Page:Scott Nearing - The American Empire (1921).djvu/20

 Rh no combination of these individuals and organizations could arbitrarily destroy the American Republic. Underneath personality and partisanship are working the forces which have stripped the American people of their essential liberties as the April sun strips the mountains of their snow.

No one can read the history of the United States since the drafting of the Declaration of Independence without being struck by the complete transformation in the forms of American life. The Industrial Revolution which had gripped England for half a century, made itself felt in the United States after 1815. Steam, transportation, industrial development, city life, business organization, expansion across the continent—these are the factors that have made of the United States a nation utterly apart from the nation of which those who signed the Declaration of Independence and fought the Revolution dreamed.

These economic changes have brought political changes. The American Republic has been thrust aside. Above its remains towers a mighty imperial structure,—the world of business,—bulwarked by usage and convention; safeguarded by legislation, judical interpretation, and the whole power of organized society. That structure is the American Empire—as real to-day as the Roman Empire in the days of Julius Caesar; the French Empire under the Little Corporal, or the British Empire of the Great Commoner, William E. Gladstone.

Approved or disapproved; exalted or condemned; the fact of empire must be evident even to the hasty observer. The student, tracing its ramifications, realizes that the structure has been building for generations.

Many minds will refuse to accept the term "empire" as applied to a republic. Accustomed to link "empire" with "emperor," they conceive of a supreme hereditary ruler as an essential part of imperial life. A little re-