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sphere, as aliens and strangers, and brought, only by
outward pressure, within the power of social attrac¬
tion. First, the cruelties of a common savage foe
kindled friendly sympathies among the scattered
hamlets, and then, as they grew into considerable
colonies, the intolerance in turn of English, French,
and Dutch rule, linked stranger-hearts into a com¬
munity of suffering, and stranger-hands into a com¬
munity of resistance. Then came the Revolutionary
period—when the attack of insane tyranny upon
sacred charters, and the storm of foreign invasion
around those homes in the wilderness, brought a
scattered race more tenderly into sympathy, over¬
coming old prejudices of envy, or ignorance, or
fear, and through that stormy era of confederacy,
ever strengthening those social ties, till they took
the seeming of nerve and sinew and vital tissue
in a single, common, organic life.
With the adoption of the Federal Constitution,
the colonies became, at least in theory, a composite
nation. Old leagues and compacts and articles of
confederacy, were put away as partition walls—pro¬
vincial watchwords were forgotten, provincial flags
furled forever, and in the form and with the
functions of a single organism, the young Republic
set forth in her progress, all her sons keeping step
to the same music, following the same banner,
E Pluribus Unum, their one glorious motto amid,
or against, the kingdoms of the world!
And yet, though from the first our theory of a
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