gorous Spirit of our Nation. We never knew
aright how very dear to us she was until the traitors tried to tear her
limb from limb because her heart was open to all made in the image of
their God--because she knew the sacred worth of man.

How near those Christmas chimes peal on the frosty air!

And if we will but think of it, a Nationality is always of slow growth,
of gradual development. It, like man himself, is born in pain and
anguish. It is indeed a living member of the Grand Man of which Humanity
is composed. Since the forty years wandering of the children of Israel
in the desert, how much suffering has been endured to hold it sacred!
The history of the present time is but a record of fierce struggles to
achieve or hold a Nationality. Poland has hung on the cross of her great
enemy for centuries rather than yield its sanctity. He has torn and
scattered its quivering members, blotted it out in blood from the names
known on earth, it has been murdered, and fed upon by three great
Christian Powers ('Oh, the pity of it!')--Catholic Austria, Protestant
Prussia and Greek-Churched Russia--but it is not dead: it lives in all
the energy of self-abnegating suffering on the mountains of Causasus,
the steppes of Asia, the frozen plains of Siberia, in the depths of
Russian mines, the darkness of Russian prisons, and it still will live
until the last Pole is laid in the last grave of his heroic but
unfortunate race. Such is its vitality when once truly born. Denmark
turns pale and shivers as she feels it may be torn from her; 'Italia,
with the fatal gift of beauty for her dower,' the fair land where fairer
Juliets breathe the enamored air, art--crowned and genius-gifted,
writhes in agony until it may be her own; Greece long bled for it; and
the brave and haughty Magyar, to whom a courser fleet and the free air
are necessities of daily life, braves and bears prisons, chains, and
poverty, in the hope of its attainment. What is this precious
Nationality? Like all basic elements, it is difficult to define. It is
not a State, a Constitution, nor is it made by man at all. An able
writer in _The North American Review_ for October says: 'It may be
said, in general, to be the sum of the differences, geographical,
historical, political, and moral, which separate a people as a community
from every other--of those differences which modify the character of
each individual, and the results of which are combined in the traits of
national ch