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nation was perfect, there was lacking in the reality
something of the compactness of a vital organism,
whose great strength should be wielded by one
imperial will, and wherein a common heart should
beat, and a common mind think. There was, as
philosophical statemanship had foreseen, the working
within, of powerful unassimilated elements threaten¬
ing destruction. Sectional interests, State jealousies,
personal ambitions, all tending to occasional inter¬
ruptions—indeed, seemingly to the ultimate destruc¬
tion of the one common life. There was need of
another and a last antagonism, to compact the
organism—the burst of another fiery flood over the
conglomerate strata, melting and moulding them
forever into one composite world.
Now, just this thing we are experiencing. And
though to short-sighted and timid reason it seem
a veritable destruction, yet to masterful faith it
is no more than a fulfilment of the law of all
social progress, by which a state of conflict, of
discomfiture, of seeming overthrow and disintegra¬
tion, precedes a condition of higher excellence and
triumph.
The grand obstacle to our permanent nationality
has been, from the first, this heresy of State Sover¬
eignties—the selfishness of the old Colonial and
Confederate eras, transmitted as hereditary virus
to disorder the functions of constitutional life. But
the effect of this war must be to annihilate that
pestilent heresy at once and forever. This, indeed,
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