Yet it may not be impertinent to suggest that in no country are the names of political parties or factions commonly selected by a committee of philologists with an eye to making the national politics intelligible. What notions of English history are conveyed by the mere names of “Whig” and “Tory” or even of “Liberal” and “Conservative” to a person unfamiliar with the political history of England? What light is thrown on the history of Byzantium by talking of the “Blues” and the “Greens,” or on the history of Florence by casual references to the “Bianchi” and the “Neri”? When one asks for the origin of such names, history is apt to give him no better answer than that of the small African child who was invited by a sympathetic lady to explain how she came to have six toes on one of her feet—“they growed so!” This is so emphatically true of American political parties that my readers must pardon me if I take them back to the “beginnings of things” for an accurate perspective of the recent Presidential election in the United States, and of its significance. * * * * * The existing Constitution of the American Union was adopted in 1789 by the citizens of thirteen new-born Republics who had grown up to manhood in the then anomalous condition of subjects of the British Crown enjoying all the privileges and immunities of local self-government in thirteen distinct and independent colonies which differed among themselves in origin, in social traditions and habits, and in religion, almost as widely as Wales differs from Ireland, or Ireland from Scotland. These colonies had co-operated from time to time with the mother country for the common defence against a common enemy, colonial France. And they had been united under a temporary political bond in the great revolutionary war of 1776, by a common spirit of resistance to that Parliamentary despotism, tempered by corruption, which after the English Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of the House of Hanover assumed to itself the place originally held by the British Crown in the allegiance of these stalwart “Home-Rulers” beyond the Atlantic.