heroic tales.

* * * * *

DEMOCRACY AND THE SECESSION WAR.

The interest which foreign peoples take in our civil war proceeds from
two causes chiefly, though there are minor causes that help swell the
force of the current of feeling. The first of these causes is the
contemplation of the check which has been given by the war's occurrence
to our march to universal American dominion. For about seventy-two years
our "progress," as it was called, was more marvellous than the dreams of
other nations. In spite of Indian wars, of wars with France and England
and Mexico, of depredations on our commerce by France and England and
Barbary, of a currency that seemed to have been created for the
promotion of bankruptcy and the organization of instability, of biennial
changes in our tariffs and systems of revenue, of competition that ought
to have been the death of trade,--in spite of these and other evils,
this country, in the brief term of one not over-long human life,
increased in all respects at a rate to excite the gravest fears in the
minds of men who had been nursed on the balance-of-power theory. A new
power had intruded itself into the old system, and its disturbing force
was beyond all calculation. Between the day on which George Washington
took the Presidential oath and the day when South Carolina broke her
oath, our population had increased from something like three millions to
more than thirty-one millions; and in all the elements of material
strength our increase had far exceeded our growth in numbers. When the
first Congress of the old Union met, our territory was confined to a
strip of land on the western shore of the Atlantic,--and that territory
was but sparsely settled. When the thirty-sixth Congress broke up, our
territory had extended to the Pacific, on which we had two States, while
other communities there were preparing to become States. It did seem as
if Coleridge's "august conception" was about to become a great fact.
"The possible destiny of the United States of America," said that mighty
genius, "as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen, stretching from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and
speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august
conception." To all appearance in 1860, there would be a hundred
millions of freemen here, and not far from twenty millions of slaves, at
the close of the nineteenth century; and middle-aged men