"Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ."—Ephesians iv. 13.
PART FOURTH.
WASHINGTON.—AGE OF UNIVERSAL AMELIORATION.
CHAPTER I.
LITERATURE.
The glory of the vegetable world is realized in the aloe, as from the single stately blossom which a century has matured it diffuses the balm and beauty of consummate life. And such seems to be the destiny of nations, to pour forth the accumulation of their ruling qualities, and then disappear. Greece blossomed, and Pericles was her central flower, proud, elegant, and voluptuous, "the Corinthian capital of society." Rome towered in a trunk of glory, and Augustus was revealed, grand and ambitious, bearing the imperial nest on high. Mediæval Europe blossomed around the garden of the Medici, and Leo X. would have been lost in the multitude of concomitant glories, literary, artistic, and chivalrous, had he not been supreme by virtue of both nature and office, even while the twin-flowers adorned opposite borders of the mighty field, Godfrey the captor of Rome and king of Jerusalem, and Richard of the lion-heart, smiting for England with the hammer hand. The old world having exhibited the preliminary exponents of an unbounded design, America produced a specimen bearing a superiority of majesty and duration of bloom commensurate with the protracted period of its growth, and the more glorious intention of its use.
Every successive epoch of civilization, with the correlative ideas on which it was founded, and from which it derived its peculiar aspect, after maintaining its ground with graduated lustre and utility, has arrived at its inevitable period of decline and dissolution. But in ceasing, apparently, to grow and to imbue society with its beneficial influence, in exchanging an erect attitude for a prostrate one, no vital principle has undergone an entire extinction, so as actually to disappear, and leave no trace of its reproductive benefits. A portion of its vitality forever survives in the monuments which attest the reign of the power to which they owe their existence; and these are not only sufficient to prolong and sanctify its memory, but are in turn themselves the sources of yet ampler and nobler influence. For example, the Teutonic spirit, so long disciplined in Arctic regions, at the fall of the Roman empire was infused into degenerate races, and for eight centuries continued to press toward lower latitudes, everywhere disseminating hardy habits, pure ethics, and the deep sentiments of freedom. Italy received the Lombards; Spain, the Goths; Gaul, the Franks; while Britain in due time fell to the vigorous Saxons, and Norman superiority finally added the accumulated wealth of all. Diagonal forces are the strongest, and while human progress has from the first moved westward only, the great redeeming and ennobling power has always descended from the North. The skill that tames the war-horse, the courage that rules the wave, and the energy, honor, and perseverance best adapted to beautify a barbarous continent, germinated on the field of Hastings, and were transplanted hither at the moment of most auspicious growth.
From Pericles to Augustus, there was a rapid transition through Alexander, armed tyranny. From Augustus to Leo X. a protracted depreciation extended from the Apostles through monks and crusaders, armed superstition. From Leo to Washington transpired the great preliminary age of scientific discovery through the agency of Galileo, Columbus, and Guttenberg, heaven's luminary, ocean's guide, and earth's fulcrum of all power, the press, armed invention. From Washington onward, literature, art, science, philosophy, and religion, perfectly revived and divinely harmonized, will constitute armed freedom. The close of the mediæval period left universal intellect in revolt. The western rim of the old world was all on fire, and through the flooding light let us now scan the new realms beyond.
When the fourteenth century expired, there was no healthful political organization extant, but in the fifteenth all Europe entered upon a grand system of centralization, as if expecting one general commonwealth. The sixteenth century was one of direct preparation; and the seventeenth, above all other epochs, was characterized by the establishment and extension of colonial empire. Preparatory to this, the choicest elements were driven into England by persecution, with the shuttle and the loom, the graver and the press. Drakes and Raleighs scattered armadas, and for the first time in human history, the great mass of the common people stood revealed. Settlements were made about the year 1606 by the French in Nova Scotia, and in 1608 in Canada. Cape Breton, and Placentia in Newfoundland, afterward attracted their attention, and a disastrous effort was made to gain a foothold in Florida. But voluntary emigration from France never existed, nor is it the fitting character to be perpetuated unmixed. Ambitious of wielding the sword, and not the spade, that martial people allied themselves with savages, and endeavored to seize on the whole vast territory north and west of the Ohio and Mississippi. Providence however, had in reserve a better element, destined to combine the whole continent in one great republic, while France has at present no prosperous colony in the eastern hemisphere, and scarcely a foot of ground upon the coveted western world.
It was on the eastern coast, and in English colonies alone, that the great foundations of the seventeenth century were laid. In 1607, the Cavalier element was planted at Jamestown, Virginia; and in 1620, the Roundheads landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. But these are antagonists by nature. A little descendant of the one genus can not meet an equally diminutive specimen of the other without the imminent and instantaneous peril of a very small fight. But there is vis inertia enough in a Dutchman to regulate any thing; and therefore, in 1624, the island of Manhattan was bought of the Indians for twenty-four dollars. At that time, Holland was the greatest of maritime nations, and so God chose them appropriately to plant the city which is already the commercial metropolis of our continent, and which eventually may rank supreme on the globe. Other colonies followed, till the sifted wheat of the old world was sown all along the nearest coast of the new. Three years after the Puritans landed in Massachusetts, other Pilgrim Fathers settled in New Hampshire, and Swedes united with Finlanders in procuring a tract of land near the falls of the Delaware. In 1633 the old feudal elements were colonized in Maryland, under the auspices of Lord Baltimore; and in 1635 Roger Williams moved from Massachusetts to found Rhode Island, unfurled the banner of civil and religious liberty in his city of Providence, and left "What-Cheer Rock" as the first goel of westward progress in America. At the revocation of the edict of Nantes, the best element of French society was persecuted in the Huguenots, and these fled to the wilds yet remoter from the original colonies. North Carolina was settled in 1628, and South Carolina in 1669. New Jersey, in 1664, opened an asylum to the Germans whom the sword of Louis XIV. drove from the Palatinate; and in 1682 the persecuted Quakers, embodying the peaceful element of English history, came to possess themselves and the fruits of their quiet industry beneath the oaks of Pennsylvania. If we glance beyond this great century of colonization, we see Georgia planted by General Oglethrope in 1733, which fact, in common with all the preceding, reminds us of the wonderful care manifested by the God of nations in selecting the primary germs of a new civilization, and in giving them their relative positions on the border of a predestined and immense domain. The birth of many pioneer Washingtons necessitated the services of one transcendent hero clearly authenticated as the chosen lieutenant of the Almighty. Liberty's great battle was fought and won. Soon the area of freedom became too narrow, and the danger of internal strife too great. The third President of the United States buys Louisiana. Why then? Because, on the Hudson, the steamboat is at the same time put afloat. The rightful possession of those great western waters gives us more available inland navigation than can elsewhere be found on the entire globe. The grand instrument of progress, therefore, like all other needful agencies, appears in the fitting time and place. The middle of the nineteenth century arrives, and great danger again threatens; when lo! far in the West rings out the cry, "Gold! gold!" Why then, and there? Because Americans, in general, and New Englanders, in particular, will go to the mouth of the cannon, or dare yet more fearful terrors, at any time for a dollar, and free States are speedily planted on the Pacific. It is no longer pertinent for a little Northerner or a little Southerner to talk about dividing this Union; great Westerners spring to their feet in predominating millions, crying, "No, you shall not divide!" Simultaneously with the discovery of California, the keel of the first successful steamship was laid in New York, not to run to Havre or Liverpool, but to New Orleans—the first link in a stupendous chain of commerce, destined soon to carry and bring the choicest treasures of earth. The trade winds of God blow westward. The west end of nearly every great city in Europe and America is the growing end. Soon a guide-board, standing east of "Pilgrim Rock," will point over a great inland thoroughfare, saying, "To the Pacific direct;" and west of San Francisco, its counterpart will read, "To the Atlantic direct," while on each hand countless myriads will ennoble their toil with intelligence, and build the sublimest monuments of power with faculties the most free. As the rude archaic sculptures of Silenus were gradually refined into the perfected glories of the Parthenon, so all the vitalities successively developed and superseded through sixty centuries will become resuscitated and harmonized on this American continent.