Stoux City Academy of Science and Letters. 121 
eighty years of federal life had knit us together into one 
body. It was an individual organism which was in tor- 
ture. The days of our multiplicity of lives was over. 
But to the old constitution we were still the thirteen 
sovereign states with their newer sisters added. Like a 
shell which protects the germ but must be burst by the 
growing plant the old constitution hampered the national 
life and was burst asunder by it. It is true, no doubt, 
that no provision for amendment would have been ac- 
cepted by the south at that time. The question of seces- 
sion or no secession had to be fought out. Having been 
fought out and decided against secession, the amenda- 
bility of the constitution becomes more than ever import- 
ant. When the union was one which all were free to 
abandon at will, the character of the instrument of feder- 
ation was, perhaps, a matter of great importance, but not 
of such transcendently great importance as now, when 
it binds us irrevocably, for better or for worse. The sig- 
nificant thing about the slavery agitation, so far as this 
discussion is concerned, is this: that slavery could never 
have been abolished by constitutional means. When it 
came to the test of actual trial of strength between two 
strong parties, the provision for amendment failed to 
accomplish its object. 
I have hinted at the enhanced importance of amend- 
ability in the constitution by reason of the centralizing 
effect of the war; but the war has not been the only nor 
the greatest centralizing influence. We have been grad- 
ually growing nearer to each other by the enormous 
activities of the life of the nation in the past half-century. 
State lines and state government have dwindled in im- 
portance as they have been overpassed and trampled out 
of sight in the onward march of nineteenth-century de- 
velopment. River courses, telegraph lines, the trade ter- 
ritory of great cities, and more than all, the sphere of 
influence of railway systems, mark the boundaries of the 
community-life of today. These pay no attention to 
state lines. The state as a sovereignty exists; but in the 
condition of a fossil. Every sweep of the great life-cur- 
rent of the nation makes for the abolition of the state 
except as a mere political division of the nation a little 
higher than a county. 
