d hostility. Hence it
was not to be imagined that we could escape the common lot: our crisis
was to be expected, and now that it has come upon us it is to be
manfully met, and so controlled by an iron will, a loftiness of
determination, and a purity of aim, that it leave us not stranded among
the breakers of disunion and political death. And if we shall succeed in
so controlling the mighty current of affairs, we may rest assured that
we shall be purified by the trial, and shall have established a position
on earth that no subsequent events can shake, until God, in His own good
time, shall bid us give way to some higher development of mankind, if
such shall be His will. With a noble and worthy nationality; with an
incontestable position of strength and political influence, a widely
diffused skill and experience in military affairs, a fund of warlike
invention, and unbounded physical resources, which shall free us from
all annoyances and intermeddlings at the hands of foreign nations; with
a purification from the errors of the past, and a deeper insight into
the capabilities as well as the exigencies of the present and the
future; with a regenerated and higher-toned press; with an _anathema
maranatha_ for treason, in whatever shape it may assume; with a purer
charity for the opinions of others, and a more graceful yielding of the
obnoxious characteristics of our own; with a firmly established and
health-giving system of finance; with a rapidly increasing population,
bringing with it an increase of responsibility, and furnishing a broader
field for the development of our energies and resources; with a glorious
past behind and a golden future before us, we shall sweep majestically
on upon the waves of time, an object of admiration to the world and of
justifiable pride to ourselves--a great, and glorious, and, above all, a
free, happy, united, and prosperous people. God grant it may be so! God
grant that we may be true to the trust reposed in us, and that the
glorious cause of human liberty--the cause in which are bound up the
hopes of the whole world--may not again fall to the earth through the
blindness and weakness and incompetence of us, who are to-day its only
exponents. May we of this day and generation live to see the crowning of
all these hopes; and when our sun goes down in the shadows of eternity,
may we be able to look back and thank God for the trials and sufferings
and losses and mournings of to-day, as the refini