The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 | Page 3

and to be fought for as for life itself (for a large, free individual life for each one of us is involved in the great life of the Union), without this deep, rock-rooted conviction in the heart of the nation, we shall tend to lukewarmness--to an awful indifference as to how this contest shall end; and begin to seek for present peace at any price. We say present peace, for a permanent peace, short of a thorough crushing of the rebellion, is simply a sheer impossibility--a wild hallucination. Nor is it a less mad fantasy to suppose that the rebellion can be effectually crushed without annihilating slavery, the sole and supreme cause of the rebellion. Such lukewarmness and untimely peace sentiments, widely diffused through the loyal States, would be truly alarming. Those who feel and talk thus, are like blind men on the verge of a fathomless abyss; and should a majority ever be animated by such ideas, we are gone--hopelessly fallen under the dark power, never perhaps to rise again in our day or generation. But we have no fears of such a dismal result; the nation is in the divine hands, and we feel confident that all will be right in the end.
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We have presented two reasons why the Union is priceless. Still further may this be seen by a glance at the opposite features and tendencies of the rebellion; and by the consideration of three or four points of radical divergence and antagonism between slavery and republicanism.
We set out with the following general statements:
The less selfish a man becomes--the more that he rises out of himself--in that degree (other conditions being equal) does he seek the society of others from disinterested motives, and the wider becomes the circle of his sympathies.
On the other hand, the more selfish he is--the lower the range of faculties which motive him--in that degree, the more exclusive is he--the more does he tend to isolate himself from others, or to associate only with those whose character or pursuits minister to his own gratification. Beasts of prey are solitary in their habits--the gentle and useful domestic animals are gregarious and social.
Now the same is true of communities. The more elevated their character--the more that the moral and intellectual faculties predominate in a community; or the more virtuous, intelligent, and industrious--in short, the more civilized it is--the closer are the individuals of that community drawn together among themselves, and the greater also is its tendency to unite with other communities into a larger society, while it preserves, at the same time, all necessary freedom and individuality. The more civilized and humanized a nation is, the greater are the tendency and ease with which it organizes a diversified, as distinguished from a homogeneous unity; or, the greater the ease with which it establishes and maintains the integrity and freedom of the component parts, of the individuals and communities of individuals, as indispensable to the freedom and welfare of the whole national body.
Thus advancing civilization will multiply the relations of men with each other, of communities with communities, of states with states, of nations with nations; and will also organize these relations with a perfection proportioned to their multiplicity; and thus draw men ever closer in the fraternal bonds of a common humanity.
On the other hand, the more a community becomes immoral, ignorant, and indolent--the lower its aims and motive, the less it cultivates the mental powers, the fewer industries it prosecutes, and the less diversified are its productions--in proportion as it declines in all these modes, in that degree does it tend to disintegration, to separation and isolation of all its parts, and toward the establishment of many petty and independent communities; in other words, it tends to lapse into barbarism.
Such a movement is, however, against the order of Providence, and thus is an evil that corrects itself. Men are happier (other conditions being equal) in large communities than in small; and when selfishness and ambition have broken up a large state into many small and independent ones, the same principle of selfishness, still operating, keeps them in perpetual mutual jealousy and collision, until, whether they will or not, they are forced into a mass again by some strong military despot, or conquered by a superior foreign power, and quiet is for a time again restored.
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From these considerations we conclude that civilization, as it advances, is but the index of the capacity of human beings to form themselves into larger and larger nationalities (perhaps ultimately to result in a federal union of all nations), each consisting of numerous parts, performing distinct functions; yet so organized harmoniously that each part shall preserve all the freedom that it requires for its utmost development and happiness, and yet depend for