PATRIOTISM AND PROVINCIALISM.
In that memorable parliamentary battle between Webster and Hayne, the broad nationalism of the former stands out in splendid contrast with the narrow provincialism of the latter. Hayne's theme was small and sectional—it wanted bulk; hence, he continually intrudes himself in his subject: the subject is half, and Hayne and Webster the other and more important half. Webster, on the contrary, is completely absorbed in the magnitude of his subject; he forgets the very existence of such facts as Webster and Hayne, and considers only that the destinies of millions hang upon the great principles he is enunciating. Hayne is burdened with an inferior sense of personality, and never gets beyond the clouds; Webster's massive intellect shines out calm and bright as a fixed star—far beyond the gross atmosphere of personal strife or sectional antagonism. Hayne looks through a glass dimly, and sees only South Carolina—a part; Webster, with his grand coup d'œil sweeps the horizon, and his eagle glance takes in the entire Union as one perfect, organic whole. Hayne's logic, granting the premises, was a finished and splendid piece of mechanism; Webster started from a deeper and broader vantage-ground of universal principle and intuitive truth, and by one terrible wrench, of his giant intellect, Hayne's premises fell from under, and the labored superstructure of his logic went down in one confused mass of ruin with its foundations.
General Banks, in his late order, welcoming the return of our brave soldiers from their two years' captivity in Texas, after recounting their heroic history, gives utterance to the following noble sentiment: 'They refused to substitute the misguided ambition of a vulgar, low-bred provincialism, for the hallowed hopes of a national patriotism.'
A great truth, like 'a thing of beauty, is a joy forever.' We feel it as the wine of life in our spiritual organisms, quickening thought, ennobling our aims, fortifying virtue, and expanding our immortal statures. Such a truth is contained in that pointed antithesis: 'A vulgar, low-bred provincialism, and the hallowed hopes of a national patriotism.'
The human soul, in its process of development, grows from the centre to the circumference, from a part to the whole, from a unit to the universe. Its first conception is that of self-consciousness, and its first emotion that of self-love. As it expands its immortal germs, it becomes conscious of its relation to objects outside of self; it seeks new outlets of sympathy in love of parents and kindred—then of political communities, nations, and races; ever expanding the grand circle of its sympathies as it grows more and more into a perfect image of the divine spirit of the universe.
This tendency of the soul to the universal is a sure index of its highest moral and intellectual culture; it is one of the divine instincts of our nature, and shines out as God's autograph upon the great representative minds of all ages. In Marcus Curtius, William Tell, Garibaldi, and our own loved Washington, it makes the cream of history and the highest poetry of nations. Its perfect manifestation is seen in that grandest of all epics, 'Christ on the Cross,' wherein we behold a most complete absorption of the self of the individual in the universal self of the race.
There are men with little, narrow souls, that never radiate beyond the centre of self; they have no conception of pure, fixed, absolute principles, but are wholly governed by their local surroundings, provincial prejudices, and the lower instincts of their nature. The large, liberal mind of the true patriot, however, can never be dwarfed down to mere sectional standards, but, true to the law of its attraction, will ever point to the Pole-star of national unity and national brotherhood.
Universality of soul, in the sense above adverted to, distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon race as the best government-builders of the world. England, by her subordination of the sectional to the national, by her reverence for organic law and national unity, has survived the fiercest shocks of her civil convulsions, and built upon their ruins a more perfect and enduring fabric of government. In Southern latitudes, where the temperament grows mercurial, and the emotional nature predominates, as in France and the Italian States, governments seem founded on volcanic strata, liable to frequent and radical eruptions. In the hot Huguenot blood of South Carolina was kindled the first fatal spark that now threatens to set our entire Union in a blaze of ruin.
The Christian draws nearer to the angels as he forgets self in the love of God and his kind; and that nation is the most prosperous, happy, and powerful that subordinates all selfish local interests, all sectional antagonisms, to the higher law of national unity and brotherhood, that holds 'the hallowed hopes of a national patriotism' as ever paramount to the misguided ambition of a vulgar, low-bred provincialism.