As this separation tendency strengthened, the unity of the race and that of one of its component nations were exposed to disintegration. The outcome {166} appeared to forebode the end of Pan-Angle world control. A house divided against itself cannot stand. If this family was to split into national factions of increasingly smaller size, its end was apparent. Some other civilization would absorb the scattered bits of the once powerful race and another chapter of the struggles of successive civilizations would be concluded.
Certain American states, desiring to loosen the tie by which they were bound, seceded from the Union. Other states declared their faith in the federal principle and took their stand against separation. The issue was befogged in many minds by other points of contention. But "the question submitted to the arbitrament of war was the right of secession."[166-1] Those who looked on could see that if success attended the secession movement, Pan-Angles would have to begin again their search for the means of preserving the balance between local and central government. "My paramount object is to save the Union and not either to save or destroy slavery," wrote Lincoln in 1862.[166-2]
Wilson characterizes the three great men of that struggle in terms of the question at stake. Of Lincoln he says: "The whole country is summed up in him: the rude Western strength, tempered with shrewdness and a broad and humane wit; the Eastern conservatism, regardful of law and devoted to fixed standards of duty. He even understood {167} the South, as no other Northern man of his generation did. He respected, because he comprehended, though he could not hold, its view of the Constitution; he appreciated the inexorable compulsions of its past in respect of slavery; he would have secured it once more, and speedily if possible, in its right to self-government when the fight was fought out . . .
"Grant was Lincoln's suitable instrument, . . . A Western man, he had no thought of commonwealths politically separate, and was instinctively for the Union; a man of the common people, he deemed himself always an instrument, never a master, and did his work, though ruthlessly, without malice; a sturdy, hard-willed, taciturn man, a sort of Lincoln the Silent in thought and spirit."
On the opposite side Robert E. Lee fought "for a principle which is in a sense scarcely less American than the principle of Union. He represented the idea of the inherent—the essential—separateness of self-government. . . . Lee did not believe in secession, but he did believe in the local rootage of all government. This is at the bottom, no doubt, an English idea; but it has had a characteristic American development. It is the reverse side of the shield which bears upon its obverse the devices of the Union,[167-1] . . . Lee . . . could not conceive of the nation apart from the State: above {168} all, he could not live in the nation divorced from his neighbors. His own community should decide his political destiny and duty."[168-1]
The outcome of the American Civil War, to those in the Pan-Angle world who were looking forward to an end of separatings—and this included many in the British Isles,—gave hope and inspiration. It demonstrated the reality of American nationhood and, more important still, it encouraged the race on its path towards convergence. It made natural the Canadian Constitution, otherwise known as the British North America Act of 1867. It made reasonable the foundation in London of the Royal Colonial Institute in 1868, whose motto is "United Empire."[168-2] It made comprehensible the theses of such books as Dilke's Greater Britain, 1868, and Seeley's Expansion of England, 1883.[168-3] Later were to come the convergences of the Australian states in 1900 and the South African provinces in 1909. "For the idea of national unity the people of the United States twenty-five years ago made sacrifices of life and money without a parallel in modern history. No one now doubts that the end justified the enormous expenditure of national force. 'The Union must be preserved' was the pregnant sentence into which Lincoln condensed the national duty of the moment, and to maintain this principle he was able to concentrate the national energy for a supreme effort. The strong man who {169} saved the great republic from disruption takes his place, without a question, among the benefactors of mankind."[169-1]
Moreover, the outcome of the American Civil War tended to revise the attitudes of the British Isles and America toward each other. Up to this time, their attention had been fixed on the conditions of their separation. Hostility seized on various acts performed or permitted by the British government which, rightly or wrongly, the American people considered acts of unfriendliness. These, as the Americans realized, they were hardly in a position to resent while the Civil War was in progress, although at one time war was very nearly declared against the British Isles.[169-2] When the Civil War was over, retaliation might have been undertaken. The American government had at its disposal a navy of over seven hundred vessels, of which over seventy were ironclads. It had an army of over one million seasoned men. The opportunity suggested itself as a proper time to payoff American grudges against the British Isles by annexing Canada. This would have been holding Canada blamable for the doings of another nation. To the credit of the Pan-Angles, President Grant successfully opposed the scheme.[169-3] Not only did the decade 1860-1870 mark the rise of the converging movement in the United States and in Canada, but the same decade saw the culmination and abatement of separating tendencies between {170} the two great powers of the Pan-Angle group, the British Isles and America.
Since those days Pan-Angles have made progress in understanding the balance necessary between the separating and the converging impulses. Men have erred by emphasizing too strongly one side or the other. In America they cried out blindly for "centralization," or "states rights "—in ignorance that only by the complementary strengths of both central and local governments can our sort of people be governed in great masses. Among the Britannic peoples men favoured either British Isles ascendency, or colonial independence—ignorant that the first would as quickly destroy them as would the second. Either course would produce the independence of the younger nations and, through lack of strength to maintain that independence, the loss of it, possibly to some nation outside the Pan-Angle group. These American and Britannic extremists are now a diminishing minority.
The growth of the idea of complementary functions in co-ordinate (not superior and inferior) governments has been instanced by many developments in America. There was a time, many now alive can remember the days, when "centralization" and "states rights" were championed by opposing political parties. To-day it is recognized that the successful government of America rests on the proper use of both of these extremes. This is true, whether it refers to national versus state authorities, or state versus municipal authorities. With a strong central authority in America goes to-day greater recognition of the need of a concurrent local control. This local spirit has gone so far in {171} some of the American states that state legislatures have authorized cities to draw up their own charters.[171-1] Moreover, American political experience within the states has adhered in many cases to the theorem that, on such questions as local taxation and the sale of liquor, the smaller subdivisions of the state should decide their own usages.
Once it was assumed that the officers of the federal government in America should enlarge as much as possible their spheres of activity, even if they appeared to encroach upon state functions. It is now realized that the states should be encouraged to attend to their own affairs, and thus avoid increasing the burdens of the federal government. President Roosevelt in 1908 unofficially called together the American state governors to discuss "conservation," and since then yearly these state executives have met to discuss questions of state policy. These conferences not only tend to produce greater uniformity of Pan-Angle political action, but tend also to make that action the product of large experience. This Conference of the Governors[171-2] and other non-official bodies, the {172} American Bar Association among them, are now encouraged by public opinion to remedy, in whatever ways seem wise, undesirable discrepancies in the laws of the various states, not by seeking greater authority in the central government, but by agitating in the states themselves.