only to those nations which belong to a common race. Through its failure to recognize this fact, Herbert Spencer's elaborate system of philosophy grows weak when it reaches the realm of political discussion. He collects his data promiscuously from the most varied sources from the civilized peoples of the progressive West, and from the most degraded savages of the Pacific islands and on the basis of this information makes his inductions, apparently forgetting that inductions made on the basis of facts gathered from the declining or petrified peoples of Central Africa, Further Asia, or the islands of the Pacific, have no immediate and necessary application to the Aryan nations. The condition of these peoples is not that of the civilized European nations minus some centuries of progress; they belong to another great branch, or to other great branches, of the human family, and have part in another inheritance.

Although two nations may belong to the same race and be endowed with essentially the same political instinct, yet it does not necessarily follow that it operates with the same force in both cases. The uninterrupted continuity of political growth in one nation may have helped to strengthen the instinctive tendency, while in the other this tendency may have been frequently interrupted by recurring revolutions, and consequently weakened. England and France are cases in point. It requires no very profound knowledge of English and French history to perceive that in the determination of their political affairs the forces of intelligence and of instinct have not operated in the same ratio in the two nations. The political conduct of the French nation has been determined by purely intellectual conceptions to a much greater extent than that of the English. It has become almost proverbial that in effecting political changes the French

follow theories, while the English are directed by their common sense, which is simply another way of stating the dominance of intelligence in French politics as contrasted with the dominance of instinct in English politics. The French revolutions of this and the previous century have been a practical outgrowth of French political philosophy, and appear as attempts to carry out certain conceptions of political organization which this philosophy had impressed upon the mind of the nation. In most English revolutions, on the contrary, always excepting the Puritan revolution, the dominant factor has been the conservative force of the nation-political instinct. This superior strength of instinct in the English furnishes ground for an explanation of important facts in the social history of this people, such as: 1. The almost unerring wisdom with which any colony of Anglo-Saxon blood, however unlettered its members, proceeds in the organization of a government; 2. The wonderful assimilative power in which this people has shown a superiority over all others with which it has come in contact in its course of worldwide colonization.

The political intelligence of our race may vary, but the instinct remains stable. The intelligence is fickle, and turns with every breath of argument; the instinct is beyond the reach of argument, and bears ever steadily towards its predetermined goal.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE POLITICAL HERITAGE OF THE BRITISH COLONIES IN AMERICA.

THE political development of colonies planted in new countries is through forms analogous to those which have marked the constitutional growth of the parent stock, and illustrates, not merely the influences of imitation, but also the force of an hereditary political sense or instinct. This tendency is clearly manifest in the history of the movement toward national unity in the British colonies of America. As the colonial settlements proceeded from a completed nation, so they manifested an irresistible tendency toward unification in the form of a fully organized nation. The town, or the plantation, or the parish as the successor of the plantation, which became the political unit in the colonies, corresponded to their prototype, the parish, the political unit in England.

In the history of the United States we have a striking example of the rapid growth of a nation up through the rudimentary stages; and we have here more clearly shown than in other instances of such growth the working of the centralizing and disrupting tendencies which have been, in a greater or less degree, the accompaniments of all natural development throughout the world. With us these opposing tendencies were especially active during the period of seventy-seven years, between 1778, when the Articles of Confederation were framed, and the close of the Civil War in 1865. During that period, especially after 1800, all party strife hinged, more or less, on

this antithesis. Looking further back we can see that the seeds of political discord were planted among the colonists almost at the beginning.

The nationalizing influences are to be found in the fact that the colonists, with few exceptions, belonged to a common stock, and proceeded from a single nation, taking with them common political instincts and the traditions of common institutions.

Thirteen

The settlement of Virginia dates from 1607. years afterward, in December, 1620, the Pilgrims landed from the Mayflower. Within three years, in 1623, the Dutch settled in New York, and very soon spread in small numbers into the present territory of New Jersey and Delaware. An interval of thirteen years elapsed before the next colony, that of Lord Baltimore, in 1634, planted itself on the Atlantic coast. Shortly afterward a small settlement of Swedes was made within the limits of Delaware. Then thirty-two years passed by before South Carolina was colonized. This long interval was followed by another of twelve years before Penn brought his Quaker co-religionists over to the banks of the Delaware; and finally it was as late as 1732 when the Oglethorpe colony came to Georgia.

Thus there were seven germs of European civilization planted at intervals along the Atlantic seaboard during this period of one hundred and twenty-five years. Six of these were from England, and one from Holland. It is hardly worth while to consider the Swedish immigrants, as their distinctive character very soon disappeared. Even the Dutch settlement in New York lost its special characteristics after its capture by the English in 1664, and counts for very little in the future political develop

ment.

The men and women who laid the foundations of the

social and political structure on this continent were mostly of the Anglo-Norman stock. Their language was one, their customs were largely similar, and their social life was marked by the same general peculiarities. Moreover, their ideas of present and future happiness grew from, and were shaped by, their common circum

stances.

The fact that the colonists possessed a common nationality is an important consideration. We are not always ready to appreciate the profound impression which a fully developed nationality makes upon the mental and moral structure of its individual citizens, nor, especially, how much it consciously and unconsciously shapes all their political actions and ideals. A fully developed nationality brings about a certain sameness in these particulars. There grows to be an hereditary habit of thought and of action in dealing with political institutions. There is a political sense which can be cultivated, and becomes a native quality, going from father to son. Our colonial history and the annals of the settlement of new states are replete with instances of rude, unlettered men, possessed with a fine political sagacity, laying the foundations of new communities. State-making aptness, and a proclivity to build up the state in a certain way, become fixed in a whole people, so that it is just as much an hereditary necessity for them to construct a new state upon certain transmitted principles, as it is for bees to build their honeycombs as their remote ancestors did. It is true, the state-making faculty is common to all the Germanic peoples, but as they successively developed into nations, each has taken on special political characteristics, which fasten themselves on any new communities that may spring from the parent stock. If the parent stock is fully developed into a nation, the emigrants who go out from