task imposed by
Fate upon the American people of creating a national unity out of this
heterogeneous material. The great experiment was, during this period,
singularly successful. The strength of the national sentiment and of
the tradition of freedom was very powerfully exhibited in the strain of
the great Civil War (1861-65) which maintained at a great cost the
threatened unity of the republic, and brought about the emancipation of
the negro slaves. And the Civil War produced in Abraham Lincoln a
national hero, and an exponent of the national character and ideals,
worthy to be set beside Washington. The America of Lincoln manifestly
stood for Liberty and Justice, the fundamental ideals of Western
civilisation.

But in this great moulding tradition of freedom there was one dubious
and narrowing element. Accustomed to regard herself as having achieved
liberty by shaking off her connection with the Old World, America was
tempted to think of this liberty as something peculiar to herself,
something which the 'effete monarchies' of the Old World did not, and
could not, fully understand or share, something which exempted her from
responsibility for the non-American world, and from the duty of aiding
and defending liberty beyond her own limits. In the abounding
prosperity of this fortunate land, liberty was apt to be too readily
identified merely with the opportunity of securing material prosperity,
and the love of liberty was apt to become, what indeed it too often is
everywhere, a purely self-regarding emotion. The distance of the
republic from Europe and its controversies, its economic
self-sufficiency, its apparent security against all attack, fostered
and strengthened this feeling. While the peoples of the Old World
strove with agony and travail towards freedom and justice, or wrestled
with the task of sharing their own civilisation with the backward races
of the globe, the echo of their strivings penetrated but faintly into
the mind of America, like the noises of the street dimly heard through
the shuttered windows of a warmed and lighted room. To the citizens of
the Middle West and the Far West, especially, busy as they were with
the development of vast untapped resources, the affairs of the outer
world necessarily appeared remote and insignificant. Even their
newspapers told them little about these far-off events. Naturally it
appeared that the function of the republic in the progress of the world
was to till its own