What he realised and first proclaimed, was that America was ceasing to be a mongrel blend or a colonial people, and was fast becoming a national community, with a voice, a vigour, a tendency, and in every department a twang, so to say, of its own; that, moreover, this consolidation would tend towards empire, and that England must prepare for and reckon with it, especially as a partial crudeness and rudeness are to some extent inseparable from developments so sudden. It had not always been thus. Even long after the Puritan settlement, the primæval charm of an aboriginal race clung to its forests and prairies. The strain, the science of race, fascinated Disraeli; the unsubdued and the untameable ever appealed to him. Races could only be replaced by nations; and the interval was always atomic and confused; but it was also one of primitive dash and daring. As a youth, Disraeli, in _Contarini_, had dreamed of such a life. In _Venetia_[136] he had wondered whether the Atlantic would ever be so memorable as the Mediterranean; whether pushfulness would ever attain refinement; whether its provincialism might not be doomed to weakness. “... Its civilisation will be more rapid, but will it be ... as permanent?... What America is deficient in is creative intelligence. _It has no nationality._ Its intelligence has been imported like its manufactured goods. _Its inhabitants are a people, but are they a nation?_ I wish that the empire of the Incas and the kingdom of Montezuma had not been sacrificed. I wish that the republic of the Puritans had blended with the tribes of the Wilderness.” Two dangers for England, however, emanated from America; and perhaps they were connected. The one was American Anglophobia, the other Fenianism. The one might estrange our North American colonies; the other was to imperil our national unity. In 1865, Disraeli addressed himself to the former. The American war was not then decided. He was not of opinion that, when it ended, our connection with Canada would bring us into collision with America. He did not believe that if the North was vanquished, it would “feel inclined to enter immediately into another struggle with a power not inferior in determination and in resources to the Southern States of America;” and he saw many rocks ahead to divert the advancing tide-- “I form that opinion because I believe that the people of the United States are eminently a sagacious people. I don’t think they are insensible to the glory of great dominion and extended empire, and I give them equally credit for being influenced by passions which actuate mankind, and particularly nations which enjoy such freedom as they do. But ... I do not think they would seize the moment of exhaustion as being the most favourable for the prosecution of an enterprise which would require great resources and great exertions.”