What a Southern statesman exclaimed, arguing against the adoption of the Federal Constitution, in 1787, may be appositely repeated here: "But the character of the partners (meaning the Northern States) causes me more alarm than the terms of the partnership." England's partnership with Australia, South Africa, and India has spread such a pall of universal indebtedness over the fairest portions of the globe that we may well hesitate before we make more permanent the stipulations in the "bond" of her blighting friendship.
Undoubtedly the seeds of the War of 1812 were sown by the treaty of 1794, negotiated by John Jay, who took "a mild and conciliatory part in the Revolutionary war," and by Lord Grenville, the son of the author of the Stamp Act. The "Jay treaty," as it was called, provided for the shameful curtailment of the American ocean-carrying trade, and for the free navigation of the Mississippi for Great Britain. And if the proposed arbitration treaty is not finally rejected by the Senate, the prominence given to the present British Minister at McKinley's inauguration, accidental though it may have been, will serve as a fine prototype of British influence in the administration of our government.
"Woe to the nation that trusts England's friendship," exclaimed the thoughtful Pettigrew, after studying her national character on the narrow island where it grew. What he says, given under the sketch of him in this book, is a valuable side-light upon the suggestion that her influence more than any other (except original sin) has changed the half of our nation nearest to her into a race of "dollar-hunters and breeders of dollar-hunters." The way to make England our ally is to show her that we are able to take care of ourselves. Her government fears nothing so much as the democratic spirit of America, and would fain bind that down by treaty; but when it serves her purposes, Old England, like New England, finds a "higher law" than a contract. Unity of interest and of purpose unites peoples--compacts often unite governments in a conspiracy to plunder.
In dwelling specially upon the main cause of our civil war, because of attempts to ignore it, I do not mean to encourage the student to neglect the other causes: the control by the Confederacy of the lower Mississippi--the ocean outlet of its headwater States; the fear of protected labor that the slaves would learn to manufacture, and reduce wages; the jealousy and friction in the newly-settled West, caused by the actual contact of the two systems of labor (for slavery was a practical and serious question there); the belief that slavery was at the bottom of the forty-four years of sectional political wrangling, and that this must cease or the Union be dissolved; the honest and the prejudiced opposition to the institution itself; the zeal and ambition of machine politicians, in both sections, anxious to get in "on the ground floor" of personal advantage--these together, acted on by the main cause, and reacting on each other, constitute the causes of the war.
