necessary to assume that any open or explicit bargaining had been made. But in the following year it became known that large sums had been improperly, if not dishonestly, paid into the Republican campaign fund by the great insurance companies of New York, and that in one instance the company's books had been falsified to conceal the evidence of this illegal use of a trust fund. It was plain that such contributions would hardly have been made without a confident expectation of receiving valuable favours in return. Judge Parker's charges were, therefore, in essence justified.

At the election, however, Mr. Roosevelt was so overwhelmingly successful as to make the result certain within two hours after the polls had closed. In the popular vote he had a majority of nearly 2,000,000, while in the Electoral College he had 336 votes as against 140 given to Judge Parker. Yet when analysed, it was apparent that his great success was due largely to the defection at the polls of the Hearst and Bryan voters. The total number of ballots cast in the country was less by nearly half a million than those which had been cast in 1900, in spite of the growth in population. It was not, then, so much an increase in the Republican vote as a decrease in the Democratic, that brought about a result which on the face of it seemed cataclysmic. No sooner had the news of his success been carried to the President, than he gave out a written statement from the White House to the effect that under no circumstances would he be a candidate for another nomination.34

President Roosevelt entered upon his second term in March, 1905, under happy auspices and with a great majority of his own party in control of Congress. What 34 Text in New York Times, November 9, 1904.

he might actually do thereafter was uncertain. How far his efforts in behalf of honesty and equal justice might be effectual in the face of sinister and reactionary influences, none could say. But he had at least, by speech and act, committed the powerful organisation of which he was the head to a new and truer policy and one consistent with the ideals of its founders,-a policy from which thereaf ter it would be not only difficult but base to swerve.

CHAPTER XVI

THE TRANSFORMED REPUBLIC

IN the twenty years which followed the first inauguration of President Cleveland, the philosophic observer finds a multiplicity of tendencies and of achieved results, among the maze of which it is often difficult to disentangle those that possess supreme significance. No period in the whole history of the Republic had been so fraught with the consummation of changes long impending. It was a period of precipitation. In it a score of influences which for many years had been almost imperceptibly at work, now with a rapid rush wrought out results so swiftly and so surely as to daze the purblind and confound the calculations of conservative students of political and social history.

The central fact which dominates these twenty years of evolution is the fact that in them the United States at last attained a genuine national unity. Whatever orators and political theorists may have said and written during the preceding century, no dispassionate analyst of American conditions could blink the truth that the Federal Republic throughout that century had been, not one nation, but several nations, held together, so to speak, mechanically, rather than blended chemically in a complete identity of sentiment and interest. The fact might well seem odd to those who took a purely superficial view and constructed a theoretical argument. Here was a people mainly of English stock, occupying a continuous territory, speak

ing the same language, and possessing the same racial, governmental, and social traditions. In the War of Independence, the colonies had resisted a common enemy in defence of a common principle, and had won a victory of which the glory was a common heritage. They had voluntarily accepted the rule of a central government in which the rights of each constituent part were carefully safeguarded. In all this there was to be detected the presence of influences making for a more perfect unification. How came it, then, that actual unity was not attained until more than a century had elapsed? What was the cause which kept the centrifugal and the centripetal forces so nearly balanced as to make it often doubtful which would finally prevail?

The anomaly was the more interesting because, from the very outset, the drift toward a true nationalisation of the Republic had been clearly indicated. Although the Revolution itself was succeeded by an ebbing of national energy, this merely evidenced the lassitude of a reaction. It was swiftly followed by a vigorous impulse which came from the South and from the West, and which was personified in the two great leaders, Calhoun and Clay. While Federalist New England was sulking in sterile criticism or impotently muttering treason, these two ardent souls were urging a boldly aggressive policy the adoption of which would inevitably bind the States together. They spurned the timid temporising of their elders, and flung the gauntlet of defiance in the face of Britain. Calhoun's early statesmanship urged the construction of "great permanent roads for defence connecting more closely the interests of various sections of this great country." Clay personified the spirit of the West, its impatience of tradi tional restraints, its thirst for expansion even at the cost of

conquest, and its conviction that the Government at Wash ington should give the vivifying impulse which the individual States withheld. In the early years of the nineteenth century it really seemed as though the barriers between one section and another were soon to be demolished. Canals were cut and other waterways were opened. Steamboats began to ply between the growing cities. Great roads were built across the mountains. Meanwhile, the constructive jurist, Chief Justice Marshall, a native of Virginia, was strengthening the authority of the central government by holding the Supreme Court to his broad. views of constitutional interpretation. It appeared at that time as though, within a few decades, facility of intercourse, commercial interests, and a growing pride in material and moral progress would link the States so closely and so surely as to give the natural ties of race and language their full effect.

It was of course the blight of slavery which deferred. this consummation-not because of any moral taint associated with that institution, but because of the economic clash which it made inevitable. It not merely kept the South a purely agricultural community without the varied industries which flourished in the North, but it erected the breeding of slaves into a highly profitable occupation. This special interest caused in the South a reaction against the centralising, unifying tendency which had earlier been noticeable. It paralysed the larger patriotism of Calhoun and his able followers and forced them into a narrow particularism and the exaltation of the State above the Nation. Their political genius was thenceforth devoted to the undoing of what they had before accomplished and to the stifling of a sentiment which was beginning to prevail. For many years thereafter, the 1 See Reed, The Brothers' War (Boston, 1906).