GIOUS.
It has been said in the Introduction to this essay that every living
nation receives from Providence a special work or mission in the
progress of society, to accomplish which is its destiny, or the end for
which it exists; and that the special mission of the United States is
to continue and complete in the political order the Graeco-Roman
civilization.
Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American Republic
alone has a destiny, or the ability to add any thing to the
civilization of the race. Canada and the other British Provinces,
Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and the rest of the
South American States, might be absorbed in the United States without
being missed by the civilized world. They represent no idea, and the
work of civilization could go on without them as well as with them. If
they keep up with the progress of civilization, it is all that can be
expected of them. France, England, Germany, and Italy might absorb the
rest of Europe, and all Asia and Africa, without withdrawing a single
laborer from the work of advancing the civilization of the race; and it
is doubtful if these nations themselves can severally or jointly
advance it much beyond the point reached by the Roman Empire, except in
abolishing slavery and including in the political people the whole
territorial people. They can only develop and give a general
application to the fundamental principles of the Roman constitution.
That indeed is much, but it adds no new element nor new combination of
preexisting elements. But nothing of this can be said of the United
States.
In the Graeco-Roman civilization is found the state proper, and the
great principle of the territorial constitution of power, instead of
the personal or the genealogical, the patriarchal or the monarchical;
and yet with true civil or political principles it mixed up nearly all
the elements of the barbaric constitution. The gentile system of Rome
recalls the patriarchal, and the relation that subsisted between the
patron and his clients has a striking resemblance to that which
subsists between the feudal lord and his retainers, and may have had
the same origin. The three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into
which the Roman people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may
have been, as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their
origin, but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the
division of each tri
|