11 nation was perfect, there was lacking in the reality something of the compactness of a vital organism, whose great strength should be wielded by one imperial will, and wherein a common heart should beat, and a common mind think. There was, as philosophical statemanship had foreseen, the working within, of powerful unassimilated elements threatening destruction. Sectional interests, State jealousies, personal ambitions, all tending to occasional interruptions—indeed, seemingly to the ultimate destruction of the one common life. There was need of another and a last antagonism, to compact the organism—the burst of another fiery flood over the conglomerate strata, melting and moulding them forever into one composite world. Now, just this thing we are experiencing. And though to short-sighted and timid reason it seem a veritable destruction, yet to masterful faith it is no more than a fulfilment of the law of all social progress, by which a state of conflict, of discomfiture, of seeming overthrow and disintegration, precedes a condition of higher excellence and triumph. The grand obstacle to our permanent nationality has been, from the first, this heresy of State Sovereignties—the selfishness of the old Colonial and Confederate eras, transmitted as hereditary virus to disorder the functions of constitutional life. But the effect of this war must be to annihilate that pestilent heresy at once and forever. This, indeed,
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