ion, originate a
continental system which will endure to the remotest periods of time, or
so long as political systems shall have place on the earth?

One empire may fall into fragments to-day; while another may not only
not suffer dissolution, but really grow stronger, and appropriate, in a
most legitimate manner, parts of the dismembered empire.

We must allow, not only for the difference of conditions with reference
to time, but, also, for the different situations at the same time of
different political structures. To assume, because nations have been
ground to atoms, or have fallen to pieces of their own weight, that
therefore Russia and the United States are about to go in the same way,
is a species of reasoning which is hardly warranted by scientific
methods. It may be that the empire of Great Britain is itself doomed to
dissolution at no very distant day; but it does not follow that the
United States are, therefore, liable to the same fate, now or ever. So
far from this, it is possible, if not highly probable, that as the
remote provinces of the British empire shall fall away, the central
political system of this continent may very naturally absorb at least
one of the fragments, and thereby become stronger as a Government, and
more potent for good to the people of an entire world.

There are laws of dissolution, and laws of segregation and combination
in the political as in the natural world. Great Britain may fall into
fragments because her geographical and political conditions render her
amenable to the laws of dissolution; while the United States may go on
enlarging their boundaries and becoming more stable and powerful from
the fact that their political status and local surroundings render them
the legitimate subject of the laws of political growth and geographical
enlargement. The British possessions are geographically too remote; they
may not be united together by the necessary bonds of political union.
The weakness of Great Britain may now be what the weakness of the
Spanish empire once was. Her geography is against her. The day is
gradually passing away when arbitrary power may hold distant regions in
subjection to a central despotism; the day is at hand which demands that
the bonds of union shall be natural and just, not arbitrary--bonds which
forever assert their own inherent power to unite and grow stronger, not
weaker, with the inevitable changes constantly being wrought out by the
busy hand of time