of the state may,
indeed, not pause where the sustenance of its integral life fails. But
then its extension will be purchased with its freedom,--the quality be
debased as the quantity increases. Jelly-fish, and creatures of the
lowest animation, may sustain magnitude of body, not only with a slight
skeleton, but with none at all; and society of a cold-blooded or
bloodless kind follows the analogy. But these low grades of social
organization, having some show of congruity with the blank levels of
Russia, can pretend to none with the continent we inhabit. Yet some
species of arbitrament between man and man is sure to establish itself;
if it live not, as a part of freedom, in the bosom of each, then does
it inevitably build itself into a Fate over their heads; and despotism,
war, or similar brutal and violent instrumentalities of adjustment,
supply in their way the demand that love and reason failed to meet.

Accordingly, in our American Man must be found, first, social largeness
and susceptibility,--whatsoever, in the breadth of a flexile and
sympathetic nature, may contribute to the keeping of the Golden Rule.
But the broadest good-feeling will not alone suffice. The great pledge
of peace, fellowship, and profitable co-working among such a population
as we anticipate must be sought in the deeper unity of moral principle.
For Right is one, and is every man's interest. Right is better than
Charity; for Right meets, or even anticipates, normal wants, while
Charity only mends failures. Nothing, therefore, that we could discover
in the New Man would be such a security for his future, nothing so fit
him for his place, as a tendency to simple and universal principles of
action. In the absence of this, he will infallibly be compelled one day
to enter Providence's court of chancery, and come forth bankrupt. But
let him be, even by promise, a seer of those primary truths in which
the interests of all are comprehended and made identical, and the
virtue of his vision will become the assurance of his welfare.
Doubtless, sad men will say that our own eyes are clouded with some
glittering dust of optimism, when we declare that this Man for the
Continent is the very one whose advent we celebrate. This might,
indeed, seem a fatuitously dulcet song to sing just now, when a din of
defection and recreancy is loud through all the land,--now, when we
have immediately in view, and on the largest scale, an open patronage
of infamous wrong-doing