workshops, manufactories, and granaries of independent States.  We have loved to linger over the praises of our common schools and our voluntary system of congregational worship, to count the spires which mark every place that man clears to earn his living in.  It has been pleasant to trace upon the map the great arteries of intercommunication, flowing east and west, churned by countless paddle-wheels, as they force a vast freight of wealth, material, social, intellectual, to and fro, a freshet of fertilizing life to swell every stream.  We love to repeat the names which self-taught men have hewn out in rude places, with the only advantage of being members of Mankind, holding their own share in the great heart and soul of it, and making that itself more illustrious than lineage and fortune.  Every element of an unexhausted soil, and all the achievements of a people let loose upon it to settle, build, sow, and reap, with no master but ambition and no dread but of poverty, and a long list of rights thrust suddenly into their hands, with liberty to exercise them,—­the right to vote, to speak, to print, to be tried by jury,—­all this margin for unfettered action, even the corresponding vastness of the country itself, whose ruggedest features and greatest distances were playthings of the popular energy,—­to love and extol these things were held by us equivalent to having a native land and feeding a patriotic flame.  But now all at once this catalogue of advantages, which we were accustomed to call “our country,” is stripped of all its value, because we begin to feel that it depends upon something else, more interior and less easy to appraise, which we had not noticed much before.  Just as when suddenly, in a favorite child, endowed with strength, beauty, and effective gifts of every member, of whom we were proud and expected great things, and whom we took unlimited comfort in calling our own, there appears the solemn intention of a soul to use this fine body to express its invisible truth and honor, a wonderful revelation of a high mind filled with aspirations which we had not suspected,—­a sudden lifting of the whole body like an eyelid before an inner eye, and we are astonished at the look it gives us:  so this body of comfort and success, which we worshipped as our country, is suddenly possessed by great passions and ideas, by a consciousness that providential laws demand the use of it, and will not be restrained from inspiring the whole frame, and directing every member of it with a new plan of Unity, and a finer feeling for Liberty, and a more generous sense of Fraternity than ever before.  Lately we did as we pleased, but now we are going to be real children of Liberty.  Formerly we had a Union which transacted business for us, secured the payment of our debts, and made us appear formidable abroad while it corrupted and betrayed us at home,—­a Union of colporteurs, and caucuses, and drummers of Southern houses; not a Union, but a long coffle of patriotic laymen, southerly