Nations are only individuals on a larger scale. They have a
life, an individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of
their own, and have the same general laws of development and
growth, and, perhaps, of decay, as the individual man. Equally
important, and no less difficult than for the individual, is it
for a nation to know itself, understand its own existence, its
own powers and faculties, rights and duties, constitution,
instincts, tendencies, and destiny. A nation has a spiritual as
well as a material, a moral as well as a physical existence, and
is subjected to internal as well as external conditions of health
and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which it must in some measure
understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, stunted in its
growth, and end in premature decay and death.

Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself
than the United States, and no one has hitherto had less. It has
hardly had a distinct consciousness of its own national existence,
and has lived the irreflective life of the child, with no severe
trial, till the recent rebellion, to throw it back on itself and
compel it to reflect on its own constitution, its own separate
existence, individuality, tendencies, and end. The defection of
the slaveholding States, and the fearful struggle that has
followed for national unity and integrity, have brought it at
once to a distinct recognition of itself, and forced it to pass
from thoughtless, careless, heedless, reckless adolescence to
grave and reflecting manhood. The nation has been suddenly
compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from
reflection, understanding, science, statesmanship, not from
instinct, impulse, passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does,