1818 that they recovered it.

[Sidenote: Republican government encouraged.] A great political principle
had been strengthened by the success of the Revolution: republican
government had been revived in a fashion unknown since ancient times. The
territory claimed by Virginia was larger than the island of Great Britain.
The federal republic included an area nearly four times as large as that
of France. In 1782 Frederick of Prussia told the English ambassador that
the United States could not endure, "since a republican government had
never been known to exist for any length of time where the territory was
not limited and concentred." The problem was a new one; but in communities
without a titled aristocracy, which had set themselves against the power
of a monarch, and which had long been accustomed to self-government, the
problem was successfully worked out. The suffrage was still limited to the
holders of land; but the spirit of the Revolution looked towards
abolishing all legal distinctions between man and man; and the foundation
of later democracy, with its universal suffrage, was thus already laid.

[Sidenote: Influence of rights of man.]

The influence of the republican spirit upon the rest of the world was not
yet discerned; but the United States had established for themselves two
principles which seriously affected other nations. If English colonies
could by revolution relieve themselves from the colonial system of
England, the French and Spanish colonies might follow that example; and
forty years later not one of the Spanish continental colonies acknowledged
the authority of the home government. The other principle was that of the
rights of man. The Declaration of Independence contained a list of rights
such as were familiar to the colonists of England, but were only theories
elsewhere. The success of the Revolution was, therefore, a shock to the