settled with a few heavy blows, and the loss of life and property
occasioned by them is but trifling when compared with the awful ruin and
desolation wrought by the perpetual and protracted contests of antiquity
and of the Middle Ages. Chronic warfare, both private and public,
periodic famines, and sweeping pestilences like the Black Death,--these
were the things which formerly shortened human life and kept down
population. In the absence of such causes, and with the abundant
capacity of our country for feeding its people, I think it an extremely
moderate statement if we say that by the end of the next century the
English race in the United States will number at least six or seven
hundred millions.

It used to be said that so huge a people as this could not be kept
together as a single national aggregate,--or, if kept together at all,
could only be so by means of a powerful centralized government, like
that of ancient Rome under the emperors. I think we are now prepared to
see that this is a great mistake. If the Roman Empire could have
possessed that political vitality in all its parts which is secured to
the United States by the principles of equal representation and of
limited state sovereignty, it might well have defied all the shocks
which tribally-organized barbarism could ever have directed against it.
As it was, its strong centralized government did _not_ save it from
political disintegration. One of its weakest political features was
precisely this,--that its "strong centralized government" was a kind of
close corporation, governing a score of provinces in its own interest
rather than in the interest of the provincials. In contrast with such a
system as that of the Roman Empire, the skilfully elaborated American
system of federalism appears as one of the most important contributions
that the English race has made to the general work of civilization. The
working out of this feature in our national constitution, by Hamilton