, and thus end the war. Had such an ending come as quickly as men wished, the real end of the war would not have been achieved, for slavery would have been tolerated within the reconstructed Union. Not until Union spelled Freedom for every human being in the length and breadth of the land, did the victory over Disunion come. The hand of God in the war was visible enough to those who, as Lord Chatham said, were " versed in the business " of the time. As often has been the case, it was seen in men's blunders. In the opinion of Von Moltke, both sides blundered badly at the outset, the North alone in a way which ad- mitted of retrieval. The South, he points out, had the material for extemporizing an army, and should have struck at once. It lost its chance through its not seizing Washington before it was fortified, and through its not fighting its Antietams and its Gettysburgs before the North had time to arm and 148 THE HAND OF GOD drill its forces. The North blundered equally in attacking the South before it was properly armed, drilled and fortified. It should have stood on the defensive and made its preparations. But Mr. Lincoln had behind him a democracy, which can appreciate anything more easily than masterly de- lay ; while Mr. Davis lacked just that very stimulus to immediate action, and thus waited until raids on Northern soil were too late. While these were the weaknesses of the two forms of social civilization which tried their righting strength in those four years, there was another side to the case. The democracy which pressed Lincoln forward to early disaster, was the stronger of the two. It had far more staying power under such disasters, and its industrial resources and general diffusion of wealth made the Northern cause sure of final success. The South was made up of three elements : planters, " poor whites " and slaves. It was the condition of the second class which was calamitous to the Confederacy. The existence of slavery and the rareness of schools kept it on a level far below even the unskilled laborers of the North. The large part of it, which inhabited the mountain ranges of Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, was unfriendly to slavery, and took part in the war IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 149 with great reluctance. This alone constituted a middle class in the South, but was utterly unable to compare with the yeomanry of Northern farmers, and the well-to-do but not wealthy residents of the Northern cities. The conditions slavery had created were thus tested by the fire of war, and the system condemned as one which degraded and enfeebled white as well as black. The conditions created by a system of free labor were found the more favorable in the long run to national strength and warlike defence. It was on those two systems that the war passed judgment. Nowhere in the struggle does the hand of God appear more distinctly than in the men who were raised up to maintain the nation's cause in the day of its sorest need of men. Of these, Abraham Lincoln 'was the most striking instance. He was pitted against the most able and statesmanlike of all the Southern leaders, who had possessed every advantage and enjoyed every kind of prestige, not only with the South but before the world. Mr. Davis was the child of a wealthy planter family, and had been trained in public life. Mr. Lincoln was the son of a " poor " and shiftless " white," who showed his best sense in leaving Kentucky for a home in Illinois. He had been to school but six months in his life. His experi- 150 THE HAND OF GOD ence of public life was limited to a term in Congress, where he most shone as a story-teller, and to practising as a lawyer at the Illinois bar. The news of his nomination was received with ill- concealed disgust by his own party in the Eastern States, as they would have preferred a polished orator like Mr. Seward, or a picturesque figure like General Fre*mont. Mr. Lincoln was neither polished nor picturesque, and had done nothing as yet to justify the unbounded confidence reposed in him by his immediate friends. Even his marvellous skill and moderation in the management of his debate with Mr. Douglas, less impressed his contemporaries than it does us, just as his Gettysburg oration was less discussed at the time than was Mr. Everett's labored and spiritless performance on the same day. He was seen at his best only after men had let him grow upon them, and they had had time to forget what was uncouth and grotesque in his manners " his lack of all we prize as debonair." But as surely as " the Lord raised lip judges, which delivered the children of Israel out of the hand of those that spoiled them," so surely did God raise up this man for our deliverance, and train him for the work. He brought him to New Orleans on a flat-boat in his youth, and took him to the IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 151 auction-rooms, where he saw families of slaves rent asunder at the bidding of their masters, and there inspired him with the purpose to " hit slavery hard " if ever he got the chance. He trained him in the love of righteousness and fair play, by making him a lawyer who cared more for justice than for fees, and thus inspired his neighbors with confidence in " honest Abe Lincoln." He gave him the stimulus to opposition to slavery by pitting him against Mr. Douglas, who had torn down the last barrier against the extension of slavery into the territories by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In any other state than that which had Mr. Douglas as its repre- sentative in the national Senate, Mr. Lincoln might have remained undistinguished in the great host of men who liked neither Slavery nor Abolitionism. Of most significance was the side of his character which turned toward God. He was not always a devout man, although he always had the grace to seek to be a just man. In early life he read and was influenced by the infidel literature, which then was more plentiful in the West than it now is. But his own reflections had brought him to recognize the judgment of God as the final court of appeal, and to that judgment he made his appeal in his very first speech against Mr. Douglas's policy in 1854. When he finally left Springfield as president-elect, 152 THE HAND OF GOD he asked the prayers of his neighbors that he might be supported by the same divine help as Washing- ton had enjoyed, since he was going to take up a burden greater even than that which Washington had borne. With the passage of those years of anguish and hope, his utterances grow more distinct in their recognition of God's presence and aid. These are not unreal or imitative ; they indicate independent thought about the matter. " Mr. Lincoln, I am sure we are going to prevail in this war, for we have God on our side," said a zealous minister. " My friend, my hope and wish is that we are on God's side," was his answer. His method as a ruler was that of patience and leadership, rather than driving all before him, in the manner of Mr. Carlyle's heroes. He watched the movements of public opinion, and guided them to the right ends. Urged again and again to strike the great blow at slavery, he refused until he felt that the public mind was prepared for it, and it would no longer divide the supporters of the war. The fact that seventeen governors of Northern States at once congratulated him on the step he had taken, showed that he had acted at the right moment. He was, as the Master of Balliol says, the best refutation of Carlyle's theory that mankind are mostly fools, and that good results are to be IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 153 had only by the few heroic persons taking them in hand to kick and cuff them into right action. As in old Hebraic and Homeric phrase, he was the " shepherd of the people," leading them by inspiring confidence and commanding their assent. He stands out as the greatest ruler of the nineteenth century, because the most complete and successful exemplar of what true government is. And he was so because God raised him up to do a great work, and trained him to do it ; and because he did not resist the training. As the years went on, he grew more and more honored by the whole people, through the growing weight of his utterances, the evident freedom of the man from all small spites, his devotion to his country, and his superiority to even the resentments which too commonly attend such struggles. He bore abuse with an outward patience which never betrayed how sharply he was wounded by it. At home and abroad, especially by those English news- papers which sympathized with the South, he was grossly caricatured and vilely misrepresented. He took it in silence. Through all those trying years, he uttered no word that could hinder the reconcilia- tion of South and North, which he desired above all things. He always remembered that those whom he was fighting were to become again attached and 154 THE HAND OF GOD loyal citizens of the Union, if the fight was to suc- ceed in reality, and its victories were not to prove empty. He stood ready to concede the most gen- erous terms to the states which had formed the Confederacy more generous than those contem- plated and finally offered by his party in the period of Reconstruction. His second Inaugural, after his reelection to the presidency, showed by its contrast to the first ex- cellent as that was for its time and purpose how much the man had grown in his sense of the pres- ence of God's hand in the struggle for the preser- vation of American nationality. Its most memorable passage runs : " The Almighty has His own purposes. ' Woe unto the world because of offences ! for it must needs be that offences come ; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery was one of those offences which in the Providence of God must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to North and South this terrible war, as was due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern that there is any departure from those divine attri- butes which believers in the living God always as- cribe to Him ? Fondly do we hope, devoutly do IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 155 we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may pass away ; yet if it is God's will that it continue until the wealth piled by bondsmen by two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so it must still be said, that ' the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' " With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the Nation's wounds, to care for those who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphans ; to do that which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all Nations." After Lincoln, the military leaders who brought the struggle to its successful close were memorable instruments in the hand of Providence. At the opening of the struggle not one of them was in sight, except perhaps General Sherman, and even he was discredited by his declarations that the war we had on hand would last for years and would require great armies to prosecute it. Slowly and painfully, through the survival of the fittest, the really able men emerged and were entrusted with command, 156 THE HAND OF GOD when men without the capacity to lead an army had been retired from that prominence. It is invidious to name them, as some are sure to be overlooked in any enumeration ; but Meade, Hancock, Thomas, Howard, Rosecrans, Sheridan, Sherman and Grant are enough for my purpose, though not enough to fill the actual battle-roll of those great years. Who, at the opening of the struggle, could have predicted the discovery of such and so varied mili- tary ability among the citizenry of a republic the least inclined to war ? It was of the providence of God that our armies found such leaders, while it was no less of his providence that they had to en- counter such generals as Jackson, Johnston, Lee and Longstreet, so that the war could not be brought to an end even by them before the appointed time had come and its proper results had been secured. The Southern troops fought bravely, with all the incentives which are furnished by a conflict for the possession of their own ground ; but they fought at a great disadvantage, which was other than phys- ical or material. It was but yesterday that they had been saluting the old Flag, and glorying in their membership in the great Republic. They could not lay aside at a moment's notice their attachment to what they had honored and vener- ated. It was the spirit which animated the citizen IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 157 soldiery of the North, that made them finally victor- ious, in spite of their fighting on the enemy's ground, over 700,000 square miles in extent. Such a conflict might have ended in Southern independence, but for the spiritual forces which turned the scale. May we not apply to the whole conflict the language a Confederate soldier, who fought at Gettysburg, applies to the issue of that decisive battle ? They fell who lifted up a hand And bade the sun in heaven to stand ; They smote and fell, who set the bars Against the progress of the stars, And stayed the march of Mother-land. They stood who saw the future come On through the fight's delirium ; They smote and stood, who held the hope Of nations on that slippery slope, Amid the cheers of Christendom. God lives ! He forged the iron will Which grasped and held that trembling hill ; God lives and reigns ; he built and lent Those heights for Freedom's battlement, Where floats her flag in triumph still. Fold up the banners, smelt the guns ; Love rules, her mightier purpose runs. The mighty Mother turns in tears The record of her battle years, Lamenting all her fallen sons. 158 THE HAND OF GOD CHAPTER XIV. RECONSTRUCTION AND GROWTH. THE death of President Lincoln by the hand of an assassin, in the very hour of national victory, seemed likely to throw everything into confusion. But when the first outburst of feeling was past, and it was seen that the South had no responsibility for that mad act, which Mr. Davis openly deplored as a calamity, then quieter moods prevailed, and the task of restoring the Union was taken in hand. It was well for Lincoln that this task was spared him, as he certainly would have come into conflict with his own party on the subject, as did his suc- cessor, President Johnson, although he probably would have managed the matter with more discretion than did that hot-headed Scotch-Irishman. As it was, it was his general influence which was felt in holding back the victors from acts of retaliation on persons who had been prominent in the attempt to divide the country. At first there was talk of an extensive vengeance on the Southern leaders, but this never got beyond the weaker minds. Finally, IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 159 even Mr. Davis went free, and not one life was taken, except that of the infamous keeper of the Andersonville military prison, who had done to death so many of our soldiers. It was thus shown that a democracy is capable of generosity and clem- ency. The situation as regards Reconstruction was complicated by the evident purpose of some of the Southern people to bring back their former slaves into a bondage which differed very little from that which the war was thought to have ended. Thus the " black laws " of South Carolina and some other states required the freedman to hire himself to a v/hV^ master within a specified number of days after the beginning of each year, and directed the sheriff to sell to the highest bidder, for the term of one year, those who had failed to do so. As the proclamation of emancipation had been a war measure, and as the war was now over, it of itself gave no guarantee for the continued freedom of the black race. With the states back in the Union, and invested with all their old power for the control of local affairs, it was not impossible for them, or even difficult, to nullify all that had been done for the emancipation of their slaves. That it was their purpose to do this, was honestly inferred from the passage of laws to restrain the black laborer, as 160 THE HAND OF GOD such, in his freedom of contract and the disposal of his own life. The dominant party's quarrel with the man whom they had made vice-president, and whom Mr. Lincoln's death had raised to the presidency, had had the effect of dividing that party. Its leaders were uncertain as to the result of an appeal to the people, since the prospect of a speedy though un- satisfactory settlement of all outstanding questions might weigh with the voters more than would the rights of the black man to his newly acquired liberty. They therefore adopted a policy suggested by their fears and based upon no just estimate of the social forces with which they had to deal. They jresolved to reconstruct the South on the basis of negro suf- frage, and to admit no state to its old place in the Union until it had given its assent to an amend- ment to the national Constitution which established this. Then if they lost the support of more North- ern states than they even feared, they still would have that of the states controlled by the freedmen, who out of gratitude would stand by the party which had stood by them. Thus the results of the war would be secured, even if the cry for peace and reconciliation were to influence the North unduly. There were elements of party selfishness in this calculation, but it could not have prevailed had it * IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 161 not been supported by multitudes of really patriotic people who saw in it the rightful solution of the problem. Its fault was lack of faith and lack of knowledge. It was prompted by a timorous dread as to the unwillingness of the American people to stand by the work of the war until the liberty it had proclaimed to the black race was secure. Faith in either God or the people would have sug- gested a different course, but that faith was wanting in the statesmen of the Reconstruction era. If they had believed that God was in the war, as Mr. Lincoln believed it, they would not have fallen into panic, or felt obliged to play Providence in this hasty and ill-considered way, in order to secure its results. Nor was their ignorance of the working of social forces less noteworthy than their lack of faith. They proposed to reconstruct Southern society on the basis of its weakest elements. The negro, just set free from a bondage in which he had been cared for like a domestic animal and kept almost as igno- rant as one, was to be lifted at once to the responsible position of an intelligent voter, and invested with the ballot as his means of defence against the encroach- ments of the class which had the monopoly of educa- tion, property and political experience. The plan worked after a fashion, so long as the North actively 1 62 THE HAND OF GOD * supported and protected the state governments thus established, without much regard to constitutional restrictions on national activity. But the success was a scandal. The freedman conducted himself, not un- naturally, as did the slaves of antiquity on the days of the Saturnalia ; and the best sentiment of the North demanded that withdrawal of national interference in the South which was conceded in Mr. Hayes' administration. Then the negro governments collapsed, in spite of their having a numerical majority in several states, and the folly of such reconstruction was manifest. The injury to the South has been great, and in some respects lasting. It has led to an antagonism between the two races, such as never existed before the emancipation of the blacks. It was notorious that the slave-holder never had the skin-shrinking from the black man,which was seen even in Northern Abolitionists. He generally had been cared for by a black " mammy." He had played with the black children from his infancy, and his English still bears the marks of the negro's influence, in its soft- ening of certain consonants and its drawling of the vowels. Masters and slaves attended the same church, and took the communion from the same hands, although the seats for the slaves were in the gallery. But now all this kindliness of relation has IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 163 disappeared. Blacks and whites have different churches, to the great injury of the race which needed the refining and restraining influence of the other. White and black touch neither in church nor school, nor much in market. Contempt on the one side has evoked insolence on the other, and thus has begun a long duel of mutual injury, on whose darker phases it is not necessary to dilate here. The white race, of course, has been injured badly through this antagonism. Its political morality has been lowered by the recourse to devices of all kinds for getting rid of the negro vote ; and the tricks thus played on the freedmen have not been forgotten when it is a question of white men trick- ing white men out of a political victory. It is not wonderful that most of the Southern states have been seeking, by constitutional devices of a ques- tionable kind, to put the negroes off the list of legal voters, in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment to the national Constitution, which is intended to keep them there. Even more demoralizing to the whites has been the recourse to mob-law for the infliction of cruel and illegal punishments on black men charged with various crimes, but convicted of none, through instituted courts of law. This practice is largely confined to negroes accused of outrages on 164 THE HAND OF GOD white women and children ; and the dreadful ex- ample has proved infectious, as mob-violence has been employed against black men for that and lesser offences in more than one of the Northern states. This is the situation which must be dealt with vigorously, unless we are to see the public order undermined, and another sectional struggle desolat- ing our country. Gen. Sherman, than whom the South had no truer friend, warned that section that he saw the possibility of another civil war in their treatment of the black man. It was especially their exclusion of the colored people from the right of suffrage which he regarded as thus imperilling the peace of the country. He foresaw a situation pos- sible in which the choice of a president might turn on the question whether the black man had voted or had been shut out from a share in the choice. He believed that the North would not submit to a president thus chosen in defiance of the provisions of the national Constitution. The danger, however, is not limited to such a possible situation. It resembles the peril to the Union from slavery, in that the national conscience is outraged by the denial of legal justice, which is a refusal of a natural right as distinct as the right to liberty. As before the war for the Union, we may, for a time, quiet the people's conscience IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 165 by asserting that there is a limit to our responsibil- ity in the matter. " What have we to do with slavery in South Carolina or in any other Southern state? " it was said. " We are no more responsible for it there, than for its existence in Brazil or Mozam- bique." But under all this assertion lay an uneasy feeling that there was a difference between slavery tolerated and maintained by law within our own nation, and slavery outside our country. It was felt that nationality constituted a bond of brother- hood with every American, white or black, of European or of African descent. Foreign criticism aided to drive home the respon- sibility ; books like Mrs. Stowe's sharpened the sense of it. And while the people at large had not reached the point which would have made it easy for any party to act on this sense of national respon- sibility, it had reached that in which nothing that the Constitution did not require could be done for slavery. It must disappear from the District of Columbia and be excluded from the territories, if it must not be touched in South Carolina. And when the South in resentment of this attitude, tried to break up the Union, the common feeling was that the Secession movement had put slavery within the reach of the nation, and it must perish on its merits, as well as from military necessity. 166 THE HAND OF GOD A nation, such as slowly shaped itself under the hand of God during the Colonial period, and crystallized between 1775 and 1789, is not an arbi- trary or voluntary organization, which men can put into any shape they please. There is a sphere within which there is room for choice on the basis of expediency, between this form of institution and that. But there are elements which belong to the very nature of a nation, and which therefore cannot be dispensed with. One of these is the nation's re- sponsibility for the natural rights of every resident of its territory citizen or alien. Those natural rights are the rights essential to the completeness of our human nature. If any one of them be de- nied, the result is to truncate the character of man. They are defined in the second table of the law which God gave to the chosen nation from the dark cloud and amid the thunderings of Horeb. That law defines the foundations of national life for all time. And the rights it thus sanctions are those of life, family, property and reputation. To these every human being has an immediate claim, and the nation exists to realize and secure them to all within its bounds. No constitutional restrictions can release it from this primal responsibility.* * Take the parallel case of the family. It is not an arbitrary or voluntary organization, to which any shape you please may IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 167 It is the nation's duty to secure the natural rights of life, family, property and reputation to the black people of every state ; and the national conscience, again reinforced by foreign criticism, is awakening to the obligation from which consti- tutional arrangements profess to have relieved us. Nor are the black men the only people thus wronged by our failure to do a nation's duty. We have treaties of amity and commerce with all the Christian nations and many outside Christendom, which the same constitutional restriction prevents us from executing. We promise the resident or visiting citizens of these nations the protection of our laws, in return for similar assurances from them that our citizens travelling or residing with them shall receive this protection. But in several be given when you enter it. Many things are open to adjust- ment this way or that, but not the things essential to family life. Suppose that the marriage settlement provided that the discipline and control of the children who might be born of this marriage should be vested, not in their parents, but in their grandparents, or their aunts or uncles. Such an arrange- ment would not stand, as it would be contrary to the institu- tion of marriage, and would involve a repudiation of primal obligations. Civil law would refuse to enforce the arrangement, and human conscience would approve the refusal. It is an American superstition that a Constitution can do anything; but it can no more alter the essential character of national obligation than a marriage settlement can alter the essential character of marital or parental obligation. 168 THE HAND OF GOD recent cases our government has been obliged to admit that it had no power either to protect alien residents, or to punish those who offered violence to them. All it could do was to offer a handful of money to the families or friends of those who had been put to death without trial, as the states would not punish and the nation could not. It is as though we had got back to the " blood-fine " as a punishment, with the difference that the country, and not the criminals, pays the fine. Several of these treaties terminate their existence by limita- tion of time in the opening years of the present century. Will it be surprising if they are not re- newed ? And if not Italy, but Germany or Great Britain had been the injured party in the outrages referred to, would the matter have passed off so quietly ? What security have we that it will not be one of the strong and aggressive powers we shall have on our hands the next time mob-vio- lence attacks a body of aliens ? What then will be the value of the precedent we are setting in de- manding exorbitant reparation in punishment as well as cash from China for the wrong done by the Boxers ? The extension of national authority to the protec- tion of every resident of the country in the enjoy- ment of his natural rights seems to be the point to IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 169 which Providence is leading this nation through many circumstances and influences. With that authority, the whole question of negro suffrage might be left to the several states, for them to dis- pose of as they please. The ballot, which was to be the freedman's defence against wrong, has proved worthless for any such purpose. It has only widened and deepened the gulf between him and the white race, and made impossible the close and friendly association with that race, which is the very first condition of his elevation to the highest level of which he is capable. He is capable neither of de- fending himself nor of elevating himself to the white man's level, without help and sympathy. He would welcome a change, which would give him something substantial in place of a phantom. All the conservative elements in the South would wel- come it as putting an end to political and moral de- moralization, such as now results from the co- existence of the two races under unhappy con- ditions. And the national conscience would wel- come it as releasing it from the sense of national obligations undischarged, and from outside criticism felt to be deserved. What was done in the haste of unbelief in 1866- 70, must be done over again, and done in a better and more lasting fashion. i;o THE HAND OF GOD CHAPTER XV. THE PERILS OF PEACE AND PROSPERITY. THE war for the Union was itself the opening of a new era of industrial development for the Ameri- can people. At the opening of the struggle Wash- ington's warning was brought home to the leaders of our national policy, and it was seen that the country must possess all those industries which are required for the equipment and supply of an army, if it was to be capable of an adequate defence. The chance of an interruption of commerce with Europe, through England and France interfering in behalf of the Confederate States, was very imminent, especially as both countries suffered in their manu- factures through the interruption of the cotton and tobacco trade, and as their rulers would have viewed with complacency the resolution of the " overgrown " republic into a number of more manageable confed- eracies. It was felt that for her own safety America must become a self-sufficient country ; and her suc- cess in doing so was one of the elements of her superior strength in the conflict. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 171 The war thus became the opening of a period of forty years of national growth in wealth and indus- trial power, with some sharp interruptions in 1873, 1883 and 1893-96. During those four decades the accumulated wealth of the people rose from $14, 183,000,000 to $64,120,000,000; and the average of wealth per citizen from $483 to $856. This increase has naturally been attended by the creation of many great fortunes, especially through successful opera- tions in railroading and commerce. But while " the rich have grown richer," it is not true that " the poor have grown poorer," for the increase of wealth has gone more to the poor than to the rich. The standard of living has risen rapidly for the laboring classes, the purchasing power of the wages of 1880 being about twice as great as that of the wages paid in 1860, and a similar increase, if not so great, having taken place since 1880. The savings accumulated in the savings-banks are estimated as being as great as the capital invested in manufac- tures. There is nothing wrong in a nation growing rich, nor in any man becoming more wealthy than his fellows. The conquest of nature, which is the proc- ess by which wealth is acquired for either man or community, is a duty enjoined upon mankind at the outset, when men were bidden to " increase and 1/2 THE HAND OF GOD multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it." It is a divinely enjoined service to reduce the world's wildernesses to order, and to make its re- sources for human support accessible to the race. It is no less a parable of that spiritual tillage and subjugation, by which " the wilderness and the sol- itary place " are made " glad " by the kingdom of the Messiah, and the evil growths in the human heart and in human society are brought under con- trol and finally exterminated. It is only when man's selfishness leaves out of sight the service and the use of this great work, to put personal profit and advantage into the foremost place, that the harm of individual or collective wealth comes into play. Then the perennial good of human work gives place to the perennial evil of human greed, and men begin to think that life, after all that has been said to the contrary, does consist in the abun- dance of the things a man possesses, and not in the wholesomeness of his relations to his fellow-men. The rapidity with which America has grown in wealth during the last half-century has brought this temptation home to us as to no other people of our time, and as never before in our history. It would, however, be a grave mistake to suppose that the love of money and of what it will buy, is a new feature of American life, or that the inhuman- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 173 ities to which this leads are without precedent in our earlier history. A century ago wealth in one of its forms, the ownership of land, was the test of the right to exercise the elective franchise in all our states. The existence of human slavery in all parts of the country, and the numbers and wretch- edness of the white " redemptioners," were evi- dence that property counted for more than persons. Imprisonment for debt was very common, and fathers of families were thus taken away from the support of their children because of their inability to pay a few dollars they had borrowed from a richer neighbor, and were immured for months and years among common criminals. The wretchedness of the laboring class in our great cities was such that impartial observers de- clared the slaves on the Southern plantations to be better clothed, fed and housed. There were deaths every winter from cold and hunger even in Philadelphia, and nobody thought it a matter of social reproach. It was about 1830 that Chalmers' ideas as to our social responsibility for the poor, and of the best modes for discharging it, began to strike root in our cities, leading to the organization of the first societies for general relief. Previously Mathew Carey says appeals for assistance had been met by the Malthusian arguments that these 1/4 THE HAND OF GOD destitute people had no right to exist and that to keep them alive was but to keep up a breed of paupers to live off the community. It did not re- quire a great deal of wealth to harden Dives' heart against Lazarus. In a sense of our responsibility for our poorer neighbors the American people have made great advances in seventy years, and also in the humanity which treats want as a misfortune rather than a crime. Along with this there has been an equally marked advance in the honesty which stands by the pledged word of the merchant, and desires to give a just equivalent in every exchange. Seventy years ago the level of business morality was vastly lower than to-day, and the shameless rascalities of the era of land-speculation under President Jackson excited nothing but amusement in others than their victims. In the previous century the loot of the pirate was sold in our cities without a question asked, and smuggling was a profession honorable enough for his future excellency, John Hancock. Peter Faneuil, the founder of " the Cradle of Lib- erty," was a slave-trader. The mutual confidence on which modern business rests with so much safety, has been indeed " a plant of slow growth," and while mercantile morals are still capable of im- provement, they have emerged from that chaotic IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 175 condition which constitutes their first stage in newly developed countries. Nor is it safe to infer from American excess of talk about money that our countrymen love it in the same degree as they talk of it. All peoples en- gaged in making money, rather than living on the savings of their forefathers, are apt to talk too much about it, without really thinking more of it than their neighbors, if so much. It has a novelty of in- terest to those who are not accustomed to enjoy its possession, which makes the newly rich often ridicu- lous in their enjoyment of it. And this may be as true of a whole people as it is of individuals. America has not so much inherited as acquired wealth, and the nation has not yet attained the re- serve which elsewhere forbids the " talking shop " on the subject. It also is true that the growth of American pros- perity presents elements of almost romantic con- trast, which, if not unknown, are not so usual else- where. Great fortunes have been built up through the audacity of beneficent enterprise, which has turned wasted resources to good account, or has cheapened and improved traditional processes in unforeseen ways. Regions considered hopelessly barren or moderately productive, have been found to contain the elements of utility of the highest i;6 THE HAND OF GOD value. Bold combinations, enabling a closer econ- omy in production and distribution, have resulted in enriching the projector while benefiting the com- munity. In the Old World romance associates it- self with the military profession especially. In this more peaceful country, the qualities which go else- where to making good soldiers and winning mili- tary renown, have been directed to the conquest of nature and the victory over the obstacles which are encountered in turning a continental wilderness into a flourishing country. Nor is the commercial temper, bred by constant contact with the life of business, one which is to be despised. Our Lord distinctly tells us that it is one which has its place and recognition in that divine kingdom, that new order of human soci- ety, which He proclaimed. In his parable of the Goodly Pearl and the Hid Treasure He sets the seal of his approval on that prompt recognition of ascertained values, and that equally prompt action on the recognition, which is the spirit of business. He thus anticipates Jonathan Edwards' definition of true religion "the recognition of great things as great, and of small things as small, and the act- ing on that knowledge." In that statement the greatest of American thinkers foreshadowed the peculiar genius of his countrymen in matters per- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 177 taining both to this life and to that which is to come. They surpass all other peoples in their readiness to act out a conviction they have once reached, and in setting aside whatever of traditional or conventional stands in the way. After all is said, however, of the good that comes of the gain in power over nature, it remains forever true that the fascination which possession exercises over the human heart always has been an especial obstacle to the power and purity of the higher life ; and never was this truer than at the present time and in our country. If the most perilous American vice at the close of the eighteenth and the begin- ning of the nineteenth centuries was drunkenness, that at the close of the nineteenth and the be- ginning of the twentieth is certainly covetousness. This vice is essentially the attempt to elevate things to the place of affection, esteem and trust, which belongs to persons, and especially to God. It is the converse of slavery, which seeks to degrade per- sons to the level of things. Its theory is that " a man's life " does " consist in the abundance of the things he possesses." It carries with it a darken- ing of the vision of God, whose perfection consists in the unlimited generosity of his gifts to the evil and the good, the deserving and the undeserving. It shuts men's hearts to the message of the Gospel, 178 THE HAND OF GOD which is all about free giving and unearned blessed- ness. It is essentially that service of Mammon which, our Lord warns us, cannot be combined with any real service of God. And whereas the service of God brings with it the rest and satisfaction of work well done for each day of life, this of Mammon puts success always into the future, and wears out the heart in anxieties about the evils which may never come. Such a vice is a gnawing worm at the root of a people's spiritual life and their national morality. According to our Lord's diagnosis, it was this which was destroying his own people, and was unfitting them to receive Him and his message. It is this which has clung to that people through all ages since his time, obscuring the virtues which they never have lost, and earning for them the enmity and detestation of the less thoughtful part of the gentile world. The story of a nation's life contained in the Old and New Testaments is not an exceptional or iso- lated instance of God's methods with the peoples of the earth. The conditions of national perpetuity and peace, which were put before the Jews in their Law and their Prophets, are those which exist for every other people to the end of time. The sins which brought upon them captivity and dispersion, are those which must involve the ruin of any people, IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 179 whatever may be the shape ruin will take for them. The Bible is the handbook of politics, as well as of theology and ethics, for those who take it in the spirit in which it was written. The harm which this sin of covetousness is threatening to our nation is not hidden from even superficial observers. It is breeding an ostentation among the rich and an envy among the poor, threat- ening to rend our country with those great social rifts which we once hoped were to be confined to the Old World. Even in the presence of a higher standard of living and a greater comfort than are enjoyed by the workmen of any other country, men feel a bitter discontent with a social system which treats them as nobodies, ignores their personality, and sees in them nothing but means to an end. It is making an audience for those revolutionary theo- rists who seek to build their Utopias on the ruins of historical society. It is even preparing many to accept a social order in which personal liberty would disappear, and the judgment of " the average man " would dominate every relation and activity of human life. In politics the lower commercial spirit, that which counts personal profit the measure of success in life, and puts gain before use, is serving to corrupt public men of every class. No one is so loud in de- i8o THE HAND OF GOD nouncing corrupt and selfish politicians as the American business-man. He ought to recognize the fact that they are acting at their worst on his own maxims, in that they go into the arena of pub- lic life for the sake of what they can get out of it, and not for the sake of any service they can render to the country. That a politician is " on the make," is the worst thing that can be said of him. Is it not to be said equally of those who treat the activi- ties of business life as a means to no higher ends than their own profit, and deny their responsibilities as stewards of God's gifts ? Before there can be any real reform of political life, there must be a much higher ideal of business life current among all the classes it embraces. Men must recognize that business is a social service, and wealth a steward- ship for God, if they wish to see public office recog- nized as a public trust, and the politician made ashamed of low aims in serving the community. In international relations this spirit of covetous- ness has taken such a hold of the civilized world during the last thirty years as it never had before since the days of the Roman Empire. It is the pervading influence in national action, where the rights and possessions of weaker peoples are con- cerned. It has led to the partition of Africa among the chief powers of the European state-system, in IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 181 a fashion as unscrupulous and cruel as the partition of Poland a century earlier an action which the world had agreed to stigmatize as criminal. It would proceed to carve up our own continent in the same lawless fashion, were it not for the veto we impose upon European aggression on American states by the Monroe Doctrine. Its apologists have reached the height of declaring that the rules of morality, which control the actions of individuals, have no application to the conduct of nations. " Cursed be he who removeth his neighbor's land- mark," is merely a Hebrew regulation for the adjustment of farm-boundaries we learn and not for the regulation of " world-politics." Fifty years ago the principle of Nationality, preached by Mazzini, was the thought of all liberal- minded men. Only the champions of Legitimacy, who claimed that power inhered by right in privi- leged families and classes, as property inheres in its lawful owner, ventured to call it in question. To- day Nationality and Legitimacy are alike stigma- tized as " academic " politics, and the Darwinian principle, that the fittest have all the rights, has taken their place. The weaker must go to the wall. The final outcome of the principle is the absorption of all nations in a single world-empire, for the last right to rule inheres in the strongest among the 182 THE HAND OF GOD nations or empires which now divide the world among them. Nor can this be evaded by classify- ing certain of them as " civilized," since that is a relative term, and all are inferior to the most civi- lized, i. e. t the possessor of the longest purse and the largest army. The rule which justifies England in annexing Dahomey will justify us in annexing England, and possibly Russia in annexing us both. Nothing but the arbitration of war can settle our relative place in the scale of this " civilization," which seeks to benefit the less advanced peoples by putting an end to their social development and im- posing upon them the paralysis of an alien rule. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 183 CHAPTER XVI. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS. THE war with Spain, in the summer of 1899, came as an interruption to a process of peaceful develop- ment, and was something of a surprise to those who had cast the horoscope of the American republic. A few years before a Methodist bishop had said to an assembly of Englishmen, " Come to America if you leave your own country, for you come to a country which will not have another war for a hundred years ! " While prophets are always safe in predic- tions which deal with eternal principles, mere pre- dictors are liable to mistake. The strength of popular feeling moving toward war in a democratic country can be checked by constitutional restrictions, and it has been so in our own country in many instances ; but in some cases it both defies restriction and mocks at pre- diction. This it did in 1899, when the situation of affairs in Cuba was known to the American people. It was felt by the common man that we owed to these, our next neighbors to the southward, pro- 1 84 THE HAND OF GOD tection such as England in the sixteenth century extended to the Protestants of France and the Netherlands, against a government which practi- cally sought their extermination as the means of perpetuating its own power. It was felt also that the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, although not directly applicable to the Cuban situation, had as a neces- sary corollary that we were the power most respon- sible for the condition of affairs throughout the continent. It would be absurd to assert our right to preserve the territories of American countries from European aggression, while we stood by and witnessed the slaughter of an American people claiming their liberty. It was in this spirit that America entered upon the [war, with solemn declaration that her purpose was to rescue Cuba from the Spanish yoke, and to establish it among the self-governing states of the New World. But the war brought its surprises, besides being itself a surprise to many people. It left us with the remnants of the great Spanish Em- pire on our .hands, and the problem of disposing of them to the best advantage of their peoples and of the world. It would have been most in harmony with our own history, most satisfactory to the conscience of the American people, and most promotive of do- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 185 mestic peace, if we had applied to them all the measures we declared we intended to apply to Cuba. A temporary protectorate^ to be maintained until they were in a position to establish self-government, would have been welcomed by them as giving them assurance against the aggression of European nations, and would have secured to us all the ad- vantages of commercial preference and naval hospi- tality, through the friendship thus established between them and ourselves. It would have saved us the waste of thousands of lives and millions of outlay on war, and would have spared us the ac- quisition of bitter enmity in the countries con- cerned, and keen distrust among our neighbors of our own continent. If the actual result of the other policy had been foreseen, it is impossible to believe that it would have been adopted. That it was not foreseen was shown by the predictions with which its adoption was accompanied. But when once it was entered upon, public pride was enlisted to carry it to the end, and to discover reasons why we are bound to suppress resistance to it wherever resistance has been offered. A new theory of national duty, of our American vocation, and even of political moral- ity, has been evolved in the effort to vindicate our new departure ; and the traditions of the republic's 186 THE HAND OF GOD past have been openly repudiated by public men and journalists. It is asserted that our former career as a nation was narrow and selfish, in that we were taking no part in the great labor of civilizing the weaker and less advanced peoples. "The White Man's Bur- den," we are told, has lain upon other shoulders than ours, and we are invited to unite in the great undertaking of " civilizing " the uncivilized peoples by imposing upon them our ideas and our methods of life. This statement is libellous as regards the pre- vious history of America, which has done as much for the advance of civilization as any country in the world. Americans have reclaimed a continent for the service of mankind, feeding millions of the Old World from the overplus they have created in the New. By the audacity of their ingenuity they have lightened the burden of human toil round the world, and have made possible a higher standard of living to poorer classes everywhere. They have set an example of orderly self-government, and of severe honesty in the discharge of public obliga- tions, which has refuted the pretensions of despot- ism to be the sole champion of settled order and public credit, and has made possible the advance of the people of other lands to the powers and re- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 187 sponsibility of citizenship. They have shown that it is possible to maintain public order and secure international respect without either a standing army or a conscription. They have strengthened the hands of struggling patriots by their sympathy, and have thus helped to the emancipation of Hungary, Italy, Servia and Bulgaria from the blight of alien rule, as well as contributed to the unification of Germany. True, they have not used force of arms in securing these objects, and to the political ma- terialists of the " blood and iron " school this may mean that they have done nothing. But the world does not move by material forces, which in the long run are subservient to those which are moral and sympathetic. Nor has our direct influence upon individual nations at the critical moments of their existence been less important than that exerted by any other people. By the Monroe Doctrine we ran a wall of fire around the free states of our New World, and secured them that opportunity for the natural and independent development which Chile, the Argen- tine Republic and Mexico already are achieving, and which will extend to all of them in due course. Without firing a gun, we brought Japan to open herself to the influences of western civilization, and to enter upon a career which shows what a less de- i88 THE HAND OF GOD veloped country can make of itself when left free to adapt itself to the demands of the modern time. By our successful protection of native industry, we encouraged other countries to resist the policy which would have kept the world in industrial sub- jection to one manufacturing people, and have thus promoted national growth and wealth in many lands, not excepting the colonial dependencies of the nation whose ambitions we defeated. By our Christian missionaries we have been carry- ing, not the branches, but the roots of a true civili- zation to every quarter of the world ; and these have met the more hearty welcome because we were known to have no political aims to promote at the expense of the peoples they taught. We did not, in the language of King Theodore of Abys- sinia, " first send a missionary, and then a consul to look after the missionary, and finally an army to take care of the consul." Our missions have con- tributed greatly to the intellectual and even the political development of the peoples they reached, as well as their moral and spiritual elevation. In Japan, in China and in other countries they have been employed in educational and similar work by the native governments. In Syria they have created the standard of modern Syrian language and litera- ture, and awakened both Moslems and native IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 189 Christians to a new intellectual life. In Egypt they trained the officials on whose services the present reforming government relies. In Turkey their Roberts College educated the young leaders who awakened the national spirit in Servia, Bulgaria and Armenia. In Bulgaria the party of progress was long known as " the American party," because of its relation to its American teachers in that admirable college. In the Sandwich Islands we lifted a pagan and cannibal people into the rank of a Christian nation. In fine, our influence, though not equally effica- cious in all directions, has been felt in all the chan- nels of the world's best life for a century past. We have borne " the White Man's Burden " as amply as any people, but with the difference that we asked for no wages in return for the service we rendered. The change now proposed is that we shall bring into our international relations the spirit of a low commercialism, and insist on an ample re- turn in trade and territory for whatever we do for mankind. We are sometimes invited to contemplate what England has done for India as a sample of what a great country can effect for the welfare of a depen- dency. England has introduced into India western methods of administration, and her own notions of I 9 o THE HAND OF GOD justice and equity. She has put down Thuggee, Suttee, and public child-murder. She has con- structed railroads and canals, at an enormous cost to the people. She has promoted secular education by government schools and colleges, which have yielded "an abundant crop of agnostics. But she has neither lifted the Hindoo people to a higher level of thought, nor secured the prosperity of the millions under her rule. By Mr. Rudyard Kipling's testimony we learn that the bulk of the Hindoos are a seething mass of unshaken resistance to prog- ress, of degrading superstition, and of utter igno- rance, which has been touched on the surface only by English influences of any kind. After a century and a half of English occupation, not one in a thousand has laid aside his own religion for that of his rulers. At the present rate and under English rule, the end of a millennium of missionary labor would find India still divided between Hindoos and Buddhists, and the adoption of Christianity would still be regarded as desertion of nationality and honor. As for the economic condition of India, it hardly could be worse, and it never was so bad under native rule of any kind. By the selfish destruction of the native manufactures in the interest of those of Great Britain, at the opening of last century, the IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 191 greatest manufacturing country of the world was reduced to the level of a merely agricultural com- munity, with the consequent certainty that every failure of the rains would leave the people of India face to face with famine. Under the reign of Vic- toria the famine victims have been numbered by tens of millions. The lowering of the diet of the people has resulted in universal splenitis, chronic cholera, and recurrent bubonic plague. A report made by the government's Famine Commission in 1885 traced the recurrence of this dreadful calamity to the uniformity of employment in agriculture ; but not a single step has been taken or proposed to make variety of employment pos- sible to the masses. To do so would run counter to English interests, or would involve the abandon- ment of economic maxims which were devised for English conditions only. In reviewing the report of the Famine Commis- sion in " The Lahore Civil and Military Gazette," an English writer, whom I take to have been Mr. Rudyard Kipling, pays America the compliment of suggesting that if India had been under our rule, we should soon have found a way to overcome the industrial difficulty and put an end to famines. The compliment is not deserved. We probably would have done even worse than England has I 9 2 THE HAND OF GOD done. She is as well situated for the successful government of dependencies as any country of the world, and is as open to the considerations of humanity and responsibility as any other. Her rule in India is the most favorable experiment that has been made in conducting an alien government for the benefit of a subject people, and it breaks down by every test that can be applied. Except in establishing peace within the peninsula, and abol- ishing a few of the most flagrant abuses of the native religion, it has failed at every point. A higher strain of argument has been used by the advocates of both English aggressions and our own, in the claim that both countries have been called by Providence to undertake the responsibil- ity of governing the dependencies they now possess, and therefore cannot without blame abandon the new path into which their steps have been led. On what this supposition rests, unless it be that we and England both went forward to do what was not at first contemplated, I am unable to see. Every step of aggression was adopted of our own free will and must stand the test of conformity to divine law on its own merits. And in our own case the indica- tions of a providential purpose, I think, were all the other way. Our possession of an area large enough to employ IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 193 all our energies for its entire reclamation, and ade- quate for the support of a population three times as great as we now have, seemed to show that we had tasks enough staked out for us by Providence. * And that we may not be disturbed in them, our country is endowed with a geographical isolation from our rivals, which constitutes our best defence against their ambitions. At the same time we are furnished with neighbors, for whom we have assumed a friendly responsibility, and whom we might greatly benefit through establishing closer relations on the basis of peace, arbitration, reciproc- ity, and commerce. Our own situation, both political and social, seemed to present problems for our statesmanship sufficient to exercise our wits for many years to come. It is only through the neglect of duties that lie close to our hands, that we can divert our energies to the control and management of possessions beyond the Pacific ; and the leadings of Providence do not bring a people to the neglect of its duties. There is nothing novel in this arrogation of provi- dential sanction for doing what we want to do, and neglecting what we ought to do. The patronage of Providence has been so often alleged in behalf of wrong-doing, as to justify Luther's saying that " in the name of God begins all mischief ! " Provi- 194 THE HAND OF GOD dence was alleged by the champions of Legitimacy, as though God had handed men over to be ruled by privileged classes and families, whose prosperity and luxury made up for the ignorance and wretchedness of the mass of mankind. It was the appeal of the supporters of absolute monarchy, and in its name passive resistance was enjoined upon subjects. It was invoked by the slave-holder, who claimed that Providence had marked out certain inferior races as fit only to toil at the command of their human superiors, and had allowed all the barbarities of the slave trade in order to bring these appointed bondsmen into the rightful subjec- tion, while at the same time securing to them so much of Christian instruction as their masters thought good for them. Thus men "played at Providence " in dealing with their fellow-men, and ignored those great rules of right which are the lines on which Providence works its purposes for the welfare of mankind. As the former appeals to providential purpose failed to command the assent of men's consciences, and thus showed their futility, so has this done. Those who are most awake to those considerations of right and wrong with which conscience deals, and through which Providence works on human society, are commonly dissenters from this new IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 195 policy. " Ian Maclaren " was struck with this when he visited the United States during the first heats of the controversy. He declared, on his re- turn to England, that the best elements of Ameri- can society were hostile to the policy of forcible annexation. It has produced, in fact, just such a rending and dividing in the moral judgment of the nation as slavery did, '.he earnest and concerned minority being then as now opposed to a majority, in whom moral and unmoral motives are blended in confusion, with the unmoral in the predominance. We are now, as before 1861, a people with different moral standards and hostile ideals. We are once more " a house divided against itself," not on such secondary matters of mere policy as the tariff or a banking system, but on the great principles which go down to the very roots of our social existence, Two conceptions of social duty are fighting again for the mastery in the womb of time, and whichever comes to the birth will be destined to give shape to the future of the republic. In one respect the situation is different from that which the division about slavery produced. In that case the national conscience was sharpened by criticism from abroad, and Americans were con- stantly reminded of the gross inconsistency of our tolerating such an enormity in a professedly free 196 THE HAND OF GOD country one boastful of its liberty. Mrs. Brown- ing's " Curse for a Nation " was the expression of what the more generous minds thought of " Free- dom's foremost acolyte " in that matter. At present all the influences from without, with very few exceptions, work against the efforts of the American minority, who are claiming for others the rights of self-government they enjoy them- selves. From England especially have come the suggestions to aggression, and the encouragements to perseverance in it, which have weighed most with the rulers and people of the republic. Just at this time it suits that country to have us active in the affairs of other continents than our own, since our traditional policy in some quarters happens to coincide with her own wishes and interest. She has therefore applauded our stepping out of the limits of American activity, with the expectation of obtaining our help in keeping Russia and other rivals of hers out of China. A very brief retrospect of our earlier history would have shown England that it is her interest to have us as inactive in such matters as is con- sistent with our interests. Just as family quarrels are the easiest to incite and the hardest to allay, so our very connection with her by bonds of blood and speech has made it easy to excite Americans IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 197 against her, when her judgment of her interests clashed with ours of our rights. In earlier days her safety lay in the fact that she was the iron pot and we the earthen. Her preponderance in wealth and military power would have made a collision with her a very serious matter for us in 1844 or 1862. But the situation has changed since we have outstripped her' in numbers, and riches of every material kind. For us to combine this new pre- ponderance with ambitions toward expansion of dominion, and to use it for the creation of a great army and navy, would be to produce a situation which England might find exceedingly embar- rassing. But it is not England that would suffer the most from such a transformation as we are incited by her to undertake. It is America herself. We are asked to enter upon a career which has been the path to the grave for every republic that has adopted it. Monarchies may flourish and aristocra- cies may fatten on war, but republics live by mind- ing their own business and respecting the rights of their neighbors. Under whatever name or form, the military republic becomes the subject of per- sonal government, because militarism generates in its armies an esprit de corps, which proves stronger than the loyalty of the soldier to the law. We 198 THE HAND OF GOD cannot count on always having a Washington to avert the perils of military discontent with the faults of civil rule. Men of his unselfish character are not developed in the atmosphere of great mil- itary establishments, or in the conquest of weaker peoples. " The Man on Horseback " will be of a different temper, and the extent to which our peo- ple even now are dazzled by naval or military abil- ity and success, is of ill omen for free institutions when the day comes that sees military and civil authority in conflict. Should that day ever come, it will be written in the chancery of heaven that the Great Republic died, as nations always die, by suicide. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 199 CHAPTER XVII. THE VOCATION OF THE REPUBLIC. IN addition to the common vocation of nations, as designed to realize natural rights for their people, and thus to establish justice within their sphere of influence, the great peoples of the world seem to have had each a special vocation, to work out some development of human life for the benefit of all. Thus Judea was called to represent the Godward culture and growth of mankind, which we call religion. Greece's mission was to nourish the sense of beauty through art, in both plastic and literary forms, and above all in the harmonious culture of the human body. Rome was called to develop the great ideas of jural procedure and order in her code, and through that she "lives on in the life of every European State," as Mr. Freeman reminds us. France has had her function in the creation of social life and its courtesies ; Germany in the unfolding of phil- osophic thought and the labors of philological research ; England in the balance of order and 200 THE HAND OF GOD liberty, the fusion of Teutonic and Romance elements. What is the vocation of America? What is the task which Providence has laid upon us as a people, so that we may take our place among the great nations who have served mankind, and not themselves only? In one of M. Guizot's suggestive lectures on the " History of Civilization in Europe," he speaks of the service rendered to human development by the life of the baronial castle of the Middle Ages, within whose limited sphere were cherished the fine courtesies, which afterward became the common property of all classes. As over against America, all Europe, ancient and modern, stands in the relation of that baronial castle to the larger world without it. In the civilizations of the Old World have been developed what were the privileges of the few ; in America these are to become the birthright of the many. America exists to take what Europe has grown in such limited circles, and to make it a universal possession. It was the hope of this which inspired the friends of America at the very inception of our national existence. Dr. Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, said of the American colonies in 1773: " May they not possibly be more successful than their mother country has been in preserving IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 201 that reverence and authority which are due to the laws to those who make and to those who execute them? May not a method be invented of procuring some tolerable share of the comforts of life to those inferior, useful ranks of men, to whose industry we are indebted for the whole? Time and discipline may discover some means to correct the extreme inequalities of condition be- tween the rich and the poor, so dangerous to the innocence and happiness of both." Lincoln, in his speech in Independence Hall, spoken while he was on his way to take up the burden of the presidency, said : " I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and who formed and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the toils of the officers and soldiers who achieved that independence. I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere -matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother-land, but that sentiment in the Declaration which . . . gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men." Six months later,) when the war was in progress, he wrote to Congress : " This is essentially a people's 202 THE HAND OF GOD contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle * /^" for maintaining in the world that f form and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuits for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life."^ Our beginning in converting privilege into birth- right was made with the universalization of the suffrage. Not at first, indeed ; for the suffrage was limited in all the original thirteen states by prop- erty qualifications of an exacting kind. English tradition was still potent to shape American ideas and practice in this as in other matters ; and it was from the French Revolution that the impulse to a more democratic definition of citizenship came. Mr. Jefferson and his party deserve the credit of sweeping away all invidious distinctions among the American people in this respect, for it was their triumph that, between 1801 and 1831, gradually effected the substitution of manhood-suffrage for the narrower basis inherited from colonial times. In a few of the states their influence was less felt, and here there lingered remnants of the older restriction down to our own times. In Rhode Island the property qualification in the case of such citizens was removed since the war for the Union. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 203 The only restriction now imposed on male citizens of mature age is the possession of an elementary education, and that only in a minority of the states. There are many who regret the abandonment of the earlier restrictions, and who would at least pre- fer the household suffrage of the United Kingdom, which confines voting to actual heads of families. They think we have gone too fast and too far in embracing the whole people in the list of citizens and voters, and that the standard of our public life and the quality of our public men have been lowered by the change. If they will but look more care- fully into the political conditions of the country while it was under a system of restricted suffrage, recalling the methods by which elections were car- ried, the rowdyism which defaced even the halls of Congress, the abusive character of our newspapers, and other unhandsome features of our earlier his- tory, they will see that the remedy for our admitted evils is not to be found in putting political power into the hands of the few, and in creating a great population which has no legitimate and orderly means of expressing its wishes or its fears, and is therefore driven to those which are illegitimate and disorderly. The extension of the suffrage in both America and Great Britain has distinctly reduced the number of the scandals attending the activity 204 THE HAND OF GOD of electoral machinery, and has at least not lowered the tone of the legislative bodies. On this last point there is a strong impression to the contrary, but it is founded on ignorance. The late Hon. John Welsh was once dining in Washing- ton with Vice-president Henry Wilson and Bishop Coxe of Western New York. The bishop was de- ploring the decline of public life in America, and especially the lowered tone of Congress in later years. " Do you speak from personal knowledge, bishop, or only from a general impression ? " asked the vice-president. The bishop admitted that he spoke only from general impression, but an im- pression he shared with a very large number of the American people. " Then I can assure you from my personal knowledge," said the vice-president, " that you are altogether mistaken. I have been in public life for many years, and in Congress for a large part of the time. I recall the days of Clay and Webster, to which so many look back with regret. And I can assure you that the tone of pub- lic life and the character of Congress have risen very greatly within my time. The scenes which were not uncommon in both branches of Congress in my early days, were such as the country would not endure now." This testimony is confirmed by the tenor of the IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 205 reports, histories and memoirs which remain to us from what some are pleased to regard as a golden age of American politics. Duelling, gambling, drunkenness and uncleanness were rampant in Washington in the earlier half of last century. Rowdyism in both speech and action characterized the debates, in the days when members were still chosen by the restricted suffrage, which is now sup- posed to have sent only " gentlemen " into public life. " Far-off hills look green." It is often asserted that manhood-suffrage puts every kind of character and ability upon the same level, and thus fails to recognize those differences in human quality which make one man more important to society than another. " Why should I take the trouble to vote," asks the fastidious American, " when my vote will be cancelled by the uneducated foreigner in my own employment ? " It is neither the purpose nor the effect of manhood-suffrage to make one man count no more than another in shap- ing political action. The educated man, who counts for but one in an election, does so because he has neglected his plain duty to his country and to his less favored fellow-citizens. Democracy does not rest on any supposed equality in men, but on the principle that a man should count and weigh for what stuff there is in him, and not for more than 206 THE HAND OF GOD that because of some stamp put on him, like the mint stamp on a fifty-cent silver dollar. If he have intelligence of public matters, such as has not fallen to his neighbors, he should make it felt in the direc- tion of their minds to reasonable ends and the choice of wise means in their political action. It was just in this way that the public hope and courage were sustained during the painful but heroic years of the war for the Union. It is be- cause educated and thoughtful men have ceased to feel the urgency of such united action in behalf of their country, that they have the consciousness of the loss of power in the public life of our later day. It is indeed worth considering whether we have not lost something for the rightful development of democracy by making suffrage equal for every sort and grade of voter. "One man, one vote" is a principle which has been rather assumed than thought out. It has been suggested by Prof. Lorimer, of the University of Edinburgh, that this equality of suffrage might be replaced by a graded system of voting. Thus a first vote might be given to every male citizen of mature years ; a second to the possessor of a common-school education; a third to the voter whose education had been carried to the point of obtaining the degree of some recog- nized university ; a fourth to the citizen who had IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 207 served in the army or navy with credit ; a fifth to the possessor of a specified income, and so on. The votes given to men of wealth might be increased up to five or even ten, in proportion to their income, but with strict limitation to a fixed number. This would tend to make them more scrupulous in their use of money to obtain votes for their candidates and party. As Mr. Emerson somewhere says, if you represent numbers only, wealth will represent itself by bribery ; and if you represent wealth only, then numbers will represent themselves by violence. Whatever may be thought of propositions like these, it is a matter of congratulation that there is to be no regression from the principle of manhood- suffrage for our country. " Government of the people by the people and for the people " is not to " perish from the earth " while the American re- public stands. It brings with it some disadvantages, as does every human arrangement for wedding truth and fact ; but it saves us from others far more injurious to the tone of character, to the steadying sense of responsibility, to manliness of mind and act, and to the social interests affected by public action. It leaves the people free to adjust govern- mental methods to their actual character and condi- tions, and saves us from the perpetuation of anomalies consecrated by the blue-mold of the past. 208 THE HAND OF GOD Hence Matthew Arnold's saying that in America for the first time he saw a body of political institu- tions, which fitted the people for whom they were made as a well-made suit of clothes fits the man it was made for. Next to the universalization of political power and responsibility, stands the diffusion of education. The order of the General Court of Massachusetts, commanding every " town " to erect a public school as soon as it attained a population of fifty souls, was a heroic demand on the people of a feeble and struggling colony, but one to which they responded promptly, and thus set the American fashion of de- manding ample education for the young at least. It was part of the Genevan ideal, which Calvin realized for a single city, and which thus became the standard for the Reformed and Puritan commun- ities of the Old and New Worlds. , Knox had fought for it in Scotland, and, in spite of the greed of the nobles in dealing with the property of the old Church, his influence at last prevailed to the establishing of those parochial schools which have done so much toward making Scotland a prosperous and intelligent nation. The English Puritans be- came schoolmasters whenever the Stuart govern- ment shut them out of the pulpit. The Scotch- Irish clergy graduates generally of the University IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 209 of Glasgow in America commonly set up an academy alongside the Presbyterian church. In fact, the highly intellectual type of religion which the Calvinists favored did no less than require the general development of the people's intelligence as a condition of salvation. Along with the school they planted the college. In England the University of Cambridge had been the stronghold of the Puritan party, and Emmanuel College in that university had been erected by a Puritan knight as " seed-plot " for Puritan preachers. From that college came most of the early ministers of New England, and as they fore- saw that they could not depend upon England for an adequate supply of ministers, they erected in 1636-38 Harvard College as a servant " Christo et Ecclesia" They thus copied on our soil the Eng- lish college at a time when that institution had reached its lowest level of organized efficiency ; and it took America more than two centuries to overcome this disadvantage, and to return to the historic conception of a university. The first to move in the right direction was the University of Pennsylvania then the College of Philadelphia which enjoyed the advantage of hav- ing a graduate of a Scotch university for its first " provost." Afterwards the influence of Germany 210 THE HAND OF GOD replaced that of England in academic organization. Through Scotch and German influence the teaching passed out of the hands of " tutors," who, as jacks- of-all-trades, taught each the entire curriculum of study, into those of professors expert in some single branch of learning ; and the narrow routine of classical literature, mathematics and logic was expanded by introducing natural science, literature and modern languages. From Germany also, through Dr. Charles Follen, a disciple of Father Jahn, came the impulse to associate gymnastic exercise and competition with scholastic. At the outset, the colleges were purely church institutions, and their curriculum was adjusted to the training of an educated ministry. The establish- ment of the College of Philadelphia through the influence of Franklin in 1759 on the foundation of the Academy of 1743 marked a new stage. The good work done by the churches in transplant- ing the higher education to America, and in sup- porting it through ages of general indifference to the subject, now began to be appreciated by pub- lic-spirited citizens, and the wealth of America began to be consecrated to the service of learning. The stream which flowed so slenderly in that " day of small things," has swelled to a mighty river of gifts and benefactions, such as has watered no other country since the Middle Ages. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 211 A still farther step was taken by the erection of state universities in the new states west of the Alle- ghanies, as the crown and consummation of the free-school system. The public high-school of America was already a recognition that the Ameri- can boy had rights beyond the spelling-book and the arithmetic ; the state university proclaimed he was to have the best the world had found worth teaching. In those states also the churches had begun the work, carrying the college into the grow- ing commonwealths of the Mississippi Valley before any general demand for it had been awakened. The results of the labors of such men as Lyman Beecher, in laying the foundations of the higher education in the West, have thus extended far be- yond their expectations in transforming the whole system of public education. What the Eastern states had never thought possible, the Western states have achieved, and the rest will have to follow their example, as they did the example of Massachusetts in setting up schools for all the children of the state. The young American of the future will have his possibilities of education limited only by his own capacity and his desire to learn. Thus far we have done better in the quantity than the quality of the education given in school, college and university. The problems of the content 212 THE HAND OF GOD of the best curriculum, of the best method of teach- ing, and of the business management of our schools, are still unsolved. Our country has been injured by being made the dumping-ground for every kind of European method that has taken the fancy of an American on his travels, or graduating from some foreign university. Especially we have sought to learn the art of teaching from the Germans, who are among the worst teachers in the world, and the spirit of whose educational system is distinctly alien to our nationality. The teaching profession in America has been far too contemptuous of the tradi- tions it has inherited from its own past, and far too ready to assume that " they do these things better " everywhere else than at home. A fault even graver has been the undue direction of teaching to the merely intellectual development of the young, without adequate effort to mould character and impress ideals of right living upon them. The State cannot be so interested in merely intellectual growth as to spend millions in procur- ing it. It wants good citizens from its schools and colleges, more than "jsmart men." Now the school or the college cannot be passive in this matter. It claims the working-hours of each rising generation through all the most plastic years of human life, and what does obtain an adequate place in its train- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 213 ing, is almost certain to fall into the background of intellectual life. What is pushed to the front with undue emphasis is sure to produce a lack of balance in the national character. Thus Dr. Harris, our National Commissioner of Education, says and quite rightly that the stress on the teaching of arithmetic in our schools of all grades, has taught Americans to measure the worth of everything by bulk and number, to the neglect of far more impor- tant qualitative measurements. This criticism applies with especial force to the neglect of what is roughly called " religious instruc- tion " in our schools and colleges. We have some confirmed secularists and agnostics, who desire the exclusion of such instruction for reasons entirely logical and consistent. Americans generally are neither secularists nor agnostics,and if they acquiesce in this exclusion, it is because they believe the in- struction can be given more properly and adequately elsewhere. But the school is the arena of the in- tellectual life of the boy or girl, and the facts which are ignored or tabooed by it must take an inferior place in their estimation, under all ordinary condi- tions. At the least, they begin to think of them as related only to a set of unintelligent emotions or observances, and that to love God with all our minds is not a part of his commandment. Has not 214 THE HAND OF GOD the result been seen in the prevalence in America of an unreasoning emotionalism in religion, and in the popularity of forms of religious belief which indicate either the absence of the power of rea- soning on religious subjects, or its complete perver- sion? Another great defect of our educational system is that it aims at the education of the young, rather than that of all ages. In our time, it is true, the worth of youth has been disclosed to us as to no previous age of the world. We have even come to see something of what Jesus of Nazareth meant when he set the little child in the midst, and told men that entrance into the kingdom, i. e., into nor- mal human society, must be through a new birth into childlikeness. But education is a matter for all ages, and was so regarded both in antiquity and the Middle Ages. They were not mere youth who gathered to hear Socrates refute the sophists, or stooped over the sands of the gymnasium to follow Euclid's demonstrations, or built up a town where Abelard established his hermitage, or thronged Oxford and Paris in literal myriads to listen to the great scholastics. The notion that education is the business of youth alone has lost ground in the last half-century, through the establishment of colleges for working- IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 215 men and workingwomen, of societies and circles for social study, and through the movement for Uni- versity Extension. It is still, however, too preva- lent, in spite of the impulse given by Frederick Maurice to a better estimate of the relations of learning and working. With the shortening of the hours of labor for the working classes, the problems of adult education will become still more pressing. The main reason for that impending change is that modern labor has lost the educational quality which inhered in the more varied toils of the old workshop, and thus has grown more wearing to all who are engaged in it. That the working people may not be driven by very vacuity into wasting the time thus recovered from labor, society must increase the opportunities for the culture of intellect, and the elevation of the tastes of the majority. Those who have seen our factory-workers enjoying lectures on the great artists and musicians, or heard their questioning of lecturers on social topics, will have learnt that there are few limits, if any, to their capacity to re- ceive and understand the best that can be given them. And as citizens of the American republic, they must be taught to welcome and expect the best as their birthright. The rapidly accumulating wealth of the American 216 THE HAND OF GOD capitalist can find a beneficial outlet in the estab- lishment of colleges, galleries and libraries for the use of the people. Mr. Carnegie's dedication of his wealth to such objects is not exactly novel, but it sets an example which will be widely followed. In this democratic republic of ours the rich man must either choose expatriation in search of a com- munity in which wealth is sought as the endow- ment of a family, or he must accept the new conception of it as a public trust. America is the only country where a rich man subjects himself to general criticism by leaving all his property to his kindred, to the neglect of public objects. And our men of wealth will soon learn that the best way is to give while they still live, as this insures them against defeat of their purposes by litigation, be- sides securing them the personal enjoyment of see- ing the results of their gifts. Along with this private munificence, there will come an enlargement of the State's conception of its duty toward the culture of its people. The rapid extension of aid to the higher education, and the great increase of public libraries in all parts of the country, are the beginnings of a development which will make art and literature as democratic as in those cities of Greece and Italy in which these had their beginnings. Mr. Walt Whitman, indeed, IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 217 has asserted that art and literature have been hitherto monarchical and aristocratic, and that their traditional forms should be rejected for this reason by a free people. Mr. Whitman knew little of their history or he would not have made such an asser- tion. It was in the most democratic communities of antiquity and the Middle Ages that both flour- ished. Great art, as Cardinal Wiseman says, found its cradle in the workshop of the artisan, and was taken into the courts of kings and the castles of nobles only to be corrupted by being made the tool of ostentation and luxury. Our calling is to be a " new race of more practi- cal Greeks," as Mr. Lowell says. What that mar- vellous people achieved in the perfection of the human form, of human power to appreciate beauty in poetry, architecture, sculpture and painting, and of relish for the serious discussion of the greatest themes of human interest, America is called to achieve in a Christian atmosphere, and for hundreds of millions instead of myriads. The intellectual activity of a whole people brought to bear on the great problems of life and culture, is the natural outcome of our democratic development. Thus far the world's intellectual work has been done for it by a few chosen spirits, who worked without the support and stimulus of national sympathy. 218 THE HAND OF GOD Nor will democracy dispense with such leaders in any field. It cherishes no delusions as to the vast differences of intellectual capacity which sunder a William Shakespeare from a Martin Farquhar Tup- per. As it accepted the leadership of a Lincoln, so will it welcome that of any man of real genius in whom it discerns a capacity for superior work. Its joyous welcomes to European men of letters are an indication that it suffers from no envy of intellec- tual distinction. But as in politics, it will think for itself and act for itself even in accepting leadership, and it will give to those it accepts the hearty sup- port which only a whole people can give. Nor will it alone be benefited by this sympathy. As Herder first pointed out, the real literature and art of the world have been the expression of the spirit and life of a whole people, while much that has claimed to rank with the permanent results of the world's growth, in art and thought, has been vitiated by being the expression only of the mind and spirit of a. class. The really great geniuses are those who interpret their nation's character and mind to us, as Homer, Shakespeare and Burns have done. Alexandrian copies of literature echoes, not voices have been produced by literary coteries, who commonly repudiated public sympathies of any sort, and set up their private standards of excellence. IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 219 What democracy in literature may mean has been shown within the limits of a city in Athens and in Florence. It is for America to do the same on a larger scale. Thus far we have made but a very imperfect ap- proach to this right relation of the public to the intellectual life. The best promise for the future is found in the universal curiosity, which has been fostered by newspaper and magazine, as to the cur- rent interests of the thinking world. Science, art, literature, theology, sociology, invention, discovery have acquired a large public in America, not always characterized by depth or discrimination most commonly the contrary, indeed. But this very activity is full of promise. With the aid of better education, this general activity about intellectual subjects will work itself clear, as does running water. Our democracy is still in the Thersites stage as re- gards many things ; but Thersites was the forerun- ner of Pericks. We have already gone a good way toward re- alizing the hope of Dr. Shipley that " some toler- able share of the comforts of life " in our New World would be secured to those whose labors are employed in securing those comforts to all of us. In our New World the compensations of labor and the standard of living for the working classes are 220 THE HAND OF GOD such as not even Americans in 1773 would have thought possible. While the condition of free labor in America can never have been so degraded as in Europe, it was low enough when the independence of the republic was secured, and its constitution of government settled. This was due to the scarcity of population, which rendered it impossible for Ameri- cans as yet to really occupy their country and mas- ter its resources ; and to the aristocratic prejudices and arrangements which the country had inherited from Europe. An abundance of land open to settle- ment was by no means the solvent of social prob- lems which some would have us think it. When every American could get all the land he chose to occupy, the condition of the poorer class was at its worst. The great reason for the difference between our own times and those of Washington and Franklin in this respect, is that in America the laws of the economic order have been given a chance to show their beneficence. With the growth of numbers under our free conditions, there has been a still greater growth of industrial power, and an en- couragement to labor to employ inventive skill in the improvement of tools and methods of using them. This constant improvement has lowered the value of things, and increased that of persons, and IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 221 has thus enabled labor to secure constantly more favorable terms for itself in its partnerships with capital. For capital itself is a portion of those things whose value falls with the improvement in methods of producing them, while that of the laborer rises in comparison. By this change labor benefits in our country more than elsewhere, because there are fewer obstacles to its beneficent operation than in countries where social prejudice still holds labor back, and treats with a certain resentment any rapid improvement in its condition, finding an es- pecial and malicious enjoyment in exposing the fol- lies with which it, like every other class, abuses un- accustomed wealth. Under the operation of the economic laws of dis- tribution, there is a steady approach to equality of condition, through the laborer taking a constantly increasing share of the joint-product of labor and capital. Complete equality is neither possible nor desirable. There always will be those who possess those gifts of thrift, enterprise and capable over- sight, that are required in the " captains of industry," just as there will be men of unusual gifts in every other field of human exertion. These will always accumulate % wealth more rapidly than do men gener- ally, and their power to do so is a service to society, when employed within the limits set by honesty and 222 THE HAND OF GOD decency. We envy their gift more than there is any reason for, as though it brought them a finer en- joyment of life in making larger possessions possible to them. This envy is a social sin of our time, which poisons much happiness in the less wealthy classes, and is at bottom one of many forms of mammon-worship. As well envy the great artist, or the great poet, and think of his endowments as something deducted from what we should have possessed. All alike are our servants, and we are the better for their existence. We are, however, by no means at the end of that approach toward equality of condition, which has been so marked a feature of our social history dur- ing the last century in America. There will be a reduction in the hours of labor, an increase in its re- wards, and a general diffusion of comfort, such as we can no more imagine, than could the Americans of 1830 have imagined the change for the better which seventy years have accomplished. At that date our people died of cold and hunger every winter in great cities, but no man laid it to heart ; and Dr. Ezra T.Ely, after his first visit to the South, declared that the negro slave was better fed, clothed and housed, than the workingman in Philadelphia. At that time, men, women and children labored for twelve, thirteen and fourteen hours a day in our IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 223 factories, and received in return what would now be thought a mere pittance. The highest wages a woman could earn was twenty-five cents a day, whatever her employment. Fuel was so scarce that many rich people threw open their kitchens on winter mornings to the working people, that these might warm themselves thoroughly before going to their work. To those who know what has been the process of improvement, " experience worketh hope " of still better things in the future. The republic will have realized its destiny when it has shown the world that no wreck of the historic forms of society is required to satisfy the reasonable demands of the many to share in the material and intellectual results of the social movement. It will have " lifted the weight from the shoulders of all men " by establishing a free political and economic order, in which every man will be able to live his life under worthily human conditions, partaking of the best that the race has achieved, governing and guiding himself by the finest wisdom the centuries have bequeathed to us, and sharing in the freedom of a community really governed, because self-gov- erned. INDEX. Abelard, Abbe, 214. Aboriginal population of America, 12; condition of, '3- Abundance of land no solvent of social problems, 220. Adams, John, on the providen- tial settlement of America, 21 ; opposed to Irish lead- ers, 108. Adams, John Quincy, Secre- tary of State, 96; writes formula of "Monroe Doctrine," 96; favors the establishment of an Ameri- can state-system, 97. Adams, Samuel, favors adop- tion of United States Constitution, 75. Aggressions, English and American, 192, et seq. Alien and Sedition Acts, the, 80. America, aboriginal population of, n ; driven to alliance with France, 61 ; conceded the leading place on the western continent, 97 ; the vocation of, 200. American colonists, escape from persecution, 20; a picked and sifted element, 21. American indifference to sister republics, 101. American literature, begin- nings of, 41, et seq. American nation, area occupied by, 8; resources of, 9; created from warring ele- ments, 24. American opinion, divided condition of, on war for Independence, 52. American people, many of, favor monarchy, 63, 64. American republic, relations of, with sister republics, I 3 I - American sympathy with strug- gling patriots, 187. American Ulster, the, 20. American war for Indepen- dence, 5. Americans, colonial, religious and political differences of, 22; native, rise of, to emi- nence, 34 ; a self-governing people, 51. Andersonville Prison, the keeper of, 159. Anglican conception of church and state, 16. Anne, Queen, a zealous Angli- can, 48. Annexation, forcible, policy of, 195. Anti-Federalists oppose adop- tion of Constitution, 74. Arena, the (chap, ii.), 7-13. Aristocratic restrictions on suffrage removed, 113. Arnold, Matthew, on American political institutions, 208. Asiatic people, an, in America, II. Ballot, the, worthless to the freedman, 169. Barnes, Albert, temperance re- former, 1 20. 225 226 INDEX. Beecher, Lyman, delivers ser- mons on intemperance, 120; labors of, in cause of higher education in the West, 211. Behmenists, the, 19. Benezet, Anthony, opponent of slavery, 118. Bible account of a nation's history, i. Bible history, the writers of, 5. Bismarck, Prince von, 25. " Black Laws," the, of South Carolina, 159. Boston, selectmen of, opposed to Scotch-Irish, 22, 23. Braddock, Gen., stupidity of, 60. Breck, Samuel, on drunken- ness, 119. British armies in America poorly officered, 60. British Government hinders emigration to America, 67 ; ruins indigo industry of Southern States, 68. British Guiana, growth of, threatens absorption of Venezuela, 99. British officers, entertainment of, in America, 43. Browning, Elizabeth B.,"The Curse for a Nation," 196. Brynhild of the West, the, 98. Buchanan, James, administra- tion of, 138. Burgoyne, Gen., 60. Calhoun, John C., declares annexation of Texas essen- tial to slavery, 133. California, gambling in, 123; admitted to the Union, !35- Calvin, John, in favor of edu- cation, 208. Cambridge, University of, the stronghold of the Puritan party, 209. Canada, Washington opposed to French rule in, 61 ; rela- tion of, to slavery, 143. Canadian insurgents of 1837, 56. Canning, George, suggests " Monroe Doctrine," 95. Carey, Mathew, 173. Carib Indians introduce maize plant, 13. Carleton, Gen., 60. Carlyle, Thomas, on the Res- toration, 39; his theory of mankind, 152, 153. Carnegie, Andrew, example of, to be followed, 216. Census, the first, 105. Chalmers, Thomas, on respon- sibility for the poor, 173. Chaos and construction (chap, vii.), 63-78. Chatham, Lord, on Providence, 6; great speeches of, on American problem, 29; alluded to, 147, Chesapeake fisheries, dispute over, 68. Christian missionaries, work of, 188. Church of England, relation of, to the state, 46; in the colonies, 47, et seq.; the first two Georges care nothing for, 49. Clarendon, Lord, devotion of, to Anglican interests, 48. Clay, Henry, vacillating course of, 134; on the compromise measures, 136. Clayton-Bulwer treaty, 142. Cobbett, William, takes up his residence in America, 107. Code-Napoleon in Louisiana, 83- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, plans a community in America, 86. College of Philadelphia estab- lished through influence of Franklin, 210. INDEX. 227 Colonial American, the, fond of show, 43. Colonial days, standard of liv- ing in, 26. Colonies, American, sympathy between, 25; population of, in 1754, 52; lack of manu- factures in, 53; salt-famine in, 54. Colonists welded together by economic necessities, 29, 30; many in favor of Great Britain, 52; unused to dis- cipline, 52. Columbus, 10, ii. Commerce on the side of slav- ery, 140. " Confederate States of Amer- ica" formed, 145. Confederation, Articles of, a loose compact, 64. Constitution of the United States, a compromise, 71; eulogy of English states- man on, 72; Sir Henry Sumner Maine on, 73; ex- cites distrust, 74. Continental Congress, opening of, at Philadelphia, 55; discontent of soldiers with, 63; constitutional conven- tion called by, 68. Cooperation, lack of colonial, 54- Cornwallis the only British general of ability, 60. Covetousness the most perilous American vice, 177, et seq. Coxe, Bishop, deplores decline of public life in America, 204. Coxe, Tench, authority on in- dustrial statistics, 66. Creeds, European enmity of, extended to the colonists, 28. Cuba, situation of affairs in, 183. Darwinian principle, the, 181. Davis, Jefferson, compared with Abraham Lincoln, 149; deplores Lincoln's death, 158. Debtors, insolvent, imprison- ment of, 1 16. Democracy, principle of, 205; cherishes no delusions on intellectual equality, 218. Distribution, effect of economic laws of, 221. Disunion talk of anti-slavery orators, 143. Douglas, Stephen A., bill of, 138; debate of, with Lin- coln, 150. Dred Scott case, decision of, 126. Duche, Rev. Jacob, at opening of Continental Congress, Dunkers (" Brethren," or Ger- man Baptists) in America, 19. Dutch, the, colonize the Hud- son and the Delaware, 17. Economic laws of distribution, effect of, 221. Education, diffusion of, 208; adult, 214, et seq. Educational system, defect in, 214. Edwards, Jonathan, preaching of, 32, 33; his definition of true religion, 176. "Elect people," 3. Ely, Dr. Ezra T., compares negro slave with Philadel- phia workman, 222. Emancipation expected in the South, 124; opinion changes, 124. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, on representation, 207. Emigration, to America, British government hinders, 67; to Kansas, 139. Emmanuel College, 209. England, population of, at out- 228 INDEX. break of American Revo- lution, 52; in India, 189, et sff.; suggests aggression to America, 196 : vocation of, 199. English tradition potent to shape American ideas, 202. Equality, complete, neither possible nor desirable, 221. " Era of Good Feeling," 97; personal jealousies of, 132. " Essays to do Good," Cotton Mather's, 41. European immigration, no re- striction imposed upon, 103. European publicists criticise " Monroe Doctrine," 102. Everett, Edward, Gettysburg oration of, 150. Exiled princes make their home in America, 106. Expansion and invention (chap, viii.), 79-91. Expansion, fears of, 86. Faneuil, Peter, a slave-trader, 174. Farmer, American, disapproves of machinery, 89. Federalist Party, rapid extinc- tion of, 84. Federalists opposed to the Louisiana Purchase, 85. Ferdinand VII. abolishes Con- stitution of Spain, 94. Fifteenth Amendment, the, 163. First Church in Hartford, pas- tor of, 26. First welding (chap, iv.), 22- 38. Fisheries, the, furnish a pre- liminary step to actual settlement in North America, 13. Florida ceded by treaty with Spain, 132. Follen, Charles, gives impulse to gymnastic exercise, 112, 210. Fort Sumter, the firing on, 144. Founders, the (chap, iii.), 14-21. France, war of, with England, for North America, 43; vocation of, 199. Franklin, Benjamin, Deistic views of, 5, 6 ; characteris- tics of, 35; receives ap- pointment from British government, 35; testimony of, to Cotton Mather, 42 ; belief of, in Divine Provi- dence, 56; receives letter from Thomas Pownall, 62; memorable speech of, in Continental Congress, 69; on resistance of Anti-Fed- eralists to United States Constitution, 74; influence of, in establishing College of Philadelphia, 210. Freedmen, conduct of, 162. Freeman, E. A., cited, 199. Frelinghuysen, Jacob, preach- ing of, 32. Fremont, John C., alluded to, ISO- French alliance with America, reasons for, 61. French Revolution, the, con- tributes to augmentation of America, 106; democratic impulse of, 202. French settlements in America begun by Huguenots, 17. Friends, English, colonize Pennsylvania, 18; flock to hear Whitefield, 33; slave- holding banished from Society of, 1 18. Fugitive Slave Law, the, 126, 136. Fulton, Robert, builds steam- boat, 87. Gambling prevalent on steam- boats, 123; in California and Washington, 123. Gambling temper cherished by lotteries, 122. INDEX. 229 Garrison~ William Lloyd, and the Liberator, 128; and the Constitution, 143. Gates, Gen., 60. Gee, Joshua, insight of, into American conditions, 44. Genet, Citizen, handling of, by Washington, 76. Geneva the model community of Presbyterians and Puri- tans, 1 6. George III., a fervent church- man, 49; introduces a reign of favoritism and corrup- tion, 59; " No Compro- mise," his policy in Amer- ica, 59. German settlers in the middle colonies unwelcome, 23. German States, Great Britain could draw recruits from, 52. Germans, among the worst teachers, 212. Germany, a nation when divided, 24; vocation of, 199; influence of, in aca- demic organization, 210. Gibbon, Edward, alluded to, 66. God, will of, in the movements of history, 2, et seq, Gorlitz, theosophic theories of, 19. Grant, Gen. U. S., 156. Grants of European govern- ments cause disputes, 23. Great Awakening, the, 32. Great Britain, area of her na- tional domain, 8; reaps harvest of Canning's di- plomacy, 98. Greece, mission of, to nourish the sense of beauty, 199. Greek Christendom, relation of, to Syria, 14. Guizot, M., suggestive lectures of, 200. Hale, Sir Matthew, influence of writings of, upon Washington, 37; the real- ized ideal of the judge, 57. " Half-way covenant," the, 31. Halleck, Fitz-Greene, on Cot- ton Mather, 41. Hamilton, Alexander, influ- ences New York to adopt United States Constitu- tion, 7 5; tribute of Barthold Niebuhr to, 76; influence of, on policy of the govern- ment, 76; assists in pre- paring Washington's " Farewell Address," 77. Hancock, Gen. W. S., 156. Hancock, John, 46; a smug- gler, 174. Harris, Dr., on teaching arith- metic in public schools, 213. Harvard College, 209. Hayes, President Rutherford B., administration of, 162. Hayti, white settlers of, come to Philadelphia, 106. Hebrew prophets, teachers of present duty, 117. Hegemony of the continent, the (chap, ix.), 92-104. Henry, Patrick, 55; opposes adoption of Constitution, 74- Herder, on art and literature, 218. High-school, public, 211. Holy Alliance, the, supports Ferdinand VII., 94; over- throws the liberties of Spain, 131. " Holy Club," the, 32. Household suffrage, 203. Howard, Gen. O. O., 156. Howe, Gen., 60. Huguenots begin French set- tlements in America, 17. " Ian Maclaren "on America's policy of forcible annexa- tion, 195. 230 INDEX. Ice Age, the, II. " If," the Hebrew, written on our history, 131. Immigrant, the (chap, x.), 105- 116; a national American, ii i ; enlarges the range of intellectual interests, 112. Immigrants, rapid increase of, 107; good character of, 108; benefits of, 109; younger generation, trans- formed through public schools, 114. Independence, confidence in success of, not universal, 55; war for (chap, vi.), 51- 62. India, England in, 189 ; econo- mic condition of, 190. Indians, disputes of, regarding territory, 28. Indigo industry of Southern States ruined by British government, 68. Industrial development, a new era of, 170, et seq. Irish nationalist leaders, ex- perience of England with, 80. Italy, a nation, 24. Jackson, Andrew,defends New Orleans, 84; era of land speculation under, 174. Jackson, Gen. Thomas J., 156. Jahn, Father, 210. James, King, saying of, " No bishop, no king," 17 ; abolishes first Virginia company, 17. Japan opened to Western civil- ization, 187. Jay, John, treaty of, with Great Britain, 76. Jefferson, Thomas, succeeds to the Presidency, 79; mis- trust of, 79; fears not ful- filled, 81 ; good sense of, in purchasing Louisiana, 85; concerned about the first census, 105; opposed to slavery, 123; deserves credit for equality of citi- zenship, 202. Jehovah, relations of, to his people, 130. Jesuit fathers' estimate of na- tive American population, 12. Jewish people, the calling and election of, 3. Johnson, Andrew, President, 158; quarrels with his party, 160. Johnston, Gen. A. S., 156. Johnston, Prof., of Princeton, on immigration, no. Judea, special vocation of, 199. Kansas, struggle in, 138, et seq. Kipling, Rudyard, opinion of, on Hindoos, 190. Kirk, pledges to, broken, 47. Knox, John, fights for educa- tion in Scotland, 208. Labor, American, protection for, demanded, 66; short- ening the hours of, 215. Laborer, immigrant, economic condition of, improved, "S- Laboring class, wretchedness of, in great cities, 173. Latin or Romance nations, 14. Laud, Archbishop, 48. Lecky, on heroic period of American history, 54, 147. Lee, Gen. Robert E., 156. Leibnitz, saying of, 39. Lieber, Francis, alluded to, 76. Lincoln, Abraham, quotes Washington's General Or- der to his army, 58 ; on slav- ery, 128; inaugural ad- dress of, 146; compared with Jefferson Davis, 149; Gettysburg oration of, 1 50 ; religious views of, 151, et seq.; his method as a ruler, INDEX. 231 152; patriotism of, 153; second inaugural of, 154; death of, 158; speech of, in Independence Hall, 201. Locomotive invented by Ste- phenson, 88. Longstreet, Gen. James, 156. Lorimer, Prof., of Edinburgh, on equality of suffrage, 206. Lotteries suppressed, 122. Louisiana question, the, 81, et seq. ; purchase of the terri- tory, 82. Louisiana Purchase gives out- let on Pacific, 132. Lowell, James Russell, on American calling, 217. Luther, Martin, 15; saying of, 193- Mack, Alexander, gathers the Bunkers, 19. Maine, Sir Henry Sumner, on United States Constitu- tion, 73. Maize plant, evolution of, 31. " Man on Horseback," the, 198. Manhood-suffrage, objections to, 205 ; no regression from the principle of, 207. Marshall, Daniel, labors among the poor whites of the South, 34. Martineau, Harriet, and Henry Clay, 136. Massachusetts, General Court of, sets aside unfair bar- gain with Indians, 27 ; fos- ters education, 208. Massachusetts, Northmen on the coast of, 10; Shays' rebellion in, 65. Mather, Cotton, the first Amer- ican man of letters, 41 ; P'itz-Greene Halleckon, 41. Maurice, Frederick, quoted, 24. Mazzini, Joseph, preaches the principle of Nationality, 181. McCormick, Cyrus H., invents reaping-machine, 89. Meade, Gen. George G., 156. Mennonites, Dutch, emigrate to America, 18. Mexico attains to good govern- ment, 101 ; acquiesces in the annexation of Texas, 134; invaded and defeated by United States in the in- terests of slavery, 134, 135. Migrations, of people along the same parallels, 7 ; early, in America, southward trend Of, 12. Milan Decree, Napoleon's, in- solence of, 1 06. Militarism, dangers of, 197. Missionaries, Christian, work of, 1 88. Missouri Compromise,the, 136. Mob-law, demoralizing effect of, 163. Modern history traces every- thing to secondary causes, I. Moltke, von, Gen., on the American civil war, 147. Money, American talk about, J7S- " Monroe Doctrine," the, 96 ; criticised by European publicists, 1 02 ; accepted without protest by Euro- pean powers, 103 ; pre- vents action of Holy Alli- ance in the New World, 131 ; and the Cuban situa- tion, 184 ; benefit of, to Spanish America, 187. Monroe, James, formulates the " Monroe Doctrine," 96. Morse, Samuel, inventor of magnetic-electric tele- graph, 88. Napoleon III. sets up an em- pire in Mexico, 98, 99. National duty, new theory of, 185. 232 INDEX. National life, 4. National perpetuity and peace, conditions of, 178. Nationality, the principle of, preached by Mazzini, 181. Natural rights, responsibility of the nation for, 166, et seq, New England unable to feed her population, 30. New-Mooners, sect of, 19. Niebuhr, Barthold, tribute of, to Hamilton, 76. North Temperate zone the field of all great develop- ments in human history, 8. Northmen on the coast of Massachusetts, 10. Northwest Territory, organiza- tion of, 137. Numerical system developed by Asiatic Americans, 12. Osnabruck, Bishop of, 64. "Palatines" (Reformed), the, in America, 18. Papacy, quarrel of, with the Eastern Empire, 14. Parting of the ways, the (chap, xvi.), 183-198. Payne, Edward John, on the aboriginal population of America, n. Penn, William, welcomes num- erous sects to Pennsylva- nia, 19 ; his treatment of the Indians not an isolated fact in colonial history, 27. Pennsylvania, legislature of, abolishes slavery, 6. Perils of peace and prosperity, the (chap, xv.), 170-182. Philadelphia, patriotic women, of. S3- Phillips, Wendell, speaks for the preservation of the Union, 146. Pietist Lutherans in America, 18. Politics, the lower commercial spirit of, 179. Polk, James K., elected Presi- dent, 134. "Poor Richard," Franklin's, 42. Porteous, Dr., Bishop of Ches- ter, a native of Virginia, 49. Pownall, Thomas, letter of, to Franklin, 62. Priestly, Joseph, alluded to, 107. Principles at stake (chap, i.), i-6. Prisoners in prison-ships, tor- ture of, by Gen. Howe, 60. Property, rights of, 116. Prophets of reform, the (chap, xi.), 117-129; Hebrew, 117 ; no nation can dispense with, 117. Protestant Church, the, in Ire- land, 47. Protestant, the word, a potent spell in colonial times, 29. Protestants, differences arise among, 15. Providence makes use of sec- ondary agencies, 25. Puritan influence in Virginia, 17- Puritanism, a characteristic feature of the American mind, 40; influence of, 40. Puritans, the, buy lands from red men, 27 ; cooling of the religious atmosphere among, 31; and Presbyter- ians, resist an American bishopric, 50 ; English, be- come schoolmasters, 208. Quaker experiment in Penn- sylvania partially brought to an end by Scotch-Irish from Ulster, 19, 20, 23. Quakers, German, protest against man-stealing, 118. INDEX. 233 Reaping-machine invented by Cyrus Me Cormick, 89, et seq. Reconstruction and growth (chap, xiv.), 158-169. " Redemptioners," 119. Reed, Benjamin, American minister to England, 95. Reformation of the sixteenth century, 14. Reformed Church, the, 16. Religious instruction, neglect of, in schools and colleges, 213. Religious interest a great uniting force, 30. Religious liberty felt to be imperilled, 46. Rending of bonds, the (chap. v.), 39-5- Republic, destiny of the, 223. Revere, Paul, secures support of Samuel Adams in adopting United States Constitution, 75. " Revolution," America never had a, 51. Rhode Island, property qual- ification in, 202. Riel, Canadian insurgent, 56. Ritter, Karl, work of, on Com- parative Geography, 7. Rochambeau, Count, alluded to, 60. Roman Catholics seek refuge in Maryland, 18. Roman Empire, area of, 8. Rome called to develop great ideas of jural procedure, 199. Rosecrans, Gen. W. S., 156. Russia, area of, 8. Salt-famine throughout the colonies, 54. Salzburgers, the, 21. Santa Anna, President, abol- ishes local self-government in Mexico, 133. Schwenkf elders, sect of, 19. Science, incompetency of, 2. Scotch, the, seek homes in America, 18. Scotch-Irish, arrival of, un- welcome, 20,22 ; clergy set up schools, 208,209. Seeker, Dr., Archbishop of Canterbury, 49. Secondary agencies made use of by Providence, 25. Secondary causes, the work- ings of, 2. Separation of the colonies from Great Britain, causes of, 39. Separatists begin settlement of New England, 17. Settlers, first, hardships of, 25, et seq. Seward, William H., alluded to, 150. Shays, Daniel, rebellion of, 65. Sheffield, Lord, publishes book on American commerce, 66. Sheridan, Gen. Philip H., 156. Sherman, Gen. W. T., early views on the length of the war, 155 ; warns the South, 164. Shipley, Dr. Jonathan, Bishop of St. Asaph, on the American colonies in 1773, 200, 219. " Six Acts," the, of 1819, 107. Slavery, fathers of the repub- lic opposed to, 123; disap- pearing from Northern States, 123, 124; the South proclaims the permanence of, 128, 129; westward advance of, barred by pos- ition of Mexico, 132; rela- tions of, take character from Mexican War, 136. Soldiers, Revolutionary, dis- contented with Continental Congress, 63. South American countries in- experienced in self-govern- ment, 100. 234 INDEX. Southern troops, bravery of, 156. Spain, war with, 183. Spaniards and Portuguese sought mineral wealth in the New World, 9. Spaniards never properly colo- nists, 92 ; look upon Amer- ica as a source of revenue, 93- Spanish Empire, remnants of, left on our hands, 184. Spanish misrule a bitter inher- itance, 100. Spanish -American colonies re- volt from Spain, 92. State universities, erection of, 211. States, Confederated, quarrels between, 65. Steamboat constructed by Ful- ton, 87. Stearns, Shubbael, gathers Baptist churches in the South, 34. Stephenson, Robert, invents locomotive, 88. " Stille im Lande," sect of, 19. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, at- tacks " domestic slave- trade," 127. Strikes, public opinion on, 116. Stuart kingship, alliance of Anglicanism with, 16. Stuarts, the return of the, 39. Suffrage confined to property- holders, 108; aristocratic re- strictions on, removed, 113. Teaching profession, the, in America, 212. Temperance, American, be- comes "teetotal," 121. Temperance reform, impor- tance of, 119. Tennent, Gilbert, preaching of, 32, et seq. Teutonic Christendom breaks away from the Latin Church, 14. Teutonic peoples establish principle of representation, 72. Texas, annexation of, opposed by anti-slavery men, 125 ; settlement of, begun by Americans, 132; becomes independent, 133 ; annexa- tion of, pressed by the South, 133. Theodore, King of Abyssinia, on missionaries. 188. " Theology of inventions," 91. Thersites the forerunner of Pericles, 219. Thomas, Gen. George H., 156. Tucker, Rev. Josiah, on future of America, 67. Tyndall, John, on the explana- tions of science, 2. Ulster, Scotch-Irish settlers from, 20. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 127. Union, peril and triumph of the (chap, xiii.), 142-157; dissolution only a question of time, 142. University of Pennsylvania, the, 209. Venezuela, threatened absorp- tion of, into Queen's do- minions, 99. Virginia, Puritan influence in, 17- Vocation of the Republic, the (chap, xvii.), 199-223. Walpole, Sir Robert, 45. War, a, and its penalties (chap, xii.), 130-141. Washington, city of, improved morals in, 204, 205. Washington, George, character and greatness of, 36 ; God's unique gift to America, 56, 57 ; foresight of, 58 ; con- fidence of his soldiers in, 58; General Order to his INDEX. 235 army quoted by Lincoln, 58 } has poor opinion of Gen. Howe, 60 ; opposed to French rule in Canada, 61 ; opposed to kingship, 63 ; unanimously elected to the Presidency, 75; signs Jay's treaty with Great Britain, 76; bids farewell to public life, 77 ; his "Farewell Address," 77; treasurer of a lottery enter- prise, 122; emancipates his slaves, 123. Wealth, rapidity of its growth, 172. Webster, Daniel, opposed to annexation of Texas, 134. Welsh, John, 204. Wesley, Charles, 32. Wesley, John, 32. "White Man's Burden," the, 1 86, 189. Whitefield, George, 32, etseq. Whitman Walt, on art and lit- erature, 2(7. Williams, Roger, manifestoes of, 39. 4i- " Wilmot Proviso," the, 137. Wilson, Henry, on public life, 204. Wiseman, Cardinal, on art, 217. Wolfe, Gen. James, victory of, 42; mentioned, 60. Women, immigrant, condition of, improved, 115. Woolman, John, mentioned, 42 ; opponent of slavery, 118. Yancey, William L., 143. 171 THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. - i ;j-- 3 1205 00205 1488 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000859290 9 OK SHOP TITOWSKY TIN STREET .ruc M Y 1 U15 < . . ..,- . , .. ., + .* ' V- :.. ' 'i i m t. -,