Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/37

Rh colonies; the rest of the English-speaking union, known as the British Empire, continues to live, and to live truly stronger and better from the lesson that was well learned when one part of that union was lost through the blunders of sectional aggression.

Not for one moment do I question the honesty and patriotism of the brave soldiers in blue who, I cheerfully admit, sincerely believed that they were fighting for the union of the fathers—although many of them allowed themselves to be swept along into this belief. But I do say this, that they, as well as we, were victims of their own Juggernaut; that their plea for a forcible American union was of the same essence with the plea, in 1776, for a forcible British union; it was the plea of Old World and world-old imperialism, and a plea which will justify every war of invasion and conquest that has ever stained history's pages.

But the objection is sometimes made that the South's success would have meant the Latin-Americanization of the Southern States: that, the principle of peaceable secession, once established, all union between the different States would have been no more than a rope of sand, and we would speedily have degenerated into a parcel of petty, mutually jealous republics—perhaps dictatorships. The history of our race refutes the suggestion.

For some two thousand years the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt have wrought out, link by link, on the anvil of hard experience and dogged experimentation, the everlasting principles of self-government. The success of the Confederate States of America would have turned out another and a stronger link, would have marked another glorious step forward in the laborious progress of Liberty and Self-government. Ours is a patient race, no less than a progressing one, and the successful termination of our second War for Independence could never have changed that bent of mind and habit of action that stand behind the following assertion in the Declaration of Independence:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long