jealous over a petty “balance of power” and always liable to war.  The disease which the face of the map suggested to the boy’s imagination was indeed a real one, inveterate, deep-seated, and prostrating to all that is best in human nature.  For a few years, before the adoption of the Constitution, America seemed likely to fall a prey to it, each of the thirteen States standing aloof on its own little dignity in a bond scarcely more than nominal, of the weakest and coolest.  In 1787 came the beneficent change.  The thirteen and those that followed the thirteen were made one, and it was the beginning of a grand unifying in many lands.  Following an instinct at first only faintly manifest but which soon gathered strength, disintegrated Germany became one.  Italy, too, became one, and in our old home the “Little Englanders,” once a noteworthy company, succumbed to a conquering sentiment that England should become a “great world-Venice,” and the seas no longer barriers, but the highways, through which the parent-state and her brood of dominions, though flung far into many zones, should yet go easily to and fro, not separate nations, nor yet a company bound together by a mere rope of sand, but one.  Great nations replaced little states.

Had the South prevailed in the Civil War, there would have been a distinct and calamitous set-back in the world movement.  It would have been a reaction toward particularism, and how far might it not have gone?  Into what granulations might not our society have crumbled?  The South’s principle once recognised, there could have been no valid or lasting tie between States.  Counties even might have assumed to nullify, and towns to stand apart sufficient unto themselves.  When the thing was doubtful with us, the North by no means escaped the infection.  The New York City of Fernando Wood contemplated isolation not only from the Union but from the State of which it was a part.  Had the spirit then so rife really prevailed, the map of America to-day might have been no less blotched with the morbid tetter of particularism than that of the Germany of sixty years ago.  Centralisation may no doubt go too far, but in the other extreme may lie the gravest danger, and rushing thitherward the South was blind to the risk.  I stood with all reverence by the graves of the two great men at Lexington.  Perhaps no Americans have been in their way more able, forceful, and really high-purposed.  But they were misguided, and their perverted swords all but brought to pass for us and the future the profoundest calamity.  I am proud to have been in the generation that fought them down, believing that upholding the country was doing a service to the world.  I think of that lofty sentence inscribed upon the memorial of Goldwin Smith at Ithaca, “Above all nations is Humanity.”  Patriotism is not the highest of virtues.  It is indeed a vice if it limits the sympathies to a part.  Love for the whole is the sovereign virtue, and the patriotism is unworthy which is not subordinate to this, recognising that its only fitting work is to lead up to a love which embraces all.