The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 6, December 1863 | Page 3

of the nation's existence is that he may
get a good crop of wheat to market during rising quotations. To another,
that he may do a good stroke of business in the boot and shoe line. To
another, that he may make a good thing in stocks. To some in the past,
this nation existed solely that men might breed negroes in Virginia, and
work them in Alabama! This great nation was worth the blacks it
owned, and the cotton it raised! Actually that was all. The conscious
end to thousands amounted to about this. Men looked at the nation
from their own small place. They dwarfed its purposes. They made
them small and mean and low. They did this three years ago more
commonly, we think, than they do now. The war has taught us many

things. It has certainly taught us higher ideas of the value of the Nation,
and a loftier idea of the meaning of its life. We have awaked to the fact
that we are trustees of this continent for the world. We have been
fighting for two years and more, not to save this nation for the value of
its wheat, or cotton, or manufactures, or exports, but for the value of the
ideas, the hopes, the aspirations, the tendencies this nation embodies.
We have risen to see that it were a good bargain to barter all the
material wealth it holds for the priceless spiritual ideas it represents.
France babbles about 'going to war for an idea.' We don't babble. We
buckle on our armor and fight, we practical, money-making Yankees,
who are said to value everything by dollars, and, after two years of
tremendous fighting, are half amazed ourselves to find we have been
fighting solely for a half-dozen ideas the world can lose only at the cost
of despair. Since the days when men left house and home and friends,
with red crosses on their hearts, to redeem from the hands of the infidel
the sepulchre which the dead Christ once made holy, the world has
never seen a war carried on for a more purely ideal end than our own.
We fight for the integrity of the Nation. We fight for what that word
means of hope and confidence and freedom and advancement to the
groaning and bewildered world. We say, let all else perish,--wealth,
commerce, agriculture, cunning manufacture, humanizing art. We
expend all to save the Nation. That priceless possession we shall hold
intact to the end, for ourselves, our children, and the coming years!
Let us see what this thing is that we prize so highly. Let us see if we are
paying any too high a price for our object--if it is worth a million lives
and a countless treasure. What is the Nation?
There used to be a theory of 'the Social Compact.' It was a prominent
theory in the French Revolution, It was vastly older, however, than that
event. It was originally a theory of the Epicureans. Ovid has something
to say about it. Horace advocates it. It has not perished. It exists in a
fragmentary way in some books taught in colleges. It has more or less
of a hold still on many minds. This theory teaches that the natural state
of man is a state of warfare, an isolated savagery, where each man's
hand is against his neighbor, each lord and master for himself, with no
rights except what force gives him, and no possessions except what he

can hold by force. This natural state, however, was found to be a very
uncomfortable state, and so men contrive to get out of it as soon as
possible. For this purpose they form a 'social compact.' They come
together, and agree to give up some of their natural rights to a settled
government, on condition that government protect them in the others.
That is to say, naturally they have the right to steal all they can lay their
hands on, to rob, plunder, murder, and commit adultery, if they have
the power, and, generally, to live like a pack of amiable tiger cats; but
that these pleasant and amusing natural rights they consent to give up,
on condition they are relieved from the trouble of guarding others. Just
such babblement as that you can read in very learned books, and stuff
like that has actually been taught in colleges, and nobody was sent to
the lunatic asylum! That is the theory of the 'Social Compact.' That is
the way, according to that theory, that nations are made.
It is enough to say of this old heathen dream, that there never was such
a state of savage brutalism known since man was man. All men are
born under some law, some government, some controlling authority. As
long