We have regarded the Union as the culmination of a long series of endeavors, so to call them, on the part of Providence, to bring men from a social condition characterized by the multiplicity, diversity, separation, antagonism, and hostility of independent, warring, petty states, into that larger, higher form of political and social life, that shall combine in itself the three conditions of unity--variety in unity, and of the utmost liberty with order--as the soul and life of the political body. And that it has also been the aim of Providence, in the formation of this Union, to accomplish the above object on as large a scale as possible, in the present moral and intellectual condition of the race. Can we be far wrong in such a view? Think of our republic embracing in its wide extent, one, two, three, or more hundred millions of human beings, all in political union, enjoying the largest liberty possible in the present life, as well as the ever-increasing influence and light of religion, science, and education, giving augmented power to preserve and rightly use that liberty. Extent of territory in the present age, is no bar to the union of very distant regions. When the telegraph, that modern miracle, brings the shores of the Pacific within three hours' time of the Atlantic seaboard--when railroads contract States into counties, and counties into the dimensions of an average farm, as to the time taken to traverse them--when _spaces_ are thus brought into the closest union, it is but the counterpart and prophecy of the close moral and industrial union of the people who inhabit the spaces. When slavery, that relic of barbarism, that demon of darkness and discord, is destroyed, we can conceive of nothing that shall possess like power to sunder one section of the Union from another--of nothing that shall not be within the power of the people to settle by rational discussion or amicable arbitration. No! Slavery once destroyed, an unimagined Future dawns upon the republic. The Southern rebellion, and the _utterly unavoidable_ civil war thence arising--as these are the two instrumentalities by which slavery will be cut clean away from the vitals of the nation, and the Union left untrammelled, to follow its great destiny--these twin events, we say, will, in after ages, be looked back upon as blessings in disguise--as the knife of the surgeon, that gives the patient a new lease of a long, prosperous, and happy life. * * * * *