ion of the Spanish-American
colonies from Spain; for we would thereby have proved that we did not
deserve either liberty or independence.

Over-Mastering Importance of the Union.

The Revolutionary war itself had certain points of similarity with the
struggles of which men like Bolivar were the heroes; where the parallel
totally fails is in what followed. There were features in which the
campaigns of the Mexican and South American insurgent leaders resembled
at least the partisan warfare so often waged by American Revolutionary
generals; but with the deeds of the great constructive statesman of the
United States there is nothing in the career of any Spanish-American
community to compare. It was the power to build a solid and permanent
Union, the power to construct a mighty nation out of the wreck of a
crumbling confederacy, which drew a sharp line between the Americans of
the north and the Spanish-speaking races of the south.

In their purposes and in the popular sentiment to which they have
appealed, our separatist leaders of every generation have borne an
ominous likeness to the horde of dictators and half-military,
half-political adventurers who for three quarters of a century have
wrought such harm in the lands between the Argentine and Mexico; but the
men who brought into being and preserved the Union have had no compeers
in Southern America. The North American colonies wrested their
independence from Great Britain as the colonies of South America wrested
theirs from Spain; but whereas the United States grew with giant strides
into a strong and orderly nation, Spanish America has remained split
into a dozen turbulent states, and has become a byword for anarchy and
weakness.

The Separatist Feeling.

The separatist feeling has at times been strong in almost every section
of the Union, although in some regions it has been much stronger than in
others. Calhoun and Pickering, Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris, Wendell
Phillips and William Taney, Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis--these and
many other leaders of thought and action, east and west, north and
south, at different periods of the nation's growth, and at different
stages of their own careers, have, for various reasons, and with widely
varying purity of motive, headed or joined in separatist movements. Many
of these men were actuated by high-minded, though narrow, patriotism;
and those who, in the culminating catastrophe of all the separatist
agitation