United States -- History -- 1815-1861; United States -- Politics and government -- 1815-1861
[Sidenote: The ends of the state.]
When a state has fairly accomplished the primal end of establishing
its governmental system, its {243} public policy will be found to be
pursuing, in ultimate generalization, two great all-comprehending
purposes, namely, national development and universal human progress.
Rarely, if ever, will any state be found to have succeeded in so
balancing these two principal objects of its public policy as to make
the resultant of its two main lines of progress follow an unchanging
angle. At one period, the principle of national development will
prevail, even to the point of national exclusiveness; at another, an
enthusiastic humanism will almost threaten the existence of national
distinctions. But in all the convulsions of political history,
described as advance and reaction, the scientific student of history
is able to discover that the zigzags of progress are ever bearing in
the general direction which the combined impulses toward nationalism
and humanism compel.
[Sidenote: The purposes of the state, as seen in the history of the
United States.]
After the humanitarian outburst of the revolutionary period in the
latter part of the eighteenth century had expended its force, the
states of the world veered in their policies toward the line of
national development. The United States, which had been excessively
humanitarian during that period, both in its doctrine of rights and in
its policy, became, in the succeeding period, the first three decades
of the nineteenth century, more and more national in disposition and
in practice, until industrial exclusiveness and race domination
appeared, at the close of the period, to be the sole principles of the
policy of the country.
Had the two elements of this policy been equally, or almost equally,
sustained throughout the whole country, there is little question that
the human purpose, the world-purpose, as Hegel calls it, of state
existence, would have been ignored to a higher degree, and for a {244}
longer period, than it was. But curiously and fortunately, the race
domination in the South produced economic conditions which demanded
trade and commerce with the world, and which finally forced upon the
North the conviction that the cause of those conditions--race
domination, slavery--must be removed, in order to secure the
industrial interests of the North against the competition of the
world's markets. The destruction of that domination must proceed,
however, upon a humanitarian principle, namely, the right of man to
personal liberty. Thus it clearly appears that the two elements of the
national exclusiveness of the United States in 1830 were, in the
peculiar relation which finally obtained between them, preparing the
nation for a new advance in the direction of world intercourse and
human rights.
[Sidenote: The Revolution of 1830.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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