"on the eve of the greatest Civil War in history?" Possibly; but that
war was precisely what was needed to ratify the Union, and lift it out
of the experimental stage. "Blut ist ein ganz besondrer Saft," and it is
sometimes necessary that other pacts than those of hell should be
written in blood, before the world recognises their full validity.
Heaven forbid that the Deed of Union of the United States should require
a second time to be retraced in red!

But it is an illusion, though a salutary one, that civil war is any more
barbarous than international war. What the world wants is the
realisation that every war is a civil war, a war between brothers,
justifiable only for the repression of some cruelty more cruel than war
itself, some barbarism more barbarous. Towards this realisation the
United States is leading the way, by showing that, under the conditions
of modern life, an effective sense of brotherhood, a resolute loyalty
to a unifying idea, may be maintained throughout a practically unlimited
extent of territory.

But, while enumerating the difficulties which the Republic has to
overcome, I have said nothing of the one great advantage it enjoys--a
common, or at any rate a dominant, language. The diversity of tongues
which prevails in Europe is doubtless one of the chief hindrances to
that "Federation of the World" of which the poet dreamed. But if the
many tongues of Europe retard its fusion into what I have called a
political aggregate, there exists in the world a political aggregate
larger in extent than either Europe or the United States, which
possesses, like the United States, the advantage of one dominant
language. I mean, of course, the British Empire; and surely it is,
on the face of it, a fact of good augury for the world that the
dominant language of these two vast aggregations of democracies should