that is critical in the affairs of foreign states; and the
real responsibilities thus existing for us, are unnaturally inflated for
us by fast-growing tendencies toward exaggeration of our concern in
these matters, and even toward setting up fictitious interests in cases
where none can discern them except ourselves, and such continental
friends as practice upon our credulity and our fears for purposes of
their own. Last of all, it is not to be denied that in what I have been
saying, I do not represent the public sentiment. The nation is not at
all conscious of being overdone. The people see that their House of
Commons is the hardest-working legislative assembly in the world: and,
this being so, they assume it is all right. Nothing pays better, in
point of popularity, than those gratuitous additions to obligations
already beyond human strength, which look like accessions or assertion
of power; such as the annexation of new territory, or the silly
transaction known as the purchase of shares in the Suez Canal.

All my life long I have seen this excess of work as compared with the
power to do it; but the evil has increased with the surfeit of wealth,
and there is no sign that the increase is near its end. The people of
this country are a very strong people; but there is no strength that can
permanently endure, without provoking inconvenient consequences, this
kind of political debauch. It may be hoped, but it cannot be predicted,
that the mischief will be encountered and subdued at the point where it
will have become sensibly troublesome, but will not have grown to be
quite irremediable.

The main and central point of interest, however, in the institutions of
a country is the manner in which it draws together and compounds the
public forces in the balanced action of the State. It seems plain that
the formal arrangements for this purpose in America are very different
from ours. It may even be a question whether they are not, in certain
respects, less popular; whether our institutions do not give more rapid
effect, than those of the Union, to any formed opinion, and resolved
intention, of the nation.

In the formation of the Federal Government we seem to perceive three
stages of distinct advancement. First, the formation of the
Confederation, under the pressure of the War of Independence. Secondly,
the Constitution, which placed the Federal Government in defined and
direct relation with the people inhabiting the several Sta