Europe. The American colonies, appreciating and
applying to their own conditions the principles of the English
Revolution, began, and with French assistance completed, the movement
which erected in another hemisphere the American republic. Weak and
tottering in its infancy, but growing ever stronger and therefore
milder, its example began at once to suggest the great and peaceful
reforms of the English constitution which have since followed.
Threatening absolutism in the strong contrasts its citizens presented
to the subjects of other lands, it has been ever since the moral
support of liberal movements the world around. England herself,
instead of being weakened, was strengthened by the child grown to
independent maturity, and a double example of prosperity under
constitutional administration was now held up to the continent of
Europe.

But it is the greatest proof of human weakness that there is no
movement however beneficent, no doctrine however sound, no truth
however absolute, but that it can be speciously so extended, so
expanded, so emphasized as to lose its identity. Coincident with the
political speculation of the eighteenth century appeared the storm and
stress of romanticism and sentimentalism. The extremes of morbid
personal emotion were thought serviceable for daily life, while the
middle course of applying ideals to experience was utterly abandoned.
The latest nihilism differs little from the conception of the perfect
regeneration of mankind by discarding the old merely because it was
old which triumphed in the latter half of the eighteenth century among
philosophers and wits. To be sure, they had a substitute for whatever
was abolished and a supplement for whatever was left incomplete.

Even the stable sense of the Americans was infected by the virus of
mere theories. In obedience to the spirit of the age they introduced
into their written constitution, which was in the main but a statement
of their deep-seated political habits, a scheme like that of the
electoral college founded on some high-sounding doctrine, or omitted
from it in obedience to a prevalent and temporary extravagance of
protest some fundamental truth like that of the Christian character of
their government and laws. If there be anywhere a Christian
Protestant state it is the United States; if any futile invention were
ever incorporated in a written charter it was that of the electoral
college. The addition of a vague theory or the omissi