To insure the stability of the federal union thus formed, the Constitution created a “system of United States courts extending throughout the states, empowered to define the boundaries of federal authority, and to enforce its decisions by federal power.”  This omnipresent federal judiciary was undoubtedly the most important creation of the statesmen who framed the Constitution.  The closely-knit relations which it established between the states contributed powerfully to the growth of a feeling of national solidarity throughout the whole country.  The United States today cling together with a coherency far greater than the 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.”