fferent, sometimes conflicting, interests and social
systems of the several States made existence as a Union and coalescence
into a nation conditional on a constant practice of moderation and
compromise. The very elements of disintegration were the best guides in
political training. Their children learned the lesson of compromise only
too well, and it was the application of it to a question of fundamental
morals that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all that
compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; that it is a temporary
expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in
statesmanship.

Has not the trial of democracy in America proved, on the whole,
successful? If it had not, would the Old World be vexed with any fears
of its proving contagious? This trial would have been less severe could
it have been made with a people homogeneous in race, language, and
traditions, whereas the United States have been called on to absorb and
assimilate enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous in all
these respects, and drawn mainly from that class which might fairly say
that the world was not their friend, nor the world's law. The previous
condition too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, landing in
New York and asked what his politics were, inquired if there was a
Government there, and on being told that there was, retorted, "Thin I'm
agin it!" We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most ignorant, the
most turbulent of her people, and have made them over into good citizens,
who have added to our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence of a
country and of institutions which they know to be worth dying for. The
exceptions have been (and they are lamentable exceptions) where these
hordes of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great cities. But the
social system is yet to seek which has not to look the same terrible wolf
in the eyes. On the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are
buying up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts, and making them productive
again by the same virtues of industry and thrift that once made them
profitable to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting them.
To have achieved even these prosaic results (if you choose to call them
so), and that out of materials the most discordant,--I might say the most
recalcitrant,--argues a certain beneficent virtue in the system that
could do it, and is not to be accounted for by