liberty possible in
the present life, as well as the ever-increasing influence and light of
religion, science, and education, giving augmented power to preserve and
rightly use that liberty. Extent of territory in the present age, is no
bar to the union of very distant regions. When the telegraph, that
modern miracle, brings the shores of the Pacific within three hours'
time of the Atlantic seaboard--when railroads contract States into
counties, and counties into the dimensions of an average farm, as to the
time taken to traverse them--when _spaces_ are thus brought into the
closest union, it is but the counterpart and prophecy of the close moral
and industrial union of the people who inhabit the spaces. When slavery,
that relic of barbarism, that demon of darkness and discord, is
destroyed, we can conceive of nothing that shall possess like power to
sunder one section of the Union from another--of nothing that shall not
be within the power of the people to settle by rational discussion or
amicable arbitration. No! Slavery once destroyed, an unimagined Future
dawns upon the republic. The Southern rebellion, and the _utterly
unavoidable_ civil war thence arising--as these are the two
instrumentalities by which slavery will be cut clean away from the
vitals of the nation, and the Union left untrammelled, to follow its
great destiny--these twin events, we say, will, in after ages, be looked
back upon as blessings in disguise--as the knife of the surgeon, that
gives the patient a new lease of a long, prosperous, and happy life.

* * * * *

We have contemplated the Union, and seen something of its matchless
symmetry, beauty, and indefinite capabilities, ever unfolding, to
promote human welfare, through its unity with variety, its liberty with
order, its freedom of action of each part in its own sphere, coexisting
with the harmonious working of all together as one grand whole--all of
which arises, as was said, from the unconscious modelling (on the part
of its authors) of our political structure upon the Divine and universal
plan of organization in mineral, in plant, in animal, in the planetary
systems, and, above all, in man himself, body and mind.

We saw that the method of this organization was the grouping of
individual parts into wholes around a centre; of many such compound
units around a yet higher centre, and so on, indefinitely, onward and
upward. That by such an organization, individ