beyond a question, the real faith of the nation, so far as
it has one, is represented by its formal declaration, made sacred by
the shedding of blood. Our belief really is not in the special
right or privilege of Americans, but in the prerogative of man.
This prerogative we may have succeeded well or ill in stating and
interpreting; the fact, that our appeal is to this, alone concerns us
here.

Now this national attitude, so far as history informs me, is
unprecedented. The true-born son of Albion, save as an exceptional
culture enlarges his soul, believes religiously that God is an
Englishman, and that the interests of England precede those of the
universe. When, therefore, he sees anything done which depletes the
pocket of England, it affects him with a sense of infidelity in those
to whom this loss is due. England professes to have a _national_
religion; she has, and in a deeper sense than is commonly meant.

We will not disparage England overmuch; she has done good service in
history. We will not boast of ourselves; the actual politics of this
country have been, in no small part, base and infidel to a degree
that is simply sickening. Nevertheless, it remains true that the
fundamental idea of the State here represents a new phase of human
history. Every European nationality had taken shape and character
while yet our globe was not known to be a globe, while before the eyes
of all lookers land and sea faded away into darkness and mystery; and
it was not possible that common human sympathy should take into its
arms a world of which it could not conceive. But a national spirit
was here generated when the ocean had been crossed, when the earth had
been rounded, when, too, Newton had, as it were, circumnavigated the
solar system,--when, therefore, there could be, and must be, a new
recognition of humanity. Our country, again, was peopled from the
minorities of Europe, from those whom the spirit of the new time
had touched, and taken away their content with old institutions,--a
population restless, uncertain, yeasty, chaotic, it might be, full of
the rawness of new conditions, mean and magnanimous by turns, as such
people are wont, but all leavened more or less with a sentiment new in
history,--all leavened with a kind of whole-world feeling, a sense
of the oneness of humanity, and, as derived from this, a sense of
absolute rights of man, of prerogatives belonging to human nature as
such.

The truth of all this has bee