in Europe. Its example was ominous, and the European Powers willingly
believed that, if discountenanced and baffled, America would soon relapse
into colonial subjugation. Such prejudices were founded in the fixed
habits of society. Not only the thirteen colonies, but the whole American
hemisphere, had been governed by European States from the period of its
discovery. The very soil belonged to the trans-atlantic monarchs by
discovery, or by ecclesiastical gift. Dominion over it attached by divine
right to their persons, and drew after it obligations of inalienable
allegiance upon those who became the inhabitants of the new world. The new
world was indeed divided between different powers, but the system of
government was the same. It was administered for the benefit of the
parental State alone. Each power prohibited all foreign trade with its
Colonies, and all intercourse between them and other plantations, supplied
its Colonies with what they needed from abroad, interdicted their
manufactures, and monopolized their trade. The prevalence of this system
over the whole continent of America and the adjacent islands prevented all
enterprize in the colonies, discouraged all improvement, and retarded
their progress to independence.

The American Revolution sundered these bonds only so far as they confined
thirteen of the British Colonies, and left the remaining British
dominions, and the continent, from Georgia around Cape Horn to the
Northern Ocean, under the same thraldom as before. Even the United States
had attained only physical independence. The moral influences of the
colonial system oppressed them still. Their trade, their laws, their
science, their literature, their social connections, their ecclesiastical
relations, their manners and their habits, were still colonial; and their
thoughts continually clung around the ancient and majestic States of the
Eastern Continent.

The American Revolution, so happily concluded here, broke out in France
simultaneously with the beginning of Washington's administration. The
French nation passed in fifteen years from absolute despotism under Louis
XVI., through all the phases of democracy to a military despotism under
Napoleon Bonaparte; and retained through all these changes, only two
characteristics--unceasing ferocity of faction, and increasing violence of
aggression against foreign States. The scandal of the French Revolution
fell back upon the United States of America, who were r