were reduced to such
a degree of inanition as to paralyze the nation, to cause internal
anarchy, and to check the general prosperity of the country.

After having investigated the causes which may induce the
Anglo-Americans to disunite, it is important to inquire whether, if the
Union continues to subsist, their Government will extend or contract
its sphere of action, and whether it will become more energetic or more
weak.

The Americans are evidently disposed to look upon their future condition
with alarm. They perceive that in most of the nations of the world the
exercise of the rights of sovereignty tends to fall under the control of
a few individuals, and they are dismayed by the idea that such will also
be the case in their own country. Even the statesmen feel, or affect
to feel, these fears; for, in America, centralization is by no means
popular, and there is no surer means of courting the majority than by
inveighing against the encroachments of the central power. The Americans
do not perceive that the countries in which this alarming tendency to
centralization exists are inhabited by a single people; whilst the fact
of the Union being composed of different confederate communities is
sufficient to baffle all the inferences which might be drawn from
analogous circumstances. I confess that I am inclined to consider the
fears of a great number of Americans as purely imaginary; and far from
participating in their dread of the consolidation of power in the hands
of the Union, I think that the Federal Government is visibly losing
strength.

To prove this assertion I shall not have recourse to any remote
occurrences, but to circumstances which I have myself witnessed, and
which belong to our own time.

An attentive examination of what is going on in the United States will
easily convince us that two opposite tendencies exist in that country,
like two distinct currents flowing in contrary directions in the same
channel. The Union has now existed for forty-five years, and in the
course of that time a vast number of provincial prejudices, which were
at first hostile to its power, have died away. The patriotic feeling
which attached each of the Americans to his own native State is become
less exclusive; and the different parts of the Union have become more
intimately connected the better they have become acquainted with each
other. The post, *t that great instrument of intellectual intercourse,
now reaches into the b