PREFACE.


In the spring of 1879 I gave at the Old South Meeting-house in Boston a
course of lectures on the discovery and colonization of America, and
presently, through the kindness of my friend Professor Huxley, the
course was repeated at University College in London. The lectures there
were attended by very large audiences, and awakened such an interest in
American history that I was invited to return to England in the
following year and treat of some of the philosophical aspects of my
subject in a course of lectures at the Royal Institution.

In the three lectures which were written in response to this invitation,
and which are now published in this little volume, I have endeavoured to
illustrate some of the fundamental ideas of American politics by setting
forth their relations to the general history of mankind. It is
impossible thoroughly to grasp the meaning of any group of facts, in any
department of study, until we have duly compared them with allied groups
of facts; and the political history of the American people can be
rightly understood only when it is studied in connection with that
general process of political evolution which has been going on from the
earliest times, and of which it is itself one of the most important and
remarkable phases. The government of the United States is not the result
of special creation, but of evolution. As the town-meetings of New
England are lineally descended from the village assemblies of the early
Aryans; as our huge federal union was long ago foreshadowed in the
little leagues of Greek cities and Swiss cantons; so the great political
problem which we are (thus far successfully) solving is the very same
problem upon which all civilized peoples have been working ever since