NATIONALITY--(AND YET) It is more and more clear to me that the main
sustenance for highest separate personality, these States, is to come
from that general sustenance of the aggregate, (as air, earth, rains,
give sustenance to a tree)--and that such personality, by democratic
standards, will only be fully coherent, grand and free, through the
cohesion, grandeur and freedom of the common aggregate, the Union. Thus
the existence of the true American continental solidarity of the future,
depending on myriads of superb, large-sized, emotional and physically
perfect individualities, of one sex just as much as the other, the
supply of such individualities, in my opinion, wholly depends on
a compacted imperial ensemble. The theory and practice of both
sovereignties, contradictory as they are, are necessary. As the
centripetal law were fatal alone, or the centrifugal law deadly and
destructive alone, but together forming the law of eternal kosmical
action, evolution, preservation, and life--so, by itself alone, the
fullness of individuality, even the sanest, would surely destroy itself.
This is what makes the importance to the identities of these States
of the thoroughly fused, relentless, dominating Union--a moral and
spiritual idea, subjecting all the parts with remorseless power, more
needed by American democracy than by any of history's hitherto empires
or feudalities, and the _sine qua non_ of carrying out the republican
principle to develop itself in the New World through hundreds, thousands
of years to come.
Indeed, what most needs fostering through the hundred years to come, in
all parts of the United States, north, south, Mississippi valley, and
Atlantic and Pacific coasts, is this fused and fervent identity of the
individual, whoever he or she may be, and wherever the place, with the
idea and fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY, and with what is meant by the Flag,
the stars and stripes. We need this conviction of nationality as a
faith, to be absorb'd in the blood and belief of the People everywhere,
south, north, west, east, to emanate in their life, and in native
literature and art. We want the germinal idea that America, inheritor
of the past, is the custodian of the future of humanity. Judging from
history, it is some such moral and spiritual ideas appropriate to
them, (and such ideas only,) that have made the profoundest glory
and endurance of nations in the past. The races of Judea, the classic
clusters of Greece and Rome, and the feudal and ecclesiastical clusters
of the Middle Ages, were each and all vitalized by their separate
distinctive ideas, ingrain'd in them, redeeming many sins, and indeed,
in a sense, the principal reason-why for their whole career.
Then, in the thought of nationality especially for the United States,
and making them original, and different from all other countries,
another point ever remains to be considered. There are two distinct
principles--aye, paradoxes--at the life-fountain and life-continuation
of the States; one, the sacred principle of the Union, the right of
ensemble, at whatever sacrifice--and yet another, an equally sacred
principle, the right of each State, consider'd as a separate sovereign
individual, in its own sphere. Some go zealously for one set of these
rights, and some as zealously for the other set. We must have both; or
rather, bred out of them, as out of mother and father, a third set, the
perennial result and combination of both, and neither jeopardized. I
say the loss or abdication of one set, in the future, will be ruin to
democracy just as much as the loss of the other set. The problem is,
to harmoniously adjust the two, and the play of the two. [Observe the
lesson of the divinity of Nature, ever checking the excess of one law,
by an opposite, or seemingly opposite law--generally the other side of
the same law.] For the theory of this Republic is, not that the General
government is the fountain of all life and power, dispensing it forth,
around, and to the remotest portions of our territory, but that THE
PEOPLE are, represented in both, underlying both the General and State
governments, and consider'd just as well in their individualities and
in their separate aggregates, or States, as consider'd in one vast
aggregate, the Union. This was the original dual theory and
foundation of the United States, as distinguish'd from the feudal and
ecclesiastical single idea of monarchies and papacies, and the divine
right of kings. (Kings have been of use, hitherto, as representing the
idea of the identity of nations. But, to American democracy, _both_
ideas must be fulfill'd, and in my opinion the loss of vitality of
either one will indeed be the loss of vitality of the other.)