coherency of any ordinary federation or league. Yet the
primary aspect of the federal Constitution was undoubtedly that of a
permanent league, in which each state, while retaining its domestic
sovereignty intact, renounced forever its right to make war upon its
neighbours and relegated its international interests to the care of a
central council in which all the states were alike represented and a
central tribunal endowed with purely judicial functions of
interpretation. It was the first attempt in the history of the world, to
apply on a grand scale to the relations between states the same legal
methods of procedure which, as long applied in all civilized countries
to the relations between individuals, have rendered private warfare
obsolete. And it was so far successful that, during a period of
seventy-two years in which the United States increased fourfold in
extent, tenfold in population, and more than tenfold in wealth and
power, the federal union maintained a state of peace more profound than
the _pax romana._

Twenty years ago this unexampled state of peace was suddenly interrupted
by a tremendous war, which in its results, however, has served only to
bring out with fresh emphasis the pacific implications of federalism.
With the eleven revolted states at first completely conquered and then
reinstated with full rights and privileges in the federal union, with
their people accepting in good faith the results of the contest, with
their leaders not executed as traitors but admitted again to seats in
Congress and in the Cabinet, and with all this accomplished without any
violent constitutional changes,--I think we may fairly claim that the
strength of the pacific implications of federalism has been more
strikingly demonstrated than if there had been no war at all. Certainly
the world never beheld such a spectacle before. In my next and
concluding lecture I shall return to this point while summing up the
argument and illustrating the part played by the English race in the
general history of civilization.

III.

"_MANIFEST DESTINY_."

Among the legends of our late Civil War there is a story of a
dinner-party given by the Americans residing in Paris, at which were
propounded sundry toasts concerning not so much the past and present as
the expected glories of the great American nation. In the general
character of these toasts geographical considerations were very
prominent, and the principal fact which seemed