The consequences of this disintegration were disastrous to the dignity of Germany and the character of her people. She had no place among the real powers of the world politically, and her masses, lacking the stimulus of a noble national atmosphere, were dwarfed and shrivelled into narrow and timid provincialism, split as they were into their little segregations. Patriotism languished in dot-like States oppressively administered, without associations to awaken pride, or generous interests to evoke devotion. Spirits like Leasing and Goethe, all but derided patriotism. It scarcely held a place among the proper virtues. The small units were forever unsympathetic and inharmonious, jealous over a petty "balance of power" and always liable to war. The disease which the face of the map suggested to the boy's imagination was indeed a real one, inveterate, deep-seated, and prostrating to all that is best in human nature. For a few years, before the adoption of the Constitution, America seemed likely to fall a prey to it, each of the thirteen States standing aloof on its own little dignity in a bond scarcely more than nominal, of the weakest and coolest. In 1787 came the beneficent change. The thirteen and those that followed the thirteen were made one, and it was the beginning of a grand unifying in many lands. Following an instinct at first only faintly manifest but which soon gathered strength, disintegrated Germany became one. Italy, too, became one, and in our old home the "Little Englanders," once a noteworthy company, succumbed to a conquering sentiment that England should become a "great world-Venice," and the seas no longer barriers, but the highways, through which the parent-state and her brood of dominions, though flung far into many zones, should yet go easily to and fro, not separate nations, nor yet a company bound together by a mere rope of sand, but one. Great nations replaced little states.