Such grandeur may justly excite anxiety rather than pride, for duties are in corresponding proportion. There is occasion for humility also, as the individual considers his own insignificance in the transcendent mass. The tiny polyp, in unconscious life, builds the everlasting coral. Each citizen is little more than the industrious insect. The result is reached by the continuity of combined exertion. Millions of citizens, working in obedience to Nature, can accomplish anything.
Of course, war is an instrumentality which true civilization disowns. Here some of our prophets have erred. Sir Thomas Browne was so much overshadowed by his own age, that his vision was darkened by “great armies,” and even “hostile and piratical assault” on Europe. It was natural that Aranda, schooled in worldly life, should imagine the new-born power ready to seize the Spanish possessions. Among our own countrymen, Jefferson looked to war for the extension of dominion. The Floridas, he says on one occasion, “are ours in the first moment of the first war, and until a war they are of no particular necessity to us.”[650] Happily they were acquired in another way. Then again, while declaring that no constitution was ever before so calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government, and insisting upon Canada as a component part, he calmly says that this “would be, of course, in the first war.”[651] Afterwards, while confessing a longing for Cuba, “as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States,” he says that he is “sensible that this can never be obtained, even with her own consent, but by war.”[652] Thus at each stage is the baptism of blood. In much better mood the poet Bishop recognized empire as moving gently in the pathway of light. All this is much clearer now than when he prophesied.
It is easy to see that empire obtained by force is unrepublican, and offensive to the first principle of our Union, according to which all just government stands only on the consent of the governed. Our country needs no such ally as war. Its destiny is mightier than war. Through peace it will have everything. This is our talisman. Give us peace, and population will increase beyond all experience; resources of all kinds will multiply infinitely; arts will embellish the land with immortal beauty; the name of Republic will be exalted, until every neighbor, yielding to irresistible attraction, seeks new life in becoming part of the great whole; and the national example will be more puissant than army or navy for the conquest of the world.