English and French Contributions  WITH the close of the war the
question of the times was the urgent problem of the form and
control of the new political state to be erected: whether it
should be the coercive sovereign of the whole, or should share
its sovereignty with the several states. Although the problem
was political, the forces that were driving to a solution were
economic, and were commonly recognized as such. Agrarian and
mercantile interests opposed each other openly and shaped their
political programs in accordance with their special needs. Not
until French romanticism popularized the doctrine of social
equalitarianism was there any serious questioning of the
principle of the economic basis of politics. The fact of
property rule was challenged in America no more than in England,
and the laws of suffrage in the several states were founded on
that principle. The new state, therefore, took its shape from
men who were political realists, deeply read in the republican
literature of the seventeenth centu