Closing as I do now my record of memories, I feel that the most momentous of the crises through which it has been my lot to pass is that attending the maintenance of the Federal bond in the United States.  Assemblies of veterans of the Confederacy and those who address them scout the idea that they fought to preserve negro bondage.  A late historian of our Civil War, Professor Paxon, of Wisconsin, holds it to be “reasonably certain” that in another generation slavery would have disappeared of itself, a contention surely open to dispute.  Here I neither dispute nor approve, but only say, if the claim can be made good, what a vindication would it constitute of men, who looked for the quiet dying out of an inveterate evil, deprecating passionate attack upon a thing moribund?  And what an indictment of the John Browns, whose impatient consciences pressed for instant abolition careless of whatever cataclysm it might involve!  Certainly the two prime champions whose graves I saw at Lexington did not fight to sustain slavery.  Their principle was that a State could not be coerced,—­and that therefore sovereignty lay in the scattered constituents and not at the centre.  The arbitrament of the sword was sharp and swift, and happily for the world it went against them.  I well recall the map of Germany I studied when a boy, a page blotched and seamed with bewildering spots of colour.  The effort was to portray the position of some three hundred independent political units, duchies, principalities, bishoprics, free cities, and what not, among electorates and kingdoms of a larger sort, but still minute.  It seemed like a pathological chart presenting a face broken out with an unseemly tetter.  The land indeed, in those days, was afflicted by a sad political disease.  The Germans call it “Particularismus” or “Vielstaaterei,” the breaking up of a nationality into a mass of fragments.  Some on the map were scarcely larger than pinheads, and in actual area hardly exceeded a fair-sized farm.  In that time Heine laughed at one of them after this fashion, while describing a journey over it in bad weather: 

  “Of Bueckeburg’s principality
  Full half on my boots I carried. 
  Such muddy roads I’ve never beheld
  Since here in the world I’ve tarried.”

The consequences of this disintegration were disastrous to the dignity of Germany and the character of her people.  She had no place among the real powers of the world politically, and her masses, lacking the stimulus of a noble national atmosphere, were dwarfed and shrivelled into narrow and timid provincialism, split as they were into their little segregations.  Patriotism languished in dot-like States oppressively administered, without associations to awaken pride, or generous interests to evoke devotion.  Spirits like Leasing and Goethe, all but derided patriotism.  It scarcely held a place among the proper virtues.  The small units were forever unsympathetic and inharmonious,