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

and its Constitution, without the hearty
belief that this Union is a gift of God, to be ours only while we
continue fit to hold it, 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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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