NATIONAL UNITY.

Pride in the physical grandeur, the magnificent proportions of our country, has for generations been the master passion of Americans. Never has the popular voice or vote refused to sustain a policy which looked to the enlargement of the area or increase of the power of the Republic. To feel that so vast a river as the Mississippi, having such affluents as the Missouri and the Ohio, rolled its course entirely through our territory—that the twenty thousand miles of steamboat navigation on that river and its tributaries were wholly our own, without touching on any side our national boundaries—that the Pacific and the Atlantic, the great lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, were our natural and conceded frontiers, that their bays and harbors were the refuge of our commerce, and their rising cities our marts and depots—were incense to our vanity and stimulants to our love of country. No true American abroad ever regarded or characterized himself as a New-Yorker, a Virginian, a Louisianian: he dilated in the proud consciousness of his country's transcendent growth and wondrous greatness, and confidently anticipated the day when its flag should float unchallenged from Hudson's Bay to the Isthmus of Darien, if not to Cape Horn.

It was this strong instinct of Nationality which rendered the masses so long tolerant, if not complaisant, toward Slavery and the Slave Power. Merchants and bankers were bound to their footstool by other and ignobler ties; but the yeomanry of the land regarded slavery with a lenient if not absolutely favoring eye, because it existed in fifteen of our States, and was cherished as of vital moment by nearly all of them, so that any popular aversion to it evinced by the North, would tend to weaken the bonds of our Union. It might seem hard to Pomp, or Sambo, or Cuffee, to toil all day in the rice-swamp, the cotton-field, to the music of the driver's lash, with no hope of remuneration or release, nor even of working out thereby a happier destiny for his children; but after all, what was the happiness or misery of three or four millions of stupid, brutish negroes, that it should be allowed to weigh down the greatness and glory of the Model Republic? Must there not always be a foundation to every grand and towering structure? Must not some grovel that others may soar? Is not all drudgery repulsive? Yet must it not be performed? Are not negroes habitually enslaved by each other in Africa? Does not their enslavement here secure an aggregate of labor and production that would else be unattainable? Are we not enabled by it to supply the world with Cotton and Tobacco and ourselves with Rice and Sugar? In short, is not to toil on white men's plantations the negro's true destiny, and Slavery the condition wherein he contributes most sensibly, considerably, surely, to the general sustenance and comfort of mankind? If it is, away with all your rigmarole declarations of 'the inalienable Rights of Man'—the right of every one to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! Let us have a reformed and rationalized political Bible, which shall affirm the equality of all white men—their inalienable right to liberty, etc., etc. Thus will our consistency be maintained, our institutions and usages stand justified, while we still luxuriate on our home-grown sugar and rice, and deluge the civilized world with our cheap cotton and tobacco!—And thus our country—which had claimed a place in the family of nations as the legitimate child and foremost champion of Human Freedom—was fast sinking into the loathsome attitude of foremost champion and most conspicuous exemplar of the vilest and most iniquitous form of Despotism—that which robs the laborer of the just recompense of his sweat, and dooms him to a life of ignorance, squalor, and despair.

But

For two generations our people have cherished, justified, and pampered slavery, not that they really loved, or conscientiously approved the accursed 'institution,' but because they deemed its tolerance essential to our National Unity; and now we find Slavery desperately intent on and formidably armed for the destruction of that Unity: for two generations we have aided the master to trample on and rob his despised slave; and now we are about to call that slave to defend our National Unity against that master's malignant treason, or submit to see our country shattered and undone.

Who can longer fail to realize that 'there is a God who judgeth in the earth?' or, if the phraseology suit him better, that there is, in the constitution of the universe, provision made for the banishment of every injustice, the redress of every wrong?

'Well,' says a late convert to the fundamental truth, 'we must drive the negro race entirely from our country, or we shall never again have union and lasting peace.'

Ah! friend? it is not the negro per se who distracts and threatens to destroy our country—far from it! Negroes did not wrest Texas from Mexico, nor force her into the Union, nor threaten rebellion because California was admitted as a Free State, nor pass the Nebraska bill, nor stuff the ballot-boxes and burn the habitations of Kansas, nor fire on Fort Sumter, nor do any thing else whereby our country has been convulsed and brought to the brink of ruin. It is not by the negro—it is by injustice to the negro—that our country has been brought to her present deplorable condition. Were Slavery and all its evil brood of wrongs and vices eradicated this day, the Rebellion would die out to-morrow and never have a successor. The centripetal tendency of our country is so intense—the attraction of every part for every other so overwhelming—that Disunion were impossible but for Slavery. What insanity in New-Orleans to seek a divorce from the upper waters of her superb river! What a melancholy future must confront St. Louis, separated by national barriers from Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, and all the vast, undeveloped sources of her present as well as prospective commerce and greatness! Ponder the madness of Baltimore, seeking separation from that active and teeming West to which she has laid an iron track over the Alleghanies at so heavy a cost! But for Slavery, the Southron who should gravely propose disunion, would at once be immured in a receptacle for lunatics. He would find no sympathy elsewhere.

But a nobler idea, a truer conception, of National Unity, is rapidly gaining possession of the American mind. It is that dimly foreshadowed by our President when, in his discussions with Senator Douglas, he said: 'I do not think our country can endure half slave and half free. I do not think it will be divided, but I think it will become all one or the other.'

'A union of lakes, a union of lands,' is well; but a true 'union of hearts' must be based on a substantial identity of social habitudes and moral convictions. If Islamism or Mormonism were the accepted religion of the South, and we were expected to bow to and render at least outward deference to it, there would doubtless be thousands of Northern-born men who, for the sake of office, or trade, or in the hope of marrying Southern plantations, would profess the most unbounded faith in the creed of the planters, and would crowd their favorite temples located on our own soil. But this would not be a real bond of union between us, but merely an exhibition of servility and fawning hypocrisy. And so the Northern complaisance toward slavery has in no degree tended to avert the disaster which has overtaken us, but only to breed self-reproach on the one side, and hauteur with ineffable loathing on the other.

Hereafter National Unity is to be no roseate fiction, no gainful pretense, but a living reality. The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellent commonwealths, but a true exemplification of 'many in one'—many stars blended in one common flag—many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls. The merchant of Boston or New-York will visit Richmond or Louisville for tobacco, Charleston for rice, Mobile for cotton, New-Orleans for sugar, without being required at every hospitable board, in every friendly circle, to repudiate the fundamental laws of right and wrong as he learned them from his mother's lips, his father's Bible, and pronounce the abject enslavement of a race to the interests and caprices of another essentially just and universally beneficent. That a Northern man visiting the South commercially should suppress his convictions adverse to 'the peculiar institution,' and profess to regard it with approval and satisfaction, was a part of the common law of trade—if one were hostile to Slavery, what right had he to be currying favor with planters and their factors, and seeking gain from the products of slave-labor? So queried 'the South;' and, if any answer were possible, that answer would not be heard. 'Love slavery or quit the South,' was the inexorable rule; and the resulting hypocrisy has wrought deep injury to the Northern character. As manufacturers, as traders, as teachers, as clerks, as political aspirants, most of our active, enterprising, leading classes have been suitors in some form for Southern favor, and the consequence has been a prevalent deference to Southern ideas and a constant sacrifice of moral convictions to hopes of material advantage.

It has pleased God to bring this demoralizing commerce to a sudden and sanguinary close. Henceforth North and South will meet as equals, neither finding or fancying in their intimate relations any reason for imposing a profession of faith on the other. The Southron visiting the North and finding here any law, usage, or institution revolting to his sense of justice, will never dream of offending by frankly avowing and justifying the impression it has made upon him: and so with the Northman visiting the South. It is conscious wrong alone that shrinks from impartial observation and repels unfavorable criticism as hostility. We freely proffer our farms, our factories, our warehouses, common-schools, alms-houses, inns, and whatever else may be deemed peculiar among us, to our visitors' scrutiny and comment: we know they are not perfect, and welcome any hint that may conduce to their improvement. So in the broad, free West. The South alone resents any criticism on her peculiarities, and repels as enmity any attempt to convince her that her forced labor is her vital weakness and her greatest peril.

This is about to pass away. Slavery, having appealed to the sword for justification, is to be condemned at her chosen tribunal and to fall on the weapon she has aimed at the heart of the Republic. A new relation of North to South, based on equality, governed by justice, and conceding the fullest liberty, is to replace fawning servility by manly candor, and to lay the foundations of a sincere, mutual, and lasting esteem. We already know that valor is an American quality; we shall yet realize that Truth is every man's interest, and that whatever repels scrutiny confesses itself unfit to live. The Union of the future, being based on eternal verities, will be cemented by every year's duration, until we shall come in truth to 'know no North, no South, no East, no West,' but one vast and glorious country, wherein sectional jealousies and hatreds shall be unknown, and every one shall rejoice in the consciousness that he is a son and citizen of the first of Republics, the land of Washington and Jefferson, of Adams, Hamilton, and Jay, wherein the inalienable Rights of Man as Man, at first propounded as the logical justification of a struggle for Independence, became in the next century, and through the influence of another great convulsion, the practical basis of the entire political and social fabric—the accepted, axiomatic root of the National life.