The previous discussions seemed local and limited.  They were squabbles, we fancied, among ourselves, which did not touch the vitals of our system, and in which the world without had neither lot nor interest.  Even when the fires of debate and division waxed hotter and hotter, and began to break out in violent eruptions in Congress, Kansas, throughout the South, and especially at Harper’s Ferry, we still said, These are political conflicts, mob-violences, raids, abnormal eccentricities, which will pass quietly away, when the dynasty is changed, and the reins of power are fairly grasped by the successful rival.

Europe sends her doctors to witness our dissolution.  They go South and see the mustering of arms and the intensity of purpose, and coming North find the whole community at their usual pursuits and pleasures, regarding the controversy as a mere political breeze, and the results in which it is beginning to issue as but the waves that ever for a short season roll fiercely after the storm.

This indifference was one of the best signs of our health.  We felt such confidence in ourselves, that we distrusted no future, however cloud-cast.  The Constitution, sold for a penny-ha’penny in New York, suggested to the mildly sarcastic humor of Dr. Russell that it had better be a little more valuable in tact, if not so cheap in form.  He did not see how the People were the rightful masters of the Constitution, as Mr. Lincoln had said they were of Congress and the Courts, and that they would take care of it and of themselves when the hour really came.

We did not see it.  Blindness in part had happened unto the whole nation.  The shot at Sumter cleft the burdened head of Jove.  A Nation was born in a day.  It saw instantly the length and the breadth, the height and the depth of the conflict.  It was not a struggle about Slavery and Abolitionism, about the white race and the black, about union and disunion; but it was a war for the rights of man, here and everywhere, to-day and forever.  The “glittering generalities” of our Declaration and Constitution suddenly blazed with light, while the dull particularities of mere routine faded as a waning moon before the glowing sun.  These were lost in the fiery splendors of the grand principles in which alone they live and move and have their being.  They will reappear, meekly shining in their humbler sphere, when the great light shall withdraw its intenser rays, the object of their blazing being accomplished.  The body of the war is Union, its soul Democracy:  union for the sake of democracy, and democracy for the sake of the world.  Abolitionism is simply a stepping-stone to the perfection of the Idea in our society.

The instinct that apprehended the full significance of the struggle was universal:  Europe saw it in the same flash that revealed it to us.  The lightning of the opening gun, or ever its accompanying thunder could follow, leaped, like the lightnings of the final judgment, in an instant from west to east, and illumined the whole earth with its glare.