The Union was as yet imperfect.  The jangling colonies had been welded together, after a fashion, in the slow fire of the Revolutionary war; but the old lines of cleavage were still distinctly marked.  The great struggle had been of incalculable benefit to all Americans.  Under its stress they had begun to develop a national type of thought and character.  Americans now held in common memories which they shared with no one else; for they held ever in mind the feats of a dozen crowded years.  Theirs was the history of all that had been done by the Continental Congress and the Continental armies; theirs the memory of the toil and the suffering and the splendid ultimate triumph.  They cherished in common the winged words of their statesmen, the edged deeds of their soldiers; they yielded to the spell of mighty names which sounded alien to all men save themselves.  But though the successful struggle had laid deep the foundations of a new nation, it had also of necessity stirred and developed many of the traits most hostile to assured national life.  All civil wars loosen the bands of orderly liberty, and leave in their train disorder and evil.  Hence those who cause them must rightly be held guilty of the gravest wrong-doing unless they are not only pure of purpose, but sound of judgment, and unless the result shows their wisdom.  The Revolution had left behind it among many men love of liberty, mingled with lofty national feeling and broad patriotism; but to other men it seemed that the chief lessons taught had been successful resistance to authority, jealousy of the central Government, and intolerance of all restraint.  According as one or the other of these mutually hostile sets of sentiments prevailed, the acts of the Revolutionary leaders were to stand justified or condemned in the light of the coming years.  As yet the success had only been in tearing down; there remained the harder and all-important task of building up.

    Task of the Nation Builders.

This task of building up was accomplished, and the acts of the men of the Revolution were thus justified.  It was the after result of the Revolution, not the Revolution itself, which gave to the governmental experiment inaugurated by the Second Continental Congress its unique and lasting value.  It was this result which marks most clearly the difference between the careers of the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking peoples on this continent.  The wise statesmanship typified by such men as Washington and Marshall, Hamilton, Jay, John Adams, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, prevailed over the spirit of separatism and anarchy.  Seven years after the war ended, the Constitution went into effect, and the United States became in truth a nation.  Had we not thus become a nation, had the separatists won the day, and our country become the seat of various antagonistic States and confederacies, then the Revolution by which we won liberty and independence would have been scarcely more memorable or noteworthy than the wars which culminated in the separation of the Spanish-American colonies from Spain; for we would thereby have proved that we did not deserve either liberty or independence.