e questioned that
commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united
its faltering provinces, maintaining the limit of its imperial
jurisdiction by the power of commercial bonds and the majesty of the
sword, until in its very vastness it collapsed. The heart of its people
did not beat in unison. Nations may be made by the joining of hands, but
the measure of their real strength and vitality, like that of the human
body, is in the heart. Show me the country whose people are not at heart
in sympathy with its institutions, and the fervor of whose patriotism is
not bespoken in its flag, and I will show you a ship of state which is
sailing in shallow waters, toward unseen eddies of uncertainty, if not
to the open rocks of dismemberment.

Whence was the proof to come, to ourselves as well as to the world, that
we were being moved once again by a common impulse, and by the same
heart that inspired and gave strength to the hands that smote the
British in the days of the Revolution, and again at New Orleans; that
made our ships the masters of the seas; that placed our flag on
Chapultepec, and widened our domain from ocean to ocean? How was the
world to know that the burning fires of patriotism, so essential to
national glory and achievement, had not been quenched by the blood
spilled by the heroes of both sides of the most desperate struggle known
in the history of civil wars? How was the doubt that stood, all
unwilling, between outstretched hands and sympathetic hearts, to be, in
fact, dispelled?

If from out the caldron of conflict there arose this doubt, only from
the crucible of war could come the answer. And, thank God, that answer
has been made in the record of the war, the peaceful termination of
which we celebrate to-night. Read it in every page of its history; read
it in the obliteration of party and sectional lines in the congressional
action which called the nation to arms in the defence of prostrate
liberty, and for the extension of the sphere of human freedom; read it
in the conduct of the distinguished Federal soldier who, as the chief
executive of this great Republic,[9] honors this occasion by his
presence to-night, and whose appointments in the first commissions
issued after war had been declared made manifest the sincerity of his
often repeated utterances of complete sectional reconciliation and the
elimination of sectional lines in the affairs of government. Differing
with him, as I do,