10 be the living, breathing, working reality. It so far transcends anything found in history, that comparisons give 90 aid. The more we strive to body forth the potential aggrandizement of the Republic on its present domain, the more completely do our powers sink exhausted and baffled, and we can at last only say that as its great authors failed in their wildest dreams adequately to imagine its strength, even as beheld by us of the third generation, we far less can prefigure the reality that shall be developed in the indefinite series of future generations. So much for the merely material interests involved. They are of immeasurable value. Yet they are but the very lowest element at stake. They relate to the nation’s adjuncts ; not to its essential life. The issue is not simply whether this Republic is to exist on a larger or smaller scale, but whether it is to exist at all. The vital force itself is in peril. This rebellion strikes at just authority ; and without authority government is but an intermittent revolution, and the so-called nation but an organized mob. To give way to the present secession movement is to loosen every national ligament, and to put our body politic throughout henceforth at the mercy of every wild passion, of every sordid calculation. We are literally battling for the nation’s life. It is a sort of war that hardly occurs once in a thousand years. Wars generally are maintained to vindicate national rights abroad, or to overthrow or reform natonal rule at home. Whether they do or do not succeed, the nation still lives. They are sometimes waged, as by our revolutionary forefathers, and by the Italian patriots of the present day, for independence, and an opportunity to originate a new nationality. But in our case it is to save a nationality already existent and strong. With the comparatively small exception of Poland, there has not been a case like it in modern times. And who can calculate a nation’s value ? The creation of one is the grandest and most difficult of all human achievements. There is not one, even the poorest, that has not cost unmeasured blood and toil—hardly one worthy of the name that has not required generations and centuries for even an imperfect development. A well-knit national organization, with all its
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