sed for. It was thought necessary to say that the troops were wanted
for an expedition against the northwestern Indians! National humiliation
could go no further than such a confession, on the part of our central
government, that it dared not use force in defence of those very
articles of confederation to which it owed its existence. Things had
come to such a pass that people of all shades of opinion were beginning
to agree upon one thing,--that something must be done, and done quickly.

CHAPTER V.

GERMS OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY.

[Sidenote: Creation of a national domain beyond the Alleghanies.]

While the events we have heretofore contemplated seemed to prophesy the
speedy dissolution and downfall of the half-formed American Union, a
series of causes, obscure enough at first, but emerging gradually into
distinctness and then into prominence, were preparing the way for the
foundation of a national sovereignty. The growth of this sovereignty
proceeded stealthily along such ancient lines of precedent as to take
ready hold of people's minds, although few, if any, understood the full
purport of what they were doing. Ever since the days when our English
forefathers dwelt in village communities in the forests of northern
Germany, the idea of a common land or folkland--a territory belonging to
the whole community, and upon which new communities might be organized
by a process analogous to what physiologists call
cell-multiplication--had been perfectly familiar to everybody. Townships
budded from village or parish folkland in Maryland and Massachusetts in
the seventeenth century, just as they had done in England before the
time of Alfred. The critical period of the Revolution witnessed the
repetition of this process on a gigantic scale. It witnessed the
creation of a national territory beyond the Alleghanies,--an enormous
folkland in which all the thirteen old states had a common interest, and
upon which new and derivative communities were already beginning to
organize themselves. Questions about public lands are often regarded as
the driest of historical deadwood. Discussions about them in newspapers
and magazines belong to the class of articles which the general reader
usually skips. Yet there is a great deal of the philosophy of history
wrapped up in this subject, and it now comes to confront us at a most
interesting moment; for without studying this creation of a national
domain between the Alleghanies and the Mi