in a foreign policy at once pacific, honourable, and firm.

What American will say that these reasonable expectations, so warmly cherished in so many lands, have been really fulfilled in the career of his country?

Prosperous beyond the dreams of her first founders the Republic has indeed become. Already she rivals the old powers that had monopolized so long the title of 'great' in the numbers of her population, while in the extent of her dominions and in the abundance of her resources she leaves the most of them far in the rear. Her commercial marine has outstripped our own; her railways outnumber the combined railways of all the earth beside; her people are better fed, better clothed, better housed, better taught than ever a people were before-than any other people are now. If a man or a nation could live by bread alone, one would say that there was nothing lacking to America-that she had achieved and was achieving the uttermost good.

How is it, then, that from this country-so rich, so powerful, so independent-there come to us such sounds of discord and of confusion? How is it that the weaker neighbours of the Great Republic seek alliances in Europe against their mighty sister? How is it that the

ambassadors of the nation which was to demonstrate that Law is nowhere so safe as in the arms of Liberty, should have been found proclaiming piracy for a policy, and menacing modern Christendom with the language of ancient Rome? How is it, above all, that the government of free America should have given its sympathies, if not its aid, to the machinations of despotic Russia against the independence and the liberties of the West ?

While the substantial America has so waxed great and rich, has the ideal America-the America which drew to itself the interest and the hope of mankind-has this withered and waned? Here is the question which all true lovers of America in the Old World have long been asking the question which is forced upon them with new intensity by the events now transpiring in all

parts of the Republic, by the outrages perpetrated upon the people in Kansas, and upon the represen tatives of the people at Washington. Let us see if to this question any hopeful answer may be found.

European observers of American affairs are constantly liable to overlook the one great fact which Americans themselves have hitherto studiously obscured and done their best to ignore, that America is not one America, but two Americasnot a nation, but a Union-and a union not only of so many separate states, but of states which divide themselves by irresistible natural affinities into two great groups.

The thirteen English colonies which formed the original Union had been settled at different times and in very different circumstances by different classes of Englishmen. The north-eastern colonies known as New England were peopled mainly by the descendants of Godfearing, intelligent, industrious men who had gone thither for 'conscience sake,' and who carried into their new home the love of constitutional liberty, the respect for religion, the just estimate of the importance of education, and the honest spirit of enterprise which distinguished the best portion of the upper and the middle classes of England in the seventeenth century. The New England settlers were Puritans, with all the virtues and all the failings of the Puritan character; and with the obnoxious Puritanism which they bequeathed to their descendants they bequeathed to them also that noble Puritanism to which we in England owe so much of the good we have kept in Church and State. Throughout the New England colonies, learning and industry were held in honour from the beginning. Hardly had the Plymouth colonists cleared away a fringe of forest from the shores of Massachusetts Bay before they founded a University for the training of teachers and preachers,' a new Cambridge, to perpetuate in the Transatlantic world the remembrance and the influence of that English Alma Mater, nearly onehalf of whose living sons, we are told, were to be found in New England between 1620 and 1643.

Very unlike the colonies of New England were those of Georgia, the two Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland. These colonies (with the exception of Georgia, which was settled, as a speculation, at the beginning of the eighteenth century) had been chiefly peopled by emigrants, Catholic and Episcopalian, who had been sent to the New World by the royal authority, or who had fled thither to escape the rule of the Commonwealth. Virginia, the oldest of these colonies, and the most important, was made up of a very mongrel population. There were Cavalier gentlemen, of good family and of character, holding large estates; and Cavalier vagabonds, with pockets empty of money and heads empty of wisdom, vulgar, swaggering, lazy, making trouble for the magistrates, and fleecing the tradesmen. There were highspirited refugees, who had escaped the sword of Cromwell's men; and low-spirited blackguards, the refuse of Alsatia, who had been sent away to the New World to rid the restored Government of Charles II. of their importunity. As a royal colony, Virginia had been entirely subjected to the regulations of the home Administration, and the ranks of the population had been continually recruited from the prisons and the workhouses of England. Convicts and paupers were sent thither, and sold into servitude ; poor girls were stolen and exported thither, and bought for tobacco by the highest bidders. There the Church of England was by law established, but got only a sorry living from a people who were more ready to fight with the Puritans than they were to work for their own parsons. As the first land settled by Englishmen, Virginia esteemed herself the true original America; and the Virginians, proud both of their politics and of their historical precedence, looked down upon their fellow-colonists.

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ginia, in the days of Elizabeth, had been honoured with the title of 'dominion,' and the name figures upon old coins of 'Queen Bess,' who styled herself Queen of England, Ireland, France, and Virginia.' While the New England colonies were swift to hail the establishment

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of the Commonwealth, Virginia held out against the Protector, and invited Prince Charles to come over from his dawdling in Holland, and beking in Virginia.' Nothing, in short, could have been more antagonistic to the habits, manners, opinions, tone, and temper of the New England people, than the habits, manners, opinions, tone, and temper of the Virginians; and the other Southern colonies partook more of the Virginian than of the New England spirit. Between New England and the South lay the great colonies of New York and Pennsylvania, with the smaller ones of New Jersey and Delaware. These colonies, again, differed in their character, as in their origin, from their neighbours on either side. But, in the main, their affinities were stronger with the Northern than with the Southern spirit. The orderly civic virtues of Holland had been quickened in the people of New York by the infusion of English resolution and enterprise. Whatever was best in the Quaker character was to be found in Pennsylvania, expanded and animated by the influence of the adventurous colonial life.

The institution of African slavery existed in all the colonies: but as it had been first introduced into Virginia, so had it been especially fostered in the Southern settlements by the temper of the inhabitants and by the nature of their occupations. The Southern colonies were more purely agricultural than those of the North; and while in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, prædial slavery was almost unknown, in the more Southern colonies the chief part of the field labour was performed by slaves.

Such was the condition of the colonies at the close of the Revolutionary contest. United in the struggle for independence, the Americans, after that great object was achieved, soon found themselves somewhat divided in sentiment when they came to settle the establishment of liberty. Somewhat divided in sentiment, we say; for the universal discussion of the fundamental principles of society and government which had accompanied the conflict, had not been

without its fruits in all parts of the country. Throughout the new Union, the leading spirits pronounced themselves very strongly upon the incompatibility of the institution of domestic slavery with the great principles for which the colonists had been doing battle, and upon which they proposed to organize the great nation they were to found.

Not seldom during the war had the consequences of the very different training which the two great sections of the Anglo-American colonists had received, been manifested in collisions between the overbearing spirit of the Southern men, and the independent temper of their Northern confederates. In the letters of Washington himself, in the private correspondence of other distinguished Americans, and in the Journals of Congress, we find frequent indications that the gentlemen of the ex-royal Southern colonies were indisposed to meet their coadjutors of Puritan, Dutch, or Quebec origin on terms of frank and absolute equality. There exists a remarkable letter addressed by the Rev. Jacob Duché, the first chaplain of Congress, to General Washington, immediately after the Declaration of Independence. In this letter the reverend gentleman, after strongly condemning the extreme step which the Congress had taken, and declaring that he can no longer consent to officiate as chaplain in an assembly of avowed rebels,' urges the general to recede with him from the way on which the colonists were entering. His appeal is eloquently worded, but we allude to it here because he brings to bear upon Washington the argument, that this measure of the Declaration' had

been chiefly forced upon the Americans by the delegates from New England, who were persons with whom it was not fit that a Virginian gentleman should be associated. Persons, sir,' he says, 'whom you or I would be ashamed to invite to our tables.'

The domineering tone of the Southern Americans re-appeared in the early debates and deliberations of the confederated Congress. Yet as the Southern representatives were almost equally with their

Northern colleagues, disposed to prepare the way for the gradual abolition of that institution of slavery which, more than anything else, tended to keep alive the antirepublican and offensive element in the Southern character, it might have been anticipated that little harm would come of all this, and that what harm did come of it would have but a brief duration.

But in the fact that it was found necessary to prepare the way' for the abolition of slavery, lay the scarce-discerned seed of America's greatest dangers, the seed of the Upas tree which has since sprung up to overshadow her institutions, and to which the axe must now be laid, if the Republic is to live and thrive.

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In the Northern colonies, slavery was already dead or dying; in the Southern colonies it was simply 'held for execution.' The Congress could not annihilate at a blow the large slave property of the Carolinas, of Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia. Although the Southern Colonies had by no means borne the brunt of the revolutionary struggle, Massachusetts alone having furnished many more men to the republican armies than the five Southern colonies together-yet the prominent part taken by eminent Southern men in the councils of war and peace, and the rank claimed for herself by Virginia particularly, gave to the South an undue preponderance in the discussions relative to the establishment of the Government. The South insisted upon a qualified recognition of slavery in the Southern States, and the North conceded an absurd, and, as events have proved, a fatal condition, by virtue of which the slave population of the South, which to the laws of the South was known only as property, should be considered in settling the basis of representation in the national legislature as partially human, every slave being reckoned as three-fifths