\ 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. 


 
 
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