the south by the Sahara Desert of Africa, on the east by the Euphrates and on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Home of three civilizations. Owning all the then discovered world that was worth owning. Gibbon, in his "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," answers, "Dead." And the vacated seats of the ruined Coliseum, and the skeletons of the aqueduct, and the miasma of the Campagna, and the fragments of the marble baths, and the useless piers of the bridge Triumphalis, and the silenced forum, and the Mamertine dungeon, holding no more apostolic prisoners; and the arch of Titus, and Basilica of Constantine, and the Pantheon, lift up a nightly chorus of "Dead! dead!" Dead, after Horace, and Virgil, and Tacitus, and Livy, and Cicero; after Horatius of the bridge, and Cincinnatus, the farmer oligarch; after Scipio, and Cassius, and Constantine, and Cæsar. Her war-eagle, blinded by flying too near the sun, came reeling down through the heavens, and the owl of desolation and darkness made its nest in the forsaken ærie. Mexican Empire, dead! French Empire, dead! You see it is no unusual thing for a government to perish. And in the same necrology of nations, and 'in the same cemetery of expired governments, will go the United States of America unless some potent voice shall call a halt, and through Divine interposition, by a purified ballot-box and an all-pervading moral Christian sentiment, the present evil tendency be stopped. MONUMENT ERECTED BY THE CHICAGO" HERALD " AT THE LANDING PLACE OF COLUMBUS, (See page 311.) |