eration. Genoa and Lucca were but names on the map, asking only to be forgotten while they lived the passive and aimless lives of beings who have survived all the associations that make life a blessing. While San Marino, still preserving in her little territory of seventeen miles square the spirit which had carried her unchanged through twelve centuries of comparative independence, seemed a living confirmation of the favorite doctrine of monarchical publicists, that republics, to be durable, must be small, industrious, and unpretending.

While the incapacity of the people for self-government seemed thus to have been set in the strongest light by the failure of every people that had undertaken to unite it with material development, the power of man to govern man, both with an absolute and a limited authority, seemed to have been set in a light equally clear and equally strong. The Seven Years' War had shown what a small state can do against fearful odds, when its resources are developed and applied by a man of genius. Russia was still pursuing, under Catharine, the career of internal improvement and external expansion which she had begun under Peter. The throne of the Hapsburgs had never appeared more firmly rooted, nor their crown more dazzling; and the hand which the young Emperor, emulous of philosophic renown, held out to his people, was the hand of imperial condescension. Never, too, had England been so powerful abroad, or so pros

perous at home; and never before had so much happiness been diffused over so wide a space, under any form of government, as was diffused over her vast possessions under her aristocratical monarchy.

Spain, it is true, had fallen into a deep sleep. But the brief career of Alberoni, within the memory of men still living, had shown startled Europe how much vitality was slumbering, undreamed of, in the lethargic mass; and how much a single will may do when it is an intelligent and a strong one. And if France excited any doubts in the minds of thoughtful partisans of monarchy, was there not enough in her profane philosophy, in her infidelity under the garb of formal devotion, and her insane trifling with all that was venerable and sacred in human as well as in divine things, under the specious pretext of philanthropy, to explain the degradation of a power which had more than once given laws to the continent?

But beneath this smooth exterior there was an internal fermentation, a feverish restlessness, a longing, vague in the beginning, but growing every day more definite, and even breaking out at times in energetic protests and warnings of deep significance. To those who had read history aright, it was evident that that natural harmony which makes form the spontaneous expression of substance, enabling you to interpret the inner life by the outward manifestation, and which reconciles anomalies and contradictions by voluntary concessions and ready

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adaptation, was lost forever. grudgingly, as an extortion, the labor which his father had given cheerfully as his lord's unquestioned due. The peasant hated the noble who trampled down his grain with his dogs and horses, and forbade him to fence out the hares and rabbits who ate with impunity the vegetables which he had planted and tended for the food of his children. The merchant dreaded monopolies; the manufacturer dreaded new edicts; industry in every form feared interference and repression under the name of protection and guidance. The man of letters sighed for freedom of thought; the lawyer, for an harmonious code; the rich man, for an opportunity to employ his wealth to advantage, and make himself felt in the world; the soldier, for promotion by service; society, through all its classes, for the correction of abuses, which in some form or other were felt by all. Two worlds, two irreconcilable systems, stood face to face, the Middle Ages, with ideas drawn from the convent and the feudal castle, and the eighteenth century, with ideas drawn from the compass and the printing-press; and every day the gulf between them grew wider and deeper.

But in the thirteen Colonies of British America there was no such contradiction between the government and the people. There were no Middle Ages to efface; no feudal abuses to correct; no institutions which had outlived their usefulness, to tear up by the roots. They had been accustomed

from the beginning to regulate their domestic affairs according to their own conception of their interests; and they were contented to leave their foreign affairs in the hands of the mother country in return for her protection. But they felt that that protection was no free gift; that the restrictions which they accepted for their commerce and manufactures transmuted every shilling which the English treasury expended on their behalf into pounds of profit for the English merchant and manufacturer. Dependence in this form they could submit to, for, though sometimes pushed to the verge of oppression, there was no humiliation in it. It was the dependence of the industrious child upon the thrifty parent; a habit outliving the necessity whence it sprang. And they had too much of the English love of precedent and English reverence for law about them to wish for any changes which did not seem to be the necessary consequence of acknowledged facts. They loved their mother country with the love of children, who, forsaking their homes under strong provocation, when time has blunted the sense of injury, turn back to them in thought, with a lively recollection of early associations and endearments, -a tenderness and a longing not altogether free from self-reproach. To go to England was to go home. To have been there was a claim to especial consideration. They studied English history as the beginning of their own; a first chapter which all

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must master thoroughly who would understand the sequel. England's literature was their literature. Her great men were their great men. when her flag waved over them, they felt as if the spirit which had borne it in triumph over so many bloody fields had descended upon them with all its inspiration and all its glory. They gave English names to their townships and counties; and if a name had been ground enough to build a pretension upon, more than one English noble, who already numbered his acres in the Old World by thousands, might have claimed tens of thousands in the new. They loved to talk of St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey; and, with the Hudson and the Potomac before their eyes, could hardly persuade themselves that the Thames was not the first of rivers.

More especially did they rejoice to see Englishmen and converse with them. The very name was a talisman that opened every door, broke down the barriers of the most exclusive circle, and transformed the dull retailer of crude opinions and stale jests into a critic and a wit.

In nine years, years full of incident, and which passed so rapidly that the keenest eye was unable to see what a mighty work they were doing, — all this was changed radically and forever. The thirteen Colonies became thirteen United States, with a name and a flag, and allies, and a history of their own; great men of their own to point to,