e and fortune. Every element of
an unexhausted soil, and all the achievements of a people let loose upon
it to settle, build, sow, and reap, with no master but ambition and no
dread but of poverty, and a long list of rights thrust suddenly into
their hands, with liberty to exercise them,--the right to vote, to
speak, to print, to be tried by jury,--all this margin for unfettered
action, even the corresponding vastness of the country itself, whose
ruggedest features and greatest distances were playthings of the popular
energy,--to love and extol these things were held by us equivalent to
having a native land and feeding a patriotic flame. But now all at once
this catalogue of advantages, which we were accustomed to call "our
country," is stripped of all its value, because we begin to feel that it
depends upon something else, more interior and less easy to appraise,
which we had not noticed much before. Just as when suddenly, in a
favorite child, endowed with strength, beauty, and effective gifts of
every member, of whom we were proud and expected great things, and whom
we took unlimited comfort in calling our own, there appears the solemn
intention of a soul to use this fine body to express its invisible truth
and honor, a wonderful revelation of a high mind filled with aspirations
which we had not suspected,--a sudden lifting of the whole body like an
eyelid before an inner eye, and we are astonished at the look it gives
us: so this body of comfort and success, which we worshipped as our
country, is suddenly possessed by great passions and ideas, by a
consciousness that providential laws demand the use of it, and will not
be restrained from inspiring the whole frame, and directing every member
of it with a new plan of Unity, and a finer feeling for Liberty, and a
more generous sense of Fraternity than ever before. Lately we did as we
pleased, but now we are going to be real children of Liberty. Formerly
we had a Union which transacted business for us, secured the payment of
our debts, and made us appear formidable abroad while it corrupted and
betrayed us at home,--a Union of colporteurs, and caucuses, and drummers
of Southern houses; not a Union, but a long coffle of patriotic laymen,
southerly clergymen, and slaves. Now the soul of a Democracy, gazing
terribly through eyes that are weeping for the dead and for indignation
at the cause of their dying, holds the thing which we call Union, and
determines to keep its mighty