THE AMERICAN OUTLOOK
itself the repudiation of any highly organised national system.
But government from this ineffectual, inert place is only the most striking outcome of that inflexible constitution the wrangling delegates of 1787 did at last produce out of a conflict of state jealousies. They did their best to render centralisation or any coalescence of states impossible and private property impregnable, and so far their work has proved extraordinarily effective. Only a great access of intellectual and moral vigour in the nation can ever set it aside. And while the more and more sterile millions of the United States grapple with the legal and traditional difficulties that promise at last to arrest their development altogether, the rest of the world will be moving on to new phases. An awakened Asia will be reorganising its social and political conceptions in the light of modern knowledge and modern ideas, and South America will be working out its destinies, perhaps in the form of a powerful confederation of states. All Europe will be schooling its John Smiths to finer discipline and broader ideas. It is quite possible that the American John Smiths may have little to brag about in the way of national predominance by A. D. 2000. It is quite possible that the United States may be sitting meekly at the feet of at present unanticipated teachers.
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