What Barret wrote was a prescient statement with political implications, for the fate of the American, unlike that of the European, is inevitably a political fate. In This, the United States is unique. The men who founded the United Sattes of america justified their creation, and their rebellion against the British Crown, as establishing a new and different kind of political society, making obsolete the kinds of goivernments that existed before the American Constitution was drafted. The nation today rest upon a political compact or treaty among people of increasingly diverse origin and religious belief, or lack of belief ; but who have in common a political vocabulary and constitutional system : and it is what justifies the national existence. The United States could as easily have been established in Australia or New Zealand, or any other large and mainly unoccupied tract of land in a reasonably habitable part of the world, as long as the Constitution was the same. If that Constitution should be abrogated, or if the political system that it established should fail or be overturned, then there would be no point to the United States. it would cease to be what it was intended to be, and we all might as well go back to where we came from.
p180
Barbarian sentiments
Noonday
