of midsummer, A. D. 1262 (one year before the battle of Largs, which saved Scotland from the invasion of this very Hákon), the Southern, Western and Northern Quarters accepted the King of Norway as their sovereign, while in 1264 (the year of the summoning of the first representative Parliament of England by Earl Simon de Montfort) the remaining districts which had not yet recognized the Norwegian Crown, now held by Magnus son of Hákon, made a like submission. Thenceforward Iceland has followed the fortunes first of Norway and then of Denmark. In 1814, when Norway was severed from the Danish and transferred to the Swedish Crown, Iceland ought to have gone with Norway. But nobody at the Congress of Vienna knew or cared about the matter1: and so Iceland remains attached to Denmark, for which she has little love.

With the free republic the literature which had given it lustre withered up and disappeared. Only one work of high merit, the religious poem called The Lily, was produced in the centuries that succeeded down to the Reformation, when the spirit of the people was again stirred, and a succession of eminent writers began which has never failed down to our own day. But in the darkest times, in the ignorance and gloom of the fifteenth century, in the pestilences and famine caused by the terrible volcanic eruptions of the eighteenth, which are said to have destroyed one-fifth of the population, the Icelanders never ceased to

1 The preliminaries to the Treaty of Kiel by which Norway was severed from the Danish Crown to be attached to the Swedish refer to Iceland, the Faeroe Isles, and Greenland as having never belonged to Norway.'

cherish and enjoy their ancient Sagas. No farmhouse wanted its tiny store of manuscripts, which were and still are read aloud in the long nights of winter, while the women spin and the men make nets and harness. And it is beyond doubt chiefly owing to the profusion and the literary splendour of these works of a remote antiquity-works produced in an age when England and Germany, Italy and France had nothing better than dull monkish annalists or the reciters of such a tedious ballad epic as the Song of the Nibelungs-that the Icelandic language has preserved its ancient strength and purity, and that the Icelandic nation, a handful of people scattered round the edge of a vast and dreary wilderness, has maintained itself, in face of the overwhelming forces of nature, at so high a level of culture, virtue and intelligence.

VI

THE

UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

AS SEEN IN THE PAST

THE PREDICTIONS OF HAMILTON AND TOCQUEVILLE

HE who desires to discover what have been the main tendencies ruling and guiding the development of American institutions, will find it profitable to examine what were the views held and predictions delivered, at different epochs in the growth of the Republic, by acute and well-informed observers. There is a sort of dramatic interest in this method of inquiry, and it is calculated to temper our self-confidence in judging the phenomena of to-day. Besides, it helps us to realize, better than we can do merely by following the course of events, what aspect the political landscape wore from time to time. When we read a narrative, we read into the events our knowledge of all that actually flowed from them. When we read what the contemporary observer expected from them as he saw them happening we reach a truer comprehension of the time.

To collect and set forth a representative anthology of political prophecies made at critical epochs in the history of the United States, would be a laborious undertaking, for one would have to search through a large number of writings, some of them fugitive writings, in order to

present adequate materials for determining the theories and beliefs prevalent at any given period. I attempt nothing so ambitious. I desire merely to indicate, by a comparatively simple example, how such a method may be profitably followed, disclaiming any pretensions to dig deep into even the obvious and familiar materials which students of American history possess.

For this purpose, then, I will take two famous books-the one written at the very birth of the Union by those who watched its cradle, and recording incidentally, and therefore all the more faithfully, the impressions and anticipations of the friends and enemies of the infant Constitution; the other a careful study of its provisions and practical working by a singularly fair and penetrating European philosopher. I choose these books not only because both are specially representative and of rare literary merit, but because they are easily accessible to European as well as American readers, who may, by referring to their pages, supply the omissions which want of space will compel me to make, and may thereby obtain a more full and graphic transcript of contemporary opinion. One of these books is The Federalist1-a series of letters recommending the proposed Constitution for adoption to the people of New York, written in 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, afterwards Secretary of the Treasury, James Madison, afterwards President from 1809 to 1817, and John Jay, afterwards Chief Justice from 1789 to 1795. They were all signed Publius. The other, which falls

1 There are several good editions of The Federalist. The latest and one of the best known to me is that edited by Mr. Paul Leicester Ford (New York, 1898).

not quite halfway between 1788 and our own time, is the Democracy in America of Alexis de Tocqueville.

I. THE UNITED STATES AT THE ADOPTION OF
THE CONSTITUTION.

I begin by briefly summarizing the record which The Federalist preserves for us of the beliefs of the opponents and advocates of the Draft Constitution of 1787 regarding the forces then at work in American politics and the probable future of the nation.

To understand those beliefs, however, we must bear in mind what the people of the United States then were, and for that purpose I will recall the reader's attention to some of the more salient aspects of the Republic at the epoch when its national life began.

In 1783 the last British soldier quitted New York, the last stronghold that was held for King George. In 1787 the present Constitution of the United States was framed by the Convention at Philadelphia, and in 1788 accepted by the requisite number of States (nine). In 1789 George Washington entered on his Presidency, the first Congress met and the machine began to work. It was a memorable year for Europe as well as for America―a year which, even after the lapse of more than a century, we are scarcely yet ripe for judging, so many sorrows as well as blessings, πολλὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ μεμιγμένα, πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά, were destined to come upon mankind from those elections of the States-General which were proceeding in France while Washington was being installed at Philadelphia.

All of the thirteen United States lay along the