Meanwhile, the ancient adage, the rose is not without its thorn, receives new illustration; for even this great result has not been wrought without giving rise to considerations suggestive of thought. Speaking tersely and concentrating what is in my mind into the fewest possible words, I may say that in our national growth up to the year 1830 the play of the centrifugal forces predominated,--that is, the necessity for greater cohesion made itself continually felt. A period of quiescence then followed, lasting until, we will say, 1865. Since 1865, it is not unsafe to say, the centripetal, or gravitating, force has predominated to an extent ever more suggestive of increasing political uneasiness. It is now, as is notorious, more in evidence than ever before. The tendency to concentrate at Washington, the demand that the central government, assuming one function after another, shall become imperial, the cry for the national enactment of laws, whether relating to marital divorce or to industrial combinations,--all impinge on the fundamental principle of local self-government, which assumed its highest and most pronounced form in the claim of State Sovereignty. I am now merely stating problems. I am not discussing the political ills or social benefits which possibly may result from action. Nevertheless, all, I think, must admit that the tendency to gravitation and attraction is to-day as pronounced and as dangerous, especially in the industrial communities of the North, as was the tendency to separation and segregation pronounced and dangerous seventy years ago in the South.
To this I shall later return. I now merely point out what I apprehend to be a tendency to extremes--an excess in the swinging of our political pendulum.