This is what makes the importance to the identities of these
States of the thoroughly fused, relentless, dominating Union--a moral
and spiritual idea, subjecting all the parts with remorseless power,
more needed by American democracy than by any of history's hitherto
empires or feudalities, and the _sine qua non_ of carrying out the
republican principle to develop itself in the New World through
hundreds, thousands of years to come.
Indeed, what most needs fostering through the hundred years to come,
in all parts of the United States, north, south, Mississippi valley,
and Atlantic and Pacific coasts, is this fused and fervent identity of
the individual, whoever he or she may be, and wherever the place, with
the idea and fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY, and with what is meant by the
Flag, the stars and stripes. We need this conviction of nationality
as a faith, to be absorb'd in the blood and belief of the People
everywhere, south, north, west, east, to emanate in their life, and
in native literature and art. We want the germinal idea that America,
inheritor of the past, is the custodian of the future of humanity.
Judging from history, it is some such moral and spiritual ideas
appropriate to them, (and such ideas only,) that have made the
profoundest glory and endurance of nations in the past. The races of
Judea, the classic clusters of Greece and Rome, and the feudal
and ecclesiastical clusters of the Middle Ages, were each and all
vitalized by their separate distinctive ideas, ingrain'd in them,
redeeming many sins, and indeed, in a sense, the principal reason-why
for their whole career.
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