century may be rated higher or lower, but in the Civil War, in
which the elder brothers of so many men now living bore their part, the
people of the North and of the South alike displayed far more heroic
qualities.

In the second place, the War of Independence and of the Revolution lacked
some of the characteristics of other national uprisings. It was not a
revolt against grievous oppression or against a wholly foreign
domination, but against a political system which the people mildly
resented and which only statesmen felt to be pernicious and found to be
past cure. The cause appealed to far-seeing political aspiration and
appealed also to turbulent and ambitious spirits and to whatever was
present of a merely revolutionary temper, but the ordinary law-abiding
man who minded his own business was not greatly moved one way or the
other in his heart.

The subsequent movement which, in a few years after independence was
secured, gave the United States a national and a working Constitution was
altogether the work of a few, to which popular movement contributed
nothing. Of popular aspiration for unity there was none. Statesmen knew
that the new nation or group of nations lay helpless between pressing
dangers from abroad and its own financial difficulties. They saw clearly
that they must create a Government of the Union which could exercise
directly upon the individual American citizen an authority like that of
the Government of his own State. They did this, but with a reluctant and
half-convinced public opinion behind them.

The makers of the Constitution earned in a manner the full praise that
has ever since been bestowed on them. But they did not, as it has often
been suggested they did, create a sort of archetype and pattern for all
Governments that may hereafter partake of a federal character. Nor has
the curious machine which they devised--with its balanced opposition
between two legislative chambers, between the whole Legislature and the
independent executive power of the President, between the governing power
of the moment and the permanent expression of the people's will embodied
in certain almost unalterable laws--worked conspicuously better than
other political constitutions. The American Constitution owes its
peculiarities partly to the form which the State Governments had
naturally taken, and partly to sheer misunderstanding of the British
Constitution, but much more to the want at the time of any stron