en 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 cooeperative
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 mean