Then a new epoch will open for us. Perhaps it has opened
already. Slowly we shall grow old, compact our people, study the
delicate adjustments of an intricate society, and ponder the niceties,
as we have hitherto pondered the bulks and structural framework, of
government. Have we not, indeed, already come to these things? But the
past we know. We can "see it steady and see it whole"; and its central
movement and motive are gross and obvious to the eye.
Till the first century of the Constitution is rounded out we stand all
the while in the presence of that stupendous westward movement which has
filled the continent: so vast, so various, at times so tragical, so
swept by passion. Through all the long time there has been a line of
rude settlements along our front wherein the same tests of power and of
institutions were still being made that were made first upon the sloping
banks of the rivers of old Virginia and within the long sweep of the Bay
of Massachusetts. The new life of the West has reacted all the
while--who shall say how powerfully?--upon the older life of the East;
and yet the East has moulded the West as if she sent forward to it
through every decade of the long process the chosen impulses and
suggestions of history. The West has taken strength, thought, training,
selected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the East,--as if out of
a new Orient; while the East has itself been kept fresh, vital, alert,
originative by the West, her blood quickened all the while, her youth
through every age renewed.
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