there is, there must be, an ultimately accepted record, but of its consequences there must ever be a various interpretation. The people who colonized the South, like those who colonized the North, were of English stock. The northern colonists were imbued with moral and religious ideas which, as they interpreted morality and religion, made them austere. The soil and climate at the North compelled them to be industrious and withal contributed to develop in them social and civil ideals-conceptions of the state and notions of government which characterize them as a people in the New World. The southern colonists, of a somewhat different social class from many of the northern ones, were also imbued with moral and religious ideas, as they understood morality and religion, but their interpretation of these included pleasure and comfort and the enjoyment of material things. Both groups of colonists worshipped the same God, spoke the same tongue and swore allegiance to the same body of supreme civil law; but the potency of a latent diversity was working in America and by the time that Virginia and Massachusetts had been settled a hundred years, the people within their respective bounds were disclosing diversities and contrasts; and not their people only, but they of the entire northern group of colonies as compared with them of the entire southern group. The cause of this diversity was climate. That cause early in our national history began its obscure operation, working out two types of people whose possession in common was rapidly vanishing. The climate

of the North intensified all the austere, individualistic characteristics; the industrialism, the sense of the equality of men, which grew apace during the next hundred years; and during that time the climate of the South intensified, equally, the love of material comfort, of ease and pleasure and the merger and identification of this love with the dominant ideas of morality, religion and government.

Until almost up to the outbreak of the Revolution, the colonies North and South were held in mutual sympathy and co-operation-feeble as they may have been at times-by

the consciousness of a common danger: the Indians and the French; and the cessation of this dual peril was scarcely announced before a greater followed-the intolerable administration of colonial affairs by the mother country. It is true that maladministration, such as our fathers complained of in the Declaration of Independence, may seem to many, at the present time, when compared with maladministration in other lands and in our own land at later periods, almost slight and insufficient to provoke a revolution and we know that American independence was not demanded, was, indeed, scarcely thought of until a few months before the Declaration of Independence was issued. Yet, maladministration of colonial affairs by the English government was the immediate cause of the Revolution, and that maladministration brought all the colonies closer to one another than they had ever been before. The culmination of the sense of danger and of the struggle to relieve themselves of the evils of which they complained was the independence of the colonies. In the familiar language of that time they called themselves free and independent States, and, in the treaty of peace which the representatives of these States signed, the States were described as "free, sovereign and independent." Whatever the motive of the English government in inserting this description of them, the States themselves did not appear as individual parties to the treaty of 1783. The parties to that treaty were England, France and the United States-and by the United States was meant the United States in Congress assembled. Congress, though possessing limited powers, such as had been granted to it by the several States, acted as the representative of the States and not directly of the people, because the delegates to Congress were elected by the several State legislatures much as United States senators are now elected. The Congress of the United States at the close of the Revolution stood for whatever sense of nationality then existed, without itself being a strictly national body. The national idea as now understood was hardly born in 1776. A few aggressive, discerning minds, of whom

Thomas Paine, and, later, Alexander Hamilton and James. Wilson, Gouverneur Morris and George Washington were among the first, advocated nationality, and a more perfect union of the American people while yet the Revolution was in progress: but the idea was obscure to most men, North and South, and like all epoch-making ideas required ample time to work out its own definition. Obscure, however, as was the idea of nationality at the time of the Revolution and even at the time of the treaty of peace in 1783, the idea itself might be traced to the pressure of necessity as interpreted by a few leading minds of the country. Without delaying here to name the time or to define the circumstances of the birth of the national idea, it may be said that external pressure and the sense of peril brought the colonies closer to one another at the time of the Revolution than ever before: the immediate fruit of that pressure was the formation of the Confederation under a plan or constitution proposed in 1777 by the Congress and ratified by the requisite number of States, after discussion and debate running through nearly four years, on Thursday, the first of March, 1781. This was a little more than two years before the treaty of peace, September 3, 1783.

At the time of the formation of this first American Union, practically with the assembling of the Congress at Philadelphia in May, 1775 (the earlier Congresses were reform conventions rather than Congresses), the theory of government received more serious consideration than the administration of government: questions involving the organization and relation of the legislative, the executive and the judiciary, their respective and aggregate powers, confederate and state, monopolized the minds of men in public life almost to the exclusion of administrative questions-such, for example, as the best method of levying taxes, the best financial system, the best industrial system, adapted to such a country as ours. The result was that America took its place among the nations of the earth as an exponent and advocate of republican institutions organized according to the somewhat

conflicting theories held at the time respecting the true basis of those institutions, but with slight, almost with no experience in the administration of government. And yet, as Franklin said, in the closing moments of the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States, "there is no form of government that may not be a blessing to the people if well administered." This remark, made in 1787, expressed a conviction understood by few in the United States at the time. A reading of the debates and discussions of the early Congresses; those from 1774 to 1787, and of the correspondence of public men in America during these years justifies the assertion that during the first decade of American independence, the people of this country North and South concerned themselves very little with the problems of civil administration, but became very familiar with the theories of republican government. And yet it is the administration of a plan or constitution of government which is the one supreme test of the worth of that government. If the people might differ among themselves respecting their civil institutions, they would be likely to differ according as they imputed administrable qualities to the plan or constitution of government in force. It is well known that the Confederation of 1777 failed to work and that it was supplanted by a government the plan or constitution of which was made in convention at Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, and that this constitution, at last ratified by the requisite number of States, took effect on the fourth of March, 1789, from which day dates the government under which we now live.

Was this new government thus inaugurated in 1789 a National Government or a Confederation?

The answer to this question goes far to bring into clear definition some of the causes of the Civil War.

By the treaty of 1783, the United States extended from Canada to the Floridas; from the Atlantic Coast to Mississippi River. The thirteen colonies had become thirteen States, each organized in the form of republican government,

and by republican government a representative government is meant. The boundaries of the several States were in confusion; portions, here and there, had been surveyed or tacitly agreed upon, but the western boundaries of all the States excepting Rhode Island and Maryland, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania-coincided with the western boundary line of the United States. Thus nine of the States claimed vast domains to the west of them and reaching to the Mississippi. The entire area of the United States under the terms of the treaty was about 830,000 square miles, of which 488,248 square miles comprised the western lands, or "Western Territory." Thus considerably more than half of the public domain lay to the west and outside of the thirteen States as known to us to-day.

While yet the States were loosely united as the Confederation, five States, New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Carolina ceded their title and claims to western lands to the United States (March 1, 1781-August 9, 1787); North Carolina followed in 1790, and in 1802, Georgia sold to the United States the 88,578 square miles of western lands which that State claimed. Thus almost with the opening of the new century, the United States became owner of more than half of the national domain-that is, of all except the area now comprised within the thirteen original States. This acquisition and ownership by the Federal government will be found to have a distinct bearing and operative force as a cause, later, in discussions and disputes of an administrative character, concerning the relations of the States to the United States. At the time the United States acquired this western territory, the land was considered as a public asset which should be utilized to pay the debts of the United States, public and private: that is, money owing to public creditors-France, Holland-and to private-the revolutionary soldiers.

At the first census, in 1790, the year following the inauguration of the present national government, the population of the United States consisted of 3,929,214 persons, of whom