ger units. Witness the reduction of the
number of German principalities, from one hundred or more to forty in
the present day--the movement now on foot in Germany for a federal union
among these forty--also the new Italian nationality. These we mention
but incidentally, not intending here to trace the steps of this advance.

This progress toward unity has also been accompanied with a constant
though slow advance in the principles of religious and political
freedom.

But now, out of this European civilization, the result itself of the
breaking up of the Roman semi-pagan, semi-Christian empire, and the
multiplied interminglings, changes, and reconstructions of the
Roman, the ecclesiastical, and northern barbarian elements--out
of this European civilization, with its movements toward large
nationalities--its progress toward religious and political freedom, and
toward the acknowledgment and recognition of human rights; the
substitution of constitutional monarchies for absolute, and the creation
of representative bodies from the people as part of the government--out
of all this, there springs as the fruit of all the long turmoil, the
wars, the blood and treasure, the groans and tears, the martyrdoms of
countless human lives, that during these long ages have, apparently in
vain, been offered up in the cause of liberty, of order, of national
peace, unity and freedom, of the right of man to the full and legitimate
use of all his God-given faculties--there springs, we say, as the fruit,
the result of all this suffering, our glorious American republic! our
sacred--yes, our sacred Union! The fairest home that man has ever raised
for man! To lay violent hands on which, should be deemed the blackest,
most unpardonable sacrilege. It is the actualization of a dazzling
vision, that may have often glowed in the imagination of many a patriot
and statesman of olden times--which he may have vainly struggled to
realize in his own age and nation, and died at last, heart-broken, amid
the carnage of civil strife.

Our republic, we repeat, is the fruit of European struggles. If Europe
had not passed through what she has, the United States would never have
arisen. The principles of religious and political liberty sprang to
birth in Europe, but there they have been of tardy growth, because
surrounded and opposed by habits and institutions of early ages. They
needed transplantation to a new and unoccupied soil, where they could
enjoy the free a