needed for the evolution of a vigorous national life. He imparted to the
very recent historical origin of his country, and his followers imparted
to its material conditions, a certain element of poetry and the felt
presence of a wholesome national ideal. The patriotism of an older
country derives its glory and its pride from influences deep rooted in
the past, creating a tradition of public and private action which needs
no definite formula. The man who did more than any other to supply this
lack in a new country, by imbuing its national consciousness--even its
national cant--with high aspiration, did--it may well be--more than any
strong administrator or constructive statesman to create a Union which
should thereafter seem worth preserving.


4. _The Missouri Compromise_.

No sober critic, applying to the American statesmen of the first
generation the standards which he would apply to their English
contemporaries, can blame them in the least because they framed their
Constitution as best they could and were not deterred by the scruples
which they felt about slavery from effecting a Union between States
which, on all other grounds except their latent difference upon slavery,
seemed meant to be one. But many of these men had set their hands in the
Declaration of Independence to the most unqualified claim of liberty and
equality for all men and proceeded, in the Constitution, to give nineteen
years' grace to "that most detestable sum of all villainies," as Wesley
called it, the African slave trade, and to impose on the States which
thought slavery wrong the dirty work of restoring escaped slaves to
captivity. "Why," Dr. Johnson had asked, "do the loudest yelps for
liberty come from the drivers of slaves?" We are forced to recognise,
upon any study of the facts, that they could not really have made the