the gulf of our
perdition, the movement of past years is reversed, and every revolution
carries us farther and farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by
God's blessing, we shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost
coil of the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may
hope to make them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul,
in an hour's discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's
exultant festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the
incense of our harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who
are to inherit the fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about
unblamed, making day and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism.

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have come
a little sooner, or a little later, but it must have come. The disease
of the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough chirurgery
of war was its only remedy.

In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse
into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived, or if
this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have
gone on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the
glories of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his
heresies; if Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr.
Phillips, the Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium,
had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr.
Clay had still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth the billows of
contention; if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from
the dust to fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of rebellion,--we
might have been spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is but
simple Martha's faith, without the reason she could have given: "If Thou
hadst been here, my brother had not died."

They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling,
who believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride
their waves. It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent to
continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its
own bubbles. If this is true of all the narrower manifestations of human
progress, how much more must it be true of those broad movements in the
intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind? But in
the more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more