was the same.  It was administered for the benefit of the parental State alone.  Each power prohibited all foreign trade with its Colonies, and all intercourse between them and other plantations, supplied its Colonies with what they needed from abroad, interdicted their manufactures, and monopolized their trade.  The prevalence of this system over the whole continent of America and the adjacent islands prevented all enterprize in the colonies, discouraged all improvement, and retarded their progress to independence.

The American Revolution sundered these bonds only so far as they confined thirteen of the British Colonies, and left the remaining British dominions, and the continent, from Georgia around Cape Horn to the Northern Ocean, under the same thraldom as before.  Even the United States had attained only physical independence.  The moral influences of the colonial system oppressed them still.  Their trade, their laws, their science, their literature, their social connections, their ecclesiastical relations, their manners and their habits, were still colonial; and their thoughts continually clung around the ancient and majestic States of the Eastern Continent.

The American Revolution, so happily concluded here, broke out in France simultaneously with the beginning of Washington’s administration.  The French nation passed in fifteen years from absolute despotism under Louis XVI., through all the phases of democracy to a military despotism under Napoleon Bonaparte; and retained through all these changes, only two characteristics—­unceasing ferocity of faction, and increasing violence of aggression against foreign States.  The scandal of the French Revolution fell back upon the United States of America, who were regarded as the first disturbers of the ancient social system.  The principal European monarchs combined, under the guidance of England, to arrest the presumptuous career of France and extirpate democracy by the sword.  Nevertheless, the republican cause, however odious in Europe, was our national cause.  The sympathies of a large portion of the American people could not be withdrawn from the French nation, which always claimed, even when marshalled into legions under the Corsican conqueror, to be fighting the battles of freedom; while, on the other side, the citizens who regarded innovation as worse than tyranny, considered England and her allies as engaged in sustaining the cause of order, of government, and of society itself.

The line already drawn between the American people in regard to their organic law, naturally became the dividing line of the popular sympathies in the great European conflict.  Thus deeply furrowed, that line became “a great gulf fixed.”  The Federal party unconsciously became an English party, although it indignantly disowned the epithet; and the Republican party became a French party, although with equal sincerity it denied the gross impeachment.  Each belligerent was thus encouraged to hope some aid from the United States, through the ever-expected triumph of its friends; while both conceived contemptuous opinions of a people who, from too eager interest in a foreign fray, suffered their own national rights to be trampled upon with impunity by the contending States.