was this same provision of the Constitution which stood
sponsor for the very earliest steps which, in the construction of the
Cumberland Road and other military or post routes, the young republic
took in the path of practical federalism.

To those Americans who received the cause of State Sovereignty as a
trust from their fathers and grandfathers before them, the cause
doubtless appears a noble one; but to the outsider, unbiassed by such
inherited sentiment, it seems evident, first, that the cause, however
noble, is also hopeless; and, second, that it is unreasonable that in
the forlorn effort to preserve one particular shred of a fabric already
so tattered, the United States as a nation should be exposed to frequent
dangers of friction with other Powers, and, what is more serious, should
be made, once in every decade or so, to stand before the world in the
position of a trader who repudiates his obligations.

And if I seem to speak on what is after all a domestic subject with
undue vehemence (as I cannot hope that I shall not seem to do to the
minds of residents on the Pacific Coast), it is only because it is
impossible for an earnest well-wisher of the United States living abroad
not to feel acutely (while it does not seem to me that Americans at home
are sensible) how much the country suffers in the estimate of other
peoples by its present anomalous position. When two business concerns in
the United States enter into any agreement, each assumes the other to be
able to control its own agents and representatives, nor will it accept a
plea of inability to control them as excuse for breach of contract.

It may be that a select circle of the statesmen and foreign office
officials in other countries are familiar with the intricacies of the
American Constitution, but the masses of the people cannot be expected
so to be, any more than the masses of the American people are adepts in
the constitutions of those other countries. And it is, unfortunately,
the masses which form and give expression to public opinion. In these
days it is not by the diplomacies of ambassadors or the courtesies of
monarchs that friendships and enmities are created between nations. The
feelings of one people towards another are shaped in curious and
intangible ways by phrases, sentiments, ideas--often trivial in
themselves--which pass current in the press or travel from mouth to
mouth. It is a pity that the United States should in this particular
exp