th a veto, elected, not
by the people directly, but by special electors, for four years, and
re-eligible. We celebrate the birthday of Washington like the birthday
of a king. The same instinct gave his name to the capital of his nation,
and that name was found a name to conjure with when the great stress
came of the Civil War in 1861. The sentiment of loyalty, developed and
twined about that name and about the Union which Washington had founded,
was not only the glow at the core of the Northern resistance to
secession: it was the secret and the explanation of that sudden revival
of the spirit of national loyalty at the South after the war was over
and an end was put to the villanies of 'Reconstruction,' by which
European observers of American affairs have been and still are so much
puzzled. For it must be remembered that the Father of his Country was a
son of the South, and that his native state, Virginia, is the oldest of
the American Commonwealths, and is known as 'the Mother of Presidents.'
The historic Union is as much Southern as Northern. Its existence was
put in peril in 1812 by the States of the extreme North. Its integrity
was shattered for a time in 1861 by the States of the South. Before it
was founded, in 1787, there was no such thing as an American nation.
There were thirteen independent American States which for certain
purposes only had formed what was described as a 'perpetual union,'
under certain Articles of Confederation. These Articles were drawn up in
1778, at a time when the event of the war with the mother country was
still most uncertain, and they were never finally ratified by all the
States until 1781, two years before the Peace of Versailles. Under these
Articles the national affairs of the Confederacy were controlled by the
Congress of the States. No national Executive existed, not even such a
nominal Executive as now exists in France. National affairs were managed
during the recess of the Congress by a Committee, and this Committee
could only confide the Presidency to any one member of the Committee for
one year at a time out of three years. This was even worse than the
elective kingship without a veto of the English Republicans of 1649. But
how were the people of these thirteen independent States, each with a
history, with interests, with prejudices, with sympathies of its own, to
be brought together and induced to form, through a more perfect union, a
nation, in the only way in which a natio