I do not see how the central government of that great American nation of which I dream can possibly be at Washington, and I do not see how the present central government can possibly be transferred to any other centre.  But to go to Washington, to see and talk to Washington, is to receive an extraordinary impression of the utter isolation and hopelessness of Washington.  The National Government has an air of being marooned there.  Or as though it had crept into a corner to do something in the dark.  One goes from the abounding movement and vitality of the northern cities to this sunny and enervating place through the negligently cultivated country of Virginia, and one discovers the slovenly, unfinished promise of a city, broad avenues lined by negro shanties and patches of cultivation, great public buildings and an immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert university, a splendid desert library, a street of souvenir shops, a certain industry of “seeing Washington,” an idiotic colossal obelisk.  It seems an ideal nest for the tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and agents and secondary people.  In the White House, in the time of President Roosevelt, the present writer found a transitory glow of intellectual activity, the spittoons and glass screens that once made it like a London gin palace had been removed, and the former orgies of handshaking reduced to a minimum.  It was, one felt, an accidental phase.  The assassination of McKinley was an interruption of the normal Washington process.  To this place, out of the way of everywhere, come the senators and congressmen, mostly leaving their families behind them in their states of origin, and hither, too, are drawn a multitude of journalists and political agents and clerks, a crowd of underbred, mediocre men.  For most of them there is neither social nor intellectual life.  The thought of America is far away, centred now in New York; the business and economic development centres upon New York; apart from the President, it is in New York that one meets the people who matter, and the New York atmosphere that grows and develops ideas and purposes.  New York is the natural capital of the United States, and would need to be the capital of any highly organised national system.  Government from the district of Columbia is in itself the repudiation of any highly organised national system.

But government from this ineffectual, inert place is only the most striking outcome of that inflexible constitution the wrangling delegates of 1787-8 did at last produce out of a conflict of State jealousies.  They did their best to render centralisation or any coalescence of States impossible and private property impregnable, and so far their work has proved extraordinarily effective.  Only a great access of intellectual and moral vigour in the nation can ever set it aside.  And while the more and more sterile millions of the United States grapple with the legal and traditional difficulties that promise at last to arrest their