10 sphere, as aliens and strangers, and brought, only by outward pressure, within the power of social attraction. First, the cruelties of a common savage foe kindled friendly sympathies among the scattered hamlets, and then, as they grew into considerable colonies, the intolerance in turn of English, French, and Dutch rule, linked stranger-hearts into a community of suffering, and stranger-hands into a community of resistance. Then came the Revolutionary period—when the attack of insane tyranny upon sacred charters, and the storm of foreign invasion around those homes in the wilderness, brought a scattered race more tenderly into sympathy, overcoming old prejudices of envy, or ignorance, or fear, and through that stormy era of confederacy, ever strengthening those social ties, till they took the seeming of nerve and sinew and vital tissue in a single, common, organic life. With the adoption of the Federal Constitution, the colonies became, at least in theory, a composite nation. Old leagues and compacts and articles of confederacy, were put away as partition walls—provincial watchwords were forgotten, provincial flags furled forever, and in the form and with the functions of a single organism, the young Republic set forth in her progress, all her sons keeping step to the same music, following the same banner, E Pluribus Unum, their one glorious motto amid, or against, the kingdoms of the world ! And yet, though from the first our theory of a
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