and France doing at Sebastopol?  Merely issuing a poster to this effect,—­“Turkey is not yours,”—­in a type that Russia could feel free to understand.  Terribly costly editions these are, and in a type utterly hideous; but while nations refuse to see the fact in a more agreeable presentation, it may probably feel compelled to go into this ugly, but indubitable shape.—­Well, somewhat less than a century since, England had committed herself to the proposition, that America was really a part or dependency of Europe, a lower-caste Europe, having about the same relation to the Cisatlantic continent that the farmer’s barn has to his house.  Mild refutations of this modest doctrine having been attempted without success, posters in the necessary red-letter type were issued at Concord, Bunker Hill, Yorktown, etc., which might be translated somewhat thus:—­“America has its own independent root in the world’s centre, its own independent destiny in the Providential thought.”  This important fact, having then and there exploded itself into legibility, and come to be known and read of all men, admits now of no dispute, and requires no confirmation.  It is evidently so.  The New World is not merely a newly-discovered hay-loft and dairy-stall for the Old, but is itself a proper household, of equal dignity with any.  To draw the due inferences from this, to see what is implied in it, is all that we are here required to do.

Be it, then, especially noted that the continent by itself can take no such rank.  A spirituality must appear to crown and complete this great continental body; otherwise America is acephalous.  Unless there be an American Man, the continent is inevitably but an appendage, a kitchen and laundry for the European parlor.  American Man,—­and the word Man is to receive a large emphasis.  Observe, that it does not refer to mere population.  The fact required will hardly be reported in the census.  Indeed, there is quite too much talk about population, about prospective increase of numbers.  We are to have thirty millions of inhabitants, they say, in 1860; soon forty, fifty, one hundred millions.  Doubtless; and if that be all, one yawns over the statement.  Could any prophet assure us of one million of men who would stand for the broadest justice as Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans stood for Lacedaemon!  But Hebrew David was thought to be punished for taking a census; nor is the story without significance.  To reckon numbers alone a success is a sin, and a blunder beside.  Russia has sixty millions of people:  who would not gladly swap her out of the world for glorious little Greece back again, and Plato and Aeschylus and Epaminondas still there?  Who would exchange Concord or Cambridge in Massachusetts for any hundred thousand square miles of slave-breeding dead-level?  Who Massachusetts in whole for as many South American (or Southern) republics as would cover Saturn and all his moons?  Make sure of depth and breadth of soul as the national characteristic; then roll up the census columns; and roll out a hallelujah for each additional thousand.