XXXVIII.

OUR DUTIES TO THE REPUBLIC.

The Old World has already revealed to us, in its unsealed books, the
beginning and end of all its own marvelous struggles in the cause of
liberty. Greece, lovely Greece,

"The land of scholars and the nurse of arms,"

where sister republics, in fair procession, chanted the praises of liberty
and the gods,--where and what is she? For two thousand years the oppressor
has ground her to the earth. Her arts are no more. The last sad relics of
her temples are but the barracks of a ruthless soldiery. The fragments of
her columns and her palaces are in the dust, yet beautiful in ruins. She
fell not when the mighty were upon her. Her sons were united at Thermopyla
and Marathon; and the tide of her triumph rolled back upon the Hellespont.
She was conquered by her own factions. She fell by the hands of her own
people. The Man of Macedonia did not the work of destruction. It was
already done by her own corruptions, banishments, and dissensions. Rome,
republican Rome, whose eagles glanced in the rising and setting sun,--where
and what is she? The eternal city yet remains, proud even in her
desolation, noble in her decline, venerable in the majesty of religion, and
calm as in the composure of death. The malaria has travelled in the paths
worn by her destroyers. More than eighteen centuries have mourned over the
loss of her empire. A mortal disease was upon her vitals before Casar had
crossed the Rubicon; and Brutus did not restore her health by the deep
probings of the senate-chamber. The Goths, and Vandals, and Huns,--the