been rent again. There would not have been one America,
but many Americas. The New World would have trodden
over again in the tracks of the old. There would have been
rival communities, with rival constitutions, democracies pass-
ing into military despotisms, standing armies, intrigues and
quarrels, and wars on wars. The completeness with which
the issue has been accepted shows that the Americans under-
stood the alternative that lay before them. That the wound
so easily healed was a proof that they had looked the alterna-
tive in the face, and were satisfied with the verdict which had
been pronounced.

And well they may be satisfied. The dimensions and value
of any single man depend on the body of which he is a mem-
ber. As an individual, with his horizon bounded by his per-
sonal interests, he remains, however high his gifts, but a mean
creature. His thoughts are small, his aims narrow; he has
no common concerns or common convictions which bind him
to his fellows. He lives, he works, he wins a share--small or
great--of the necessaries or luxuries which circumstances
throw within his reach, and then he dies and there is an end
of him. A man, on the other hand, who is more than him-
self, who is part of an institution, who has devoted himself to
a cause--or is a citizen of an imperial power--expands to the
scope and fulness of the larger organism; and the grander
the organization, the larger and more important the unit that
knows that he belongs to it. His thoughts are wider, his in-
terests less selfish, his ambitious ampler and nobler. As a
granite block is to the atoms of which it is composed when
disintegrated, so are men in organic combination to the same
men only aggregated together. Each particle contracts new
qualities which are created by the intimacy of union. Indi-
vidual Jesuits are no more than other mortals. The Jesuits
as a society are not mortal at all, and rule the Catholic world.
Behind each American citizen America is standing, and he

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