Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/446

414 Effects of national growth. [i850- matters of the States united. For a generation or more after the founding of the Union, the South as well as the North had felt the pulses of growth and national expansion; and Calhoun had once been at the front of a group of young statesmen who were pushing forward internal improvements, advocating the acquisition of territory, and supporting every national enterprise and policy. It was when the movement quickened beyond the pace at which the South could follow it, when States threatened to multiply without end in the West, when railways shortened the road of growth, and immigration swelled more and more the tide of new peoples that poured in to join the northern, not the southern, hosts of settlers and State-makers, that the South began to realise her separateness and isolation. It was significant that it was in a debate concerning the right policy to be pursued with regard to the western lands, the unoccupied national domain, that Webster and Hayne came to their issue with regard to the doctrine of nullification. It was the West that was making a nation out of the old-time federation of seaboard States. Webster was insisting upon the new uses and significance of the Constitution, Hayne was harking back to the old. The Constitution had once been deemed almost, if not quite, susceptible of the interpretation which the Senator from South Carolina still sought to apply to it ; but the national life had in these later days grown strong within it, and it had become, at any rate for the major part of those who lived under it, the instrument of nationality Webster understood it to be. No constitution can ever be treated as a mere law or document: it must always be also a vehicle of life. Its own phrases must become as it were living tissue. It must grow and strengthen and subtly change with the growth and strength and change of the political body whose life it defines, and must, in all but its explicit and mandatory provisions with regard to powers and forms of action, take its reading from the circumstances of the time. In the South circumstances had not changed ; in the North and West they had changed almost beyond recognition ; and the men of the two sections could no longer think alike with regard to the fundamentals of their common government. The days when South Carolina attempted nullification were the days of the first full consciousness of these momentous changes and of this disparity of interests between the sections; and by 1850 these things could escape no thoughtful man's observation. Movements which had been slow had become rapid; issues which had seemed far away were now obviously close at hand. The decade 1840-50, particularly, had seen every process of modification quickened. The age of railways and of labour-saving invention had set in, and with it the days when movements of population were to be greater than ever. Before 1842 no year had brought so many as a hundred thousand immigrants to the United States, but by 1847 the tide had mounted to 234,968, and by 1849 to