AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SEVENTY YEARS AGO 277 



harbinger of greater transformations, in the opinions 

 and sentiments and mental habits of men and women 

 in all civilized countries. Nowhere have the compli- 

 cated effects been more potent or more marked than 

 in the United States. Every part of our vast domain 

 has been brought into easy contact with all four quar- 

 ters of the globe. Australia and Zululand are less 

 remote from us to-day than England was in Jackson's 

 time. We go back and forth across the Atlantic in 

 crowds, and we exchange ideas with the whole world. 

 We are becoming daily more and more cosmopolitan, 

 and are, perhaps, as much in the centre of things as 

 any people. 



However, as I said a moment ago, the old provin- 

 cial spirit of Americanism was in its day eminently 

 useful and wholesome. The swagger and tall talk 

 was simply the bubbling forth that accompanied the 

 fermentation of a vigorous and hopeful national spirit, 

 but for which we might long before this have been 

 broken up into a group of little spiteful, squabbling 

 republics> with custom-houses and sentinels in uni- 

 form scattered along every state line. The second 

 war with England was the first emphatic assertion of 

 this national spirit. Before that time the sentiment 

 of union was weak. In 1786 nearly all the states 

 were, for various reasons, snarling and showing their 

 teeth. In 1799 Kentucky uttered a growl in which 

 something was heard that sounded like nullification. 

 In 1804 Timothy Pickering dallied with a scheme, to 

 which it was hoped that Aaron Burr might lend assist- 

 ance, for a Northern confederacy of New England and 

 New York, with the possible addition of New Jersey 

 and Pennsylvania. In 1808 some of the New Eng- 



