CHAPTER IV 



THROUGH THREEFOLD TENSION TO 

 HARMONY 



PHILOSOPHICAL historians warn us against 

 over-emphasis on particular units of time or of 

 space or of personality. To centre attention on 

 a single date, a single place, a single individual, 

 is to distort the truth and misrepresent the 

 general movements of events. If disregard of 

 this wise warning may ever be tolerated, a fair 

 case for a free hand is presented by the year 

 1848 in the history of the United States and 

 its relations with Great Britain. Even more 

 narrowly the month of February in that year 

 may be assigned to a position of unique signifi 

 cance. To that month belong, as we have seen, 

 the definitive acquisition of vast Mexican ter 

 ritory by the signing of the treaty of peace, and 

 the discovery of gold in the newly acquired 

 region. In the same month Louis Philippe was 

 dethroned by a revolution in France, and a 

 popular agitation was engendered that swept 



over all central and western Europe. Mon- 



149 



