An unsurpass'd series of revolutionary events, influences. Yet it took
over two hundred years for the seeds of the crusades to germinate,
before beginning even to sprout. Two hundred years they lay, sleeping,
not dead, but dormant in the ground. Then, out of them, unerringly,
arts, travel, navigation, politics, literature, freedom, the spirit of
adventure, inquiry, all arose, grew, and steadily sped on to what we
see at present. Far back there, that huge agitation-struggle of the
crusades stands, as undoubtedly the embryo, the start, of the high
preeminence of experiment, civilization and enterprise which the
European nations have since sustain'd, and of which these States are
the heirs.
Another illustration--(history is full of them, although the war
itself, the victory of the Union, and the relations of our equal
States, present features of which there are no precedents in
the past.) The conquest of England eight centuries ago, by the
Franco-Normans--the obliteration of the old, (in many respects so
needing obliteration)--the Domesday Book, and the repartition of
the land--the old impedimenta removed, even by blood and ruthless
violence, and a new, progressive genesis establish'd, new seeds
sown--time has proved plain enough that, bitter as they were, all
these were the most salutary series of revolutions that could possibly
have happen'd. Out of them, and by them mainly, have come, out of
Albic, Roman and Saxon England--and without them could not have
come--not only the England of the 500 years down to the present,
and of the present--but these States.
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