noble political prose. It is the sentiment of Union. In one sense,
of course, this dates back to the period of Franklin's _bon mot_ about
our all hanging together, or hanging separately. It is found in
Hamilton's pamphlets, in Paine's _Crisis_, in the _Federalist_, in
Washington's "Farewell Address." It is peculiarly associated with the
name and fame of Daniel Webster, and, to a less degree, with the career
of Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over slavery, many a
Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of
Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid
peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the
Union go." But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the
firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was
made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay
or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty
ideal of indissoluble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded for in
editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven into the web of fiction. Edward
Everett Hale's _Man Without a Country_ became one of the most
poignantly moving of American stories. In Walt Whitman's _Drum-Taps_
and his later poems, the "Union of these States" became transfigured
with mystical significance: no longer a mere political compact,
dissoluble at will, but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the
soul of man.

We must deal later with that American instinct of fellowship which
Whitman believed to have been finally cemented by the Civil War, and
which has such import for the future of our democracy. There are
likewise communal loyalties, glowing with the new idealism which has
come with the twentieth century: ethical, municipal, industrial, and
artistic movements which are full of promise for the higher life of the
country, but which have not yet had time to express themselves
adequately in literature. There are stirrings of racial loyalty among
this and that element of our composite population,--as for instance
among the gifted younger generation of American Jews,--a racial loyalty
not antagonistic to the American current of ideas, but rather in full
unison with it. Internationalism itself furnishes motives for the
activity of the noblest imaginations, and the true literature of
internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in the play and
counterplay of these new forces that the American literature of the
twentieth ce