t is, doubtless, an
unseen system receiving from them impulse and light. On a scale not
utterly insignificant, a parallel may be hereafter suggested in the
relation of these combined cities to a part, at least, of our national
system. Their attitude and action during the war--successfully closed
under the gallant military leadership of men whom we gladly welcome
and honor--were of vast advantage to the national cause. The moral,
political, intellectual temper, which dominates in them, as years go
on, will touch with beauty, or scar with scorching and baleful heats,
extended regions. Their religious life, as it glows in intensity, or
with a faint and failing lustre, will be repeated in answering image
from the widening frontier. The beneficence which gives them grace and
consecration, and which, as lately, they follow to the grave with
universal benediction, or, on the other hand, the selfish ambitions
which crowd and crush along their streets, intent only on accumulated
wealth and its sumptuous display, or the glittering vices which they
accept and set on high--these will make their impression on those who
never cross the continent to our homes, to whom our journals are but
names.

Surely, we should not go from this hour, which marks a new era in the
history of these cities, and which points to their future indefinite
expansion, without the purpose in each of us, that, so far forth as in
us lies, with their increase in numbers, wealth, equipment, shall also
proceed, with equal step, their progress in whatever is noblest and
best in private and in public life; that all which sets humanity
forward shall come in them to ampler endowment, more renowned
exhibition: so that, linked together, as hereafter they must be, and
seeing "the purple deepening in their robes of power," they may be
always increasingly conscious of fulfilled obligation to the Nation
and to God; may make the land, at whose magnificent gateway they
stand, their constant debtor; and may contribute their mighty part
toward that ultimate perfect Human Society for which the seer could
find no image so meet or so majestic as that of a City, coming down
from above, its stones laid with fair colors, its foundations with
sapphires, its windows of agates, its gates of carbuncles, and all its
borders of pleasant stones, with the sovereign promise resplendent
above it,--

"And great shall be the Peace of thy children!"

End of the Project Guten