seemed to have divided German Highland from German Netherland; Belgic
Gaul from the rest of the Gallic realm. And even from the slender body,
which an arbitrary destiny had set off for centuries into a separate
organism, tyranny and religious bigotry had just hewn another portion
away. But the commonwealth was already too highly vitalized to permit
peaceful dismemberment. Only the low organisms can live in all their
parts after violent separations. The trunk remained, bleeding but alive
and vigorous, while the amputated portion lay for centuries in fossilized
impotence.

Never more plainly than in the history of this commonwealth was the
geographical law manifested by which the fate of nations is so deeply
influenced. Courage, enterprise amounting almost to audacity, and a
determined will confronted for a long lapse of time the inexorable, and
permitted a great empire to germinate out of a few sand-banks held in
defiance of the ocean, and protected from human encroachments on the
interior only by the artificial barrier of custom-house and fort.

Thus foredoomed at birth, it must increase our admiration of human energy
and of the sustaining influence of municipal liberty that the republic,
even if transitory, should yet have girdled the earth with its
possessions and held for a considerable period so vast a portion of the
world in fee.

What a lesson to our transatlantic commonwealth, whom bountiful nature
had blessed at her birth beyond all the nations of history and seemed to
speed upon an unlimited career of freedom and peaceful prosperity, should
she be capable at the first alarm on her track to throw away her
inestimable advantages! If all history is not a mockery and a fable, she
may be sure that the nation which deliberately carves itself in pieces
and, substitutes artificial boundaries for the natural and historic ones,
condemns itself either to extinction or to the lower life of political
insignificance and petty warfare, with the certain loss of liberty and
national independence at last. Better a terrible struggle, better the
sacrifice of prosperity and happiness for years, than the eternal setting
of that great popular hope, the United American Republic.

I speak in this digression only of the relations of physical nature to
liberty and nationality, making no allusion to the equally stringent
moral laws which no people can violate and yet remain in health and
vigour.

Despite a quarter of a century of wh