United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


For the gradual assimilation of all the ethnic elements of the community is our ideal, as it is the ideal of the French, English, Italian, and other states. "Isolation and particularism are the negative of that ideal, and operate like a piece of iron or wood in the human body which produces ulceration and gangrene. All our institutions should therefore be calculated to encourage assimilation.

Next, feudalism came in as a strong political solvent, and thus for centuries Germany crumbled and mouldered away, until disunion seemed to be the fate of her richest lands, and particularism became a rooted instinct of her princes, burghers, and peasants.

The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced.

In the first place, the free journals suffered from the difficulty which all true reformers have, that they have to begin by going against the stream. In the second place they suffered from that character of particularism or "crankiness," which was a necessary result of their Propagandist character. In the third place and this is most important they suffered economically.

So, too, is the series of reports by Hamilton. But his plans could not prevail by force of reason against the general spirit of selfish particularism.

Krochmal though he does not say it explicitly sees in religion only a passing phenomenon in the history of the Jewish people, exactly as its political existence was but a temporary phase. The Jewish people presents a double aspect to the observer. It is national in its particularism, or its concrete aspect, and universal in its spiritualism.

The political and national development of the German people has always, so far back as German history extends, been hampered and hindered by the hereditary defects of its character that is, by the particularism of the individual races and States, the theoretic dogmatism of the parties, the incapacity to sacrifice personal interests for great national objects from want of patriotism and of political common sense, often, also, by the pettiness of the prevailing ideas.

We of the North must confess that there was considerable foundation for the asserted right of States to secede. Although the Constitution did in distinct terms make the Federal Government supreme, it was not so understood at first by the people either North or South. Particularism prevailed everywhere at the beginning.

The minute that the spirit which finds its healthy development in local self-government, and is the antidote to the dangers of an extreme centralization, develops into mere particularism, into inability to combine effectively for achievement of a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great results.

And yet it is clearly evident that before the real import of American Democracy can be divined the forest must be explored and the underbrush cleared away. This is not a plea for localism or particularism. On the contrary, it suggests the possibility of a broader view of our National life. It points to the source of our political ideals.