At the North, thanks to a free press and periodicals, to a dozen reform agitations, and to the intellectual stir generally accompanying industries and commerce, we have been developing an immense intellectual activity, a portion of which has found expression in fiction, in poetry, in essays, that are instinct with American life and aspiration; so that now for over thirty years, in the field of literature, we have had a vigorous offset to the English intellectual domination of which I spoke.  How far this has in the past molded American thought and sentiment, in what degree it should be held responsible for the infidelity in regard to our “American experiment,” I will not undertake to say.  The South furnishes a very interesting illustration in this connection.  When the civil war broke down the barriers of intellectual non-intercourse behind which the South had ensconced itself, it was found to be in a colonial condition.  Its libraries were English libraries, mostly composed of old English literature.  Its literary growth stopped with the reign of George III.  Its latest news was the Spectator and the Tatler.  The social order it covered was that of monarchical England, undisturbed by the fiery philippics of Byron or Shelley or the radicalism of a manufacturing age.  Its chivalry was an imitation of the antiquated age of lords and ladies, and tournaments, and buckram courtesies, when men were as touchy to fight, at the lift of an eyelid or the drop of the glove, as Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and as ready for a drinking-bout as Christopher North.  The intellectual stir of the North, with its disorganizing radicalism, was rigorously excluded, and with it all the new life pouring out of its presses.  The South was tied to a republic, but it was not republican, either in its politics or its social order.  It was, in its mental constitution, in its prejudices, in its tastes, exactly what you would expect a people to be, excluded from the circulation of free ideas by its system of slavery, and fed on the English literature of a century ago.  I dare say that a majority of its reading public, at any time, would have preferred a monarchical system and a hierarchy of rank.

To return to England.  I have said that English domination usually carries the best elements of civilization.  Yet it must be owned that England has pursued her magnificent career in a policy often insolent and brutal, and generally selfish.  Scarcely any considerations have stood in the way of her trade and profit.  I will not dwell upon her opium culture in India, which is a proximate cause of famine in district after district, nor upon her forcing the drug upon China—­a policy disgraceful to a Christian queen and people.  We have only just got rid of slavery, sustained so long by Biblical and official sanction, and may not yet set up as critics.  But I will refer to a case with which all are familiar—­England’s treatment of her American colonies.  In 1760 and onward, when Franklin, the agent of the colonies of