have been fraught with almost as much danger as the secession movement itself.  At least it would have been a hasty confession, quite uncalled for and quite untrue, that American federalism had thus far proved itself incompetent,—­that we had indeed preserved our national unity, but only at the frightful cost of sinking to a lower plane of national life. [Sidenote:  The English method of nation-making] [Sidenote:  Pacific tendencies of federalism]

But federalism, with its pacific implications, was not an invention of the Teutonic mind.  The idea was familiar to the city communities of ancient Greece, which, along with their intense love of self-government, felt the need of combined action for warding off external attack.  In their Achaian and Aitolian leagues the Greeks made brilliant attempts toward founding a nation upon some higher principle than that of mere conquest, and the history of these attempts is exceedingly interesting and instructive.  They failed for lack of the principle of representation, which was practically unknown to the world until introduced by the Teutonic colonizers of the Roman empire.  Until the idea of power delegated by the people had become familiar to men’s minds in its practical bearings, it was impossible to create a great nation without crushing out the political life in some of its parts.  Some centre of power was sure to absorb all the political life, and grow at the expense of the outlying parts, until the result was a centralized despotism.  Hence it came to be one of the commonplace assumptions of political writers that republics must be small, that free government is practicable only in a confined area, and that the only strong and durable government, capable of maintaining order throughout a vast territory, is some form of absolute monarchy. [Sidenote:  Fallacy of the notion that republics must be small]

It was quite natural that people should formerly have held this opinion, and it is indeed not yet quite obsolete, but its fallaciousness will become more and more apparent as American history is better understood.  Our experience has now so far widened that we can see that despotism is not the strongest but wellnigh the weakest form of government; that centralized administrations, like that of the Roman empire, have fallen to pieces, not because of too much but because of too little freedom; and that the only perdurable government must be that which succeeds in achieving national unity on a grand scale, without weakening the sense of personal and local independence.  For in the body politic this spirit of freedom is as the red corpuscles in the blood; it carries the life with it.  It makes the difference between a society of self-respecting men and women and a society of puppets.