If such be the conditions of unity, then surely it is not to be feared, because New England manufactures, the Middle States mine, the Western States farm, and the Southern States plant, that, therefore, they must needs be under separate and distinct governments. This very dissimilarity of soil, climate, occupation, and production enables the sections to contribute to each other's welfare, and is a condition of their unity. The heart, liver, lungs, stomach, brain, and nerves cannot dispense with each other in the vital economy; it is the very dependence of one special part upon another through the channels of circulation, that renders the superior animal organism so completely a unit. It cannot be repeated too often that it is not sameness of function, but heterogeneity of function, that unity requires. Hence, through the specialization of industries—one kind of manufactures here, and another there; mining in one locality, and farming in another; the growing of a certain product in one section, and the growing of a different product in a different section—all these, together with, the increasing facilities for correspondence and transportation, are preparing society for larger, more complete, and inevitable unity.
There need be no fear of confirmed hostility of feeling between the North and South when the war is over, should it end in the reëstablishment of the Union. Southern journalists say:
'If the North is successful in its mad scheme of conquest, we shall look upon ourselves as a subjugated people, and there never can be cordial union between the people of the two sections.'
Nonsense. With the coming of peace, there will also come a very different spirit over the dream of the entire South. The great mass of her people have been cruelly duped, and not less cruelly coerced; and once the war is over, these people will become undeceived, and at once relieved from the gyves of a remorseless conscription. There will be a violent reaction in Southern sentiment, and a storm of indignation will be hurled against the instigators of rebellion for all the torture and agony and ruin they have brought to the millions of a once happy nation. The war for the Union will yet find an altar in every Southern home; it will become as truly appreciated there as here; the Southern people will one day glory as greatly in its magnificent results. There will be no longer a few thousand aristocrats, calling themselves 'the South,' and teaching hatred to freedom and progress. This class will be shorn of power and influence, as one of the consequences of the war; and being no longer competent for good or mischief, they may, indeed, nurse their gloom, and torture their lives to the bitter end with the wail, 'We are a subjugated people.' But it will be the wail of selfishness for the sceptre which has departed forever from their hands. There is nothing to fear from these. Very soon after the Government shall have vindicated its competence and extended its jurisdiction over the rebel States, will the most influential and active of their people range themselves on the side of the 'powers that be'—such is the charm of power, the magic of interest, the welcome of peace. All the antagonism generated and cherished by slavery will have totally disappeared; and the South will soon be on the side of all freedom. There will be cordial coöperation under free labor and free trade, between her people and our people; and though diversified as to occupations, habits, and tastes, they will constitute essentially one great political brotherhood.
When slavery, the cause of the present unhappy strife, is extinguished, our country has little to fear, except, perhaps, from the Rocky Mountains, which interpose so formidable a barrier between the Atlantic and Pacific States of our great Federal Union. This mountain barrier and the great distance by water may one day afford an occasion for the encouragement of ambitious men to repeat the experiment of secession. The antidote to this possible evil is the reduction of the most formidable features of the barrier, and the shortening of the forbidding interval. Span the mountains and intervening valleys with railroads and lines of telegraph, and every wire and rail assumes the dignity of a social and political power in the bonds of an indissoluble unity.
If there be so little to create apprehension for the future, may we not rationally hope that the diminution of war, if not its ultimate extinction, is one of the promises of political unity?
Great, strong, noble men—those who are great and noble in all the elements of their nature—such are never pugilists, and never fight: it is those of distorted and defective development—those who have not completeness and integrality within themselves, that are turbulent and break the peace.
Another value of comprehensive unity is that only in great coöperative combinations of mankind can the individual man find the fullest expression for all the faculties of his nature. There is no unity proper—no organization—in savage society; and life there is very simple, with little variety of expression and little enjoyment. As man becomes cultivated his wants increase, and he becomes a more social being. His happiness becomes more and more dependent on others; hence arise societies and organizations of various kinds. The more cultivated any people and the more diversified their wants, the more various do their relations become, and the more extensive their combinations. This is given merely as a fact of history. The truly philosophic eye, we believe, cannot be long in discerning that these larger combinations and more comprehensive unities are only a necessary outgrowth of an improving civilization, and indispensable to the fullest measure of happiness; since in them only can the life of a cultured people find the means of its best expression. The growth of unity, as revealed in history, is not an arbitrary thing incident to a chance concurrence of causes, but naturally growing out of the needs of a steady progress in the education and freedom of the people.
To say that it is through great social and political institutions that the individual finds the most ample means for the culture and satisfaction of the faculties and wants of his nature, is but another way of saying that it is through such institutions that he finds the widest range for individual liberty. A very little observation of history will show that as political unity has enlarged and political organization become more distinctly marked, the radii of individual freedom have at the same time swept a wider field.
Despotism curtails enterprise, and prevents the specialization of parts and functions as the genuine condition of unity. The free play of intelligence and interest is necessary to develop the diversity upon which unity depends. Let the bare statement suffice. It must come to every careful observer and clear thinker with the authority of a self-evident proposition. Unity and individual freedom are necessary to each other; they act and react, and one implies the other. They go hand in hand; and national unity cannot be violated and broken, without, at the same time, necessitating despotism, and curtailing the individual in the exercise of his legitimate rights. Unity and liberty are mutually dependent and forever inseparable. Hence the inestimable value of unity, the leading issue of the war.