less, heedless, reckless adolescence
to grave and reflecting manhood. The nation has been suddenly
compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from reflection,
understanding, science, statesmanship, not from instinct, impulse,
passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does, and wherefore it does
it. The change which four years of civil war have wrought in the
nation is great, and is sure to give it the seriousness, the gravity,
the dignity, the manliness it has heretofore lacked.

Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own
existence, it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear
understanding of its own national constitution. Its vision is still
obscured by the floating mists of its earlier morning, and its judgment
rendered indistinct and indecisive by the wild theories and fancies of
its childhood. The national mind has been quickened, the national
heart has been opened, the national disposition prepared, but there
remains the important work of dissipating the mists that still linger,
of brushing away these wild theories and fancies, and of enabling it to
form a clear and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true and just
appreciation of its own constitution tendencies,--and destiny; or, in
other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own idea, and the
means of its actualization in space and time.

Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to realize, and
whose realization is its special work, mission, or destiny. Every
nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of God. The Jews were the
chosen people of God, through whom the primitive traditions were to be
preserved in their purity and integrity, and the Messiah was to come.
The Greeks were the chosen people of God, for the development and
realization of the beautiful or the divine splendor in art, and of the
true in science and philosophy; and the Romans, for the development of
the state, law, and jurisprudence. The great despotic nations of Asia
were never properly nations; or if they were nations with a mission,
they proved false to it--, and count for nothing in the progressive
development of the human race. History has not recorded their mission,
and as far as they are known they have contributed only to the abnormal
development or corruption of religion and civilization. Despotism is
barbaric and abnormal.

The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is
chosen of God for the