Pierton W. Dooner

"Forever occupied and diverted by its factions and its politicians, in their local intrigues for the acquisition of political power, the Ship of State sailed proudly on, too blinded by her preoccupation and too reliant in her strength to bestow a thought upon the perils of the sea. She sighted afar the foam of the maelstrom, and tossed her haughty pennants in sovereign disdain of its power. But its current was around her, and she glided unconsciously to her doom. In vain the exercise of her giant strength; in vain that her factions, in happy forgetfulness of their petty antipathies, united their powers to save! Too late! She was hurled, helpless and struggling, to ruin and annihilation; and as she sank, engulfed, she carried with her the prestige of a race; for in America the representatives of the one race of man, which, in its relation to the family of men, had borne upon its crest the emblem of sovereign power since the dawn of history, saw now the ancestral diadem plucked from its proud repose, to shed its lustre upon an alien crown. Thus passed away the glory of the Union of States, at the dawn of the Twentieth Century."