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THE SECTIONAL FEATURE IN AMERICAN POLITICS. 
By HUMPHREY J. DESMOND. 
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It is not always easy to determine the main threads of political history? 
but in the' century of American Presidents, ending with the month of 
April, 1889, one intermittent and ever recurring question has been that of 
sectionalism. And the question waits among the perplexities of the new 
century. 
There are grounds for regarding it as thus far the controlling fact 
in American politics. It was an overshadowing issue long before the 
slavery agitation was launched, and it continues a problem of to-day, long 
after slavery has ceased, and the irrepressible conflict has been fought out. 
All the larger events of the constitutional epoch carry a significance to the 
fact of sectionalism, gain an interest and importance from their relation 
to that fact, and may be grouped along its length as off-shoots from th& 
main stem. 
The theory which regards the constitution as a “ compact between the 
states” may have been true in a formal way, and on that account plausible 
among the doctrinaires; the essential condition, however, was not a union 
of states, but a treaty of alliance between two great sections having oppo¬ 
site civilizations and diverse interests. And it is this condition, and not a . 
theory, that confronts us in our survey of the first century in American 
politics. 
The theory figured on both sides of Mason's and Dixon’s line — the Hart¬ 
ford Convention being no less extreme a manifestation of states’ rights- 
than the episode of nullification. But the condition never fluctuated nor- 
lost its consistency or purpose. It continued from the first to 
“ Divert and crack, rend and deracinate 
The unity and married*calm of states.” 
New issues were sought from time to time, but they were merely tempo*- 
rarv aberrations. There was the trivial controversy, which for many days,, 
went on in the convention of 1787, between the larger and the smaller 
states. Even then, the greater question was waiting. The absurd fear of 
the smaller states that a closer union would result in their absorption by the 
larger commonwealths being allayed, Madison admonished his colleagues 
that the ^states were divided into different interests, “not by their differ¬ 
ence in size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which 
resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effect of their hav~ 
