Page:The parallel between the English and American civil wars.djvu/49

CIVIL WARS There is another reason why the Americans were more successful in solving the problems that were left them. They had a long experience of the working of democratic institutions, and we were just beginning to make the experiment of republican government. The English of the middle of the seventeenth century, as Mr Roosevelt observes, "had by no means attained to that power of compromise which they showed forty years later in the Revolution of 1688, or which was displayed by their blood-kin and political heirs, the American victors in the struggles of 1776 and 1861 ."

I will go further and say that the very idea of compromise was as unfamiliar to the average seventeenth-century Englishman as it was familiar to the average citizen of the United States. The constitution of the United States was itself a compromise; not a compromise slowly effected by the incessant and insensible action of opposing forces, as our constitution is, but a compromise made 41