10 pursuit of the fine arts, and agriculture, and education, and travel, and investigations in science, and the interchange of thought—the thousand threaded net-work of the relations of enlightened life—must all go on undisturbed, if each man in the net-work is to prosper. These ramify out and inter- weave us all up together in an inextricable tangle. The manufactory with its hundred arms, why, it is laboring for me ; yonder ship plows out and sails forth for me; yonder silent man that touches and tints the canvas with his pencils—yonder silent man that chips at the block of marble—he is thinking for me ; yonder school-house, with its busy hum of voices, there is work going on there for my benefit, for the good of my posterity, for my country, for mankind, for God. And so a man is not an isolated being ; he is set and knotted in the tangle of a social structure; he is bound to his fellows by ten thousand ties; he is dependent in some wray upon every other man in the community. Every man is like a brain ; and a million nerves of tender sensation run out from him and spread themselves throughout the community. What touches the community, touches him. Every wrong done to any man among us, is a wrong done to every man. In this vast, complicated, interdependent social structure, for the happiness and highest success of the individual, we must have order and law and obedience and subordination of the individual, at least, to the authority of the whole, or we are ruined. But of what individual ?—is it the individual man ?—is it the individual neighborhood ?—or is it the individual state ? The great question, therefore, which we are now deciding, as supplemental to the great question of the Revolution, is, where must this blessed liberty of action which our fathers secured be checked, in order not to degenerate into license and plunge us into anarchy. We are bringing an abstract question down to a concrete shape. We are giving to indefiniteness a form with definite outline. The issue of this contest will be the most practical of all issues, worked out by the most practical of all nations. How far should liberty of fractional action be allowed to proceed, in order to remain consistent with the security and weal of all.
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