Ages to come
may never know, but I know, how narrowly during the late secession
war--and more than once, and more than twice or thrice--our
Nationality, (wherein bound up, as in a ship in a storm, depended, and
yet depend, all our best life, all hope, all value,) just grazed, just
by a hair escaped destruction. Alas! to think of them! the agony and
bloody sweat of certain of those hours! those cruel, sharp, suspended
crises!
Even to-day, amid these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury
of parties, infidelity, entire lack of first-class captains and
leaders, added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the
ostensible masses--that problem, the labor question, beginning to open
like a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year--what prospect
have we? We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and
under-currents, vortices--all so dark, untried--and whither shall we
turn? It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation charts
of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a
deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous
imperfection-saying, lo! the roads, the only plans of development,
long and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions. You said in
your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past
and present, putting the history of Old-World dynasties, conquests
behind me, as of no account--making a new history, a history of
democracy, making old history a dwarf--I alone inaugurating largeness,
culminating time.
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