The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863, page 129 by Various Authors
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gs the shores of the Pacific within three hours' time of the Atlantic seaboard--when railroads contract States into counties, and counties into the dimensions of an average farm, as to the time taken to traverse them--when spaces are thus brought into the closest union, it is but the counterpart and prophecy of the close moral and industrial union of the people who inhabit the spaces. When slavery, that relic of barbarism, that demon of darkness and discord, is destroyed, we can conceive of nothing that shall possess like power to sunder one section of the Union from another--of nothing that shall not be within the power of the people to settle by rational discussion or amicable arbitration. No! Slavery once destroyed, an unimagined Future dawns upon the republic. The Southern rebellion, and the utterly unavoidable civil war thence arising--as these are the two instrumentalities by which slavery will be cut clean away from the vitals of the nation, and the Union left untrammelled, to follow its great destiny--these twin events, we say, will, in after ages, be looked back upon as blessings in disguise--as the knife of the surgeon, that gives the patient a new lease of a long, prosperous, and happy life.
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We have contemplated the Union, and seen something of its matchless symmetry, beauty, and indefinite capabilities, ever unfolding, to promote human welfare, through its unity with variety, its liberty with order, its freedom of action of each part in its own sphere, coëxisting with the harmonious working of all together as one grand whole--all of which arises, as was said, from the unconscious modelling (on the part of its authors) of our political structure upon the Divine and universal plan of organization in mineral, in plant, in animal, in the planetary systems, and, above all, in man himself, body and mind.
We saw that the method of this organization was the grouping of individual parts into wholes around a centre; of many such compound units around a yet h