WORLD'S POLITICS AND NINETEENTH CENTURY 299 



for them, further, no Dominion of Canada and no Australian Federa- 

 tion would exist. 



National expansion would undoubtedly have gone much further 

 than it has but for the antagonism it encounters from the disposition 

 of blood-related communities to get together under the same gov- 

 ernments. Blood is not only thicker than water; it is thicker than 

 the ink in which pacts are written or constitutions printed. In deter- 

 mining the boundaries of states, a wholly new prominence has come 

 to be assumed by consanguinity, the nation political inclining to 

 coincide with the nation as an affair of race. 



Ireland's wish to shake off or minimize English rule illustrates 

 this, as does the centrifugal energy tending to dirempt Hungary from 

 Austria and Norway from Sweden. The centripetal working of the 

 idea is seen in the unity of Germany and of Italy. Many think that 

 the German Empire will in time embrace German Austria and Italy 

 Italian Austria. Slavic races, too, desiderate political unity, but 

 the feeling as yet ends in sighs, brochures, editorials, and speeches, 

 choked there, it would seem, through dread of Russia's supposed 

 absorption policy. 



Both these tendencies - - to centralize and governmentally to 

 group consanguineous peoples - - are insignificant beside the one 

 next to be named, the republican or democratic, so pronounced in the 

 political history of my hundred years. 



When the American Revolution broke out, a method of governing 

 states to which we of to-day can give no tenderer name than abso- 

 lutism was practically universal. Even Great Britain was no true 

 exception. Not a constitution in the sense now usual existed in all 

 the world. 



Since then absolutism in government has given way, no longer 

 existing in any state of first rank. Only the Czar and the Sultan 

 rule in the old fashion, and even they are bound by public opinion, 

 local and ecumenical, considerably to heed the popular wish. Mon- 

 archy has been dispensed with by many peoples, in form as well 

 as in substance; in the rest most of its old power is gone. Civil- 

 ized lands are ruled in unprecedented measure for the people and 

 by the people. Suffrage has been enormously extended, serfs and 

 slaves set free. Of all the emancipation edicts and statutes on 

 record, an overwhelming majority hail from days since the 

 French Revolution. The list of those uttered during this period in 

 Germany alone makes up a half-page close fine-print note in Roscher's 

 Political Economy. 4 



This strongly-marked democratic period had its proximate and 

 for us its practical opening in the French Revolution, though its 

 absolute origination must be referred to the Cromwellian revolution 

 in England. Sir Henry Maine has pointed out that the character- 



