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 -i860] The South and the Union. 413 it with a morning vision of its great tasks and certain destiny. Those who heard were not so much convinced as aroused, stimulated, exhila- rated. He had spoken for the new generation. But the generation in the midst of which he stood was both new and old. It was new on the whole stage of movement, of change, of struggle, of achievement, where the nation was being re-established and transformed; but it was old where change had not penetrated, where institutions had stood un- touched, where the organisation of society was in fact unalterable, and where thought and habit held steady and undiverted to the old ways. The South stood still in a fixed order. Since the making of the Con- stitution, Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas had been added to the South upon the Gulf, and Tennessee and Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri within the continent; but such growth had been assured her almost from the first, and had resulted in a uniform expansion, without essential change either in conceptions or in modes of life. Wherever slavery was established, society took and kept a single and invariable form ; industry had its fixed variety and pattern ; life held to unalterable standards. Change had entry and freedom only in the great westward migration which followed the parallels of latitude further to the north, and in the great industrial expansion of the East. It was a process there which obliterated old political boundaries, fused diverse elements of population, created community in enterprise, quickened throughout wide regions the sense of co-operation, and made the nation itself seem to those who took part in it a single great partnership in material and political development. No doubt the whole country had felt a certain critical coolness towards the Constitution throughout the generation which framed and adopted it. Statesmen defended, praised, expounded, fortified it; Courts diligently wove its provisions into the law of the land; success added prestige to the general government which it had set up ; but the little commonwealths of the long seaboard, which had agreed to live under it, kept their old pride of separateness, thought of it at first rather as a serviceable arrangement than as an unalterable law, respected it but did not love it, and were ready enough to question it, asking once and again, as they had asked at first, whether it was really, after all, calculated to promote their interests. And this was the point of view which the South, more than any other part of the country, had kept, because she more than any other part of the country had remained unchanged. She did not feel her dependence upon the national govern- ment as those did who were building up manufactures under the protecting shadow of the federal tariff laws, or as those did who were organising settlements and making new States out of the national domain in the West. These men had always an image of enterprise, union, and co-operation when they spoke of the nation ; while public men in the South thought only of the general government, the agent in certain CH. XIII.