In a notable essay Professor Josiah Royce has asserted the salutary
influence of a highly organized provincial life in order to counteract
certain evils arising from the tremendous development of nationalism in
our own day. Among these evils he enumerates: first, the frequent
changes of dwelling place, whereby the community is in danger of losing
the well-knit organization of a common life; second, the tendency to
reduce variety in national civilization, to assimilate all to a common
type and thus to discourage individuality, and produce a "remorseless
mechanism—vast, irrational;" third, the evils arising from the fact
that waves of emotion, the passion of the mob, tend in our day to sweep
across the nation.
Against these surges of national feeling Professor Royce would erect
dikes in the form of provincialism, the resistance of separate sections
each with its own traditions, beliefs and aspirations. "Our national
unities have grown so vast, our forces of social consolidation so
paramount, the resulting problems, conflicts, evils, have become so
intensified," he says, that we must seek in the province renewed
strength, usefulness and beauty of American life.
Whatever may be thought of this philosopher's appeal for a revival of
sectionalism, on a higher level, in order to check the tendencies to a
deadening uniformity of national consolidation (and to me this appeal, under the limitations which he gives it, seems warranted by the conditions)—it is certainly true that in the history of the United States sectionalism holds a place too little recognized by the historians.
By sectionalism I do not mean the struggle between North and South which
culminated in the Civil War. That extreme and tragic form of
sectionalism indeed has almost engrossed the attention of historians, and it is, no doubt, the most striking and painful example of the phenomenon in our history. But there are older, and perhaps in the long run more enduring examples of the play of sectional forces than the slavery struggle, and there are various sections besides North and South.
Indeed, the United States is, in size and natural resources, an empire, a collection of potential nations, rather than a single nation. It is comparable in area to Europe. If the coast of California be placed along the coast of Spain, Charleston, South Carolina, would fall near Constantinople; the northern shores of Lake Superior would touch the Baltic, and New Orleans would lie in southern Italy. Within this vast empire there are geographic provinces, separate in physical conditions, into which American colonization has flowed, and in each of which a special society has developed, with an economic, political and social life of its own. Each of these provinces, or sections, has developed its own leaders, who in the public life of the nation have voiced the needs of their section, contended with the representatives of other sections, and arranged compromises between sections in national legislation and policy, almost as ambassadors from separate countries in a European congress might make treaties.
Between these sections commercial relations have sprung up, and economic
combinations and contests may be traced by the student who looks beneath
the surface of our national life to the actual grouping of States in
congressional votes on tariff, internal improvement, currency and
banking, and all the varied legislation in the field of commerce. American industrial life is the outcome of the combinations and contests of groups of States in sections. And the intellectual, the spiritual life of the nation is the result of the interplay of the sectional ideals, fundamental assumptions and emotions.
In short, the real federal aspect of the nation, if we penetrate beneath
constitutional forms to the deeper currents of social, economic and
political life, will be found to lie in the relation of sections and
nation, rather than in the relation of States and nation. Recently
ex-secretary Root emphasized the danger that the States, by neglecting
to fulfil their duties, might fall into decay, while the national
government engrossed their former power. But even if the States
disappeared altogether as effective factors in our national life, the
sections might, in my opinion, gain from that very disappearance a
strength and activity that would prove effective limitations upon the
nationalizing process.