force, and that the
influence of the American Revolution is growing daily stronger. Signs
of this are the councils and conferences which are steadily increasing
in number and in power, on the subject of arbitration as the peaceful
means of settling questions growing out of the relations of
communities, of states and of nations. Arbitration, whether between
persons or between communities, states and nations, implies a
universal and common law. Peace conferences can, it would seem, have
no reasonable purpose and can hope to accomplish no permanent result,
except as they attempt to substitute a universal and common law,
supported by the public sentiment of the civilized world, for human
edicts founded on human will and supported by physical force. The
American System is but the establishment of interstate and
international arbitration as the common and usual course of
governmental action instead of as a voluntary or spasmodic
manifestation of governmental will.

Only on the assumption of the existence of this universal common law
can the relations between us and our Insular brethren be relations
under law, for a written constitution between us and them is
impossible. We realize, as Americans, that somehow these relations
must be under law if they are to be according to the American System,
for we know that there is no liberty except under law, and that the
American System has, for its sole object, human liberty.

If we are right, the American people, in rejecting, as they have, the
European terms "colony," "dependence" and "empire," and the theory
which these terms symbolize, have been true to the American System. In
substituting for these terms the American terms, "free state," "just
connection" and "union" and the American theory which these terms
symbolize, it is not necessary for us to alter in the least our
established views concerning the Constitution as the supreme law of
the Union. It is only necessary for us to realize that the
Constitution is itself but one application of the great principles of
the American System which, as the Supreme Court says, are "formulated"
in it, and to proceed, by a new formulation or by adjudication, to
apply these principles outside the present Union wherever American
jurisdiction extends, in the confident belief that they can be applied
universally, and that, wherever applied, they will bring the blessings
of true liberty.

APPENDIX

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM

THE ANNUNCIATI