The American Union Speaker

by John D. Philbrick

BOOK SECOND.

RECENT SELECTIONS.

PROSE.

CCL.

THE ORATORS OF REVOLUTIONS.

And then and thus comes the orator of that time, kindling with their fire; sympathizing with that great beating heart; penetrated, not subdued; lifted up rather by a sublime and rare moment of history made real to his consciousness; charged with the very mission of life, yet unassured whether they will hear or will forbear; transcendent good within their grasp, yet a possibility that the fatal and critical opportunity of salvation will be wasted; the last evil of nations and of men overhanging, yet the siren song of peace—peace when there is no peace—chanted madly by some voice of sloth or fear,—there and thus the orators of revolutions come to work their work! And what then is demanded, and how it is to be done, you all see; and that in some of the characteristics of their eloquence they must all be alike. Actions, not law or policy: whose growth and fruits are to be slowly evolved by time and calm; actions daring, doubtful but instant; the new things of a new world,—these are what the speaker counsels; large, elementary, gorgeous ideas of right, of equality, of independence, of liberty, of progress through convulsion,—these are the principles from which he reasons, when he reasons,—these are the pinions of the thought on which he soars and stays; and then the primeval and indestructible sentiments of the breast of man,—his sense of right, his estimation of himself, his sense of honor, his love of fame, his triumph and his joy in the dear name of country, the trophies that tell of the past, the hopes that gild and herald her dawn,—these are the springs of action to which he appeals,—these are the chords his fingers sweep, and from which he draws out the troubled music, "solemn as death, serene as the undying confidence of patriotism," to which he would have the battalions of the people march! Directness, plainness, a narrow range of topics, few details, few but grand ideas, a headlong tide of sentiment and feeling; vehement, indignant, and reproachful reasonings,—winged general maxims of wisdom and life; an example from Plutarch; a pregnant sentence of Tacitus; thoughts going forth as ministers of nature in robes of light, and with arms in their hands; thoughts that breathe and words that burn,—these vaguely, approximately, express the general type of all this speech. R. Choate.

CCLI.

THE ELOQUENCE OF REVOLUTIONS

The capital peculiarity of the eloquence of all times of revolution, is that the actions it persuades to are the highest and most heroic which men can do, and the passions it would inspire, in order to persuade to them, are the most lofty which man can feel. "High actions and high passions"—such are Milton's words, high actions through and by high passions; these are the end and these the means of the orator of the revolution. Hence are his topics large, simple, intelligible, affecting. Hence are his views broad, impressive, popular; no trivial details, no wire-woven developments, no subtle distinctions and drawing of fine lines about the boundaries of ideas, no speculation, no ingenuity; all is elemental, comprehensive, intense, practical, unqualified, undoubting. It is not of the small things of minor and instrumental politics he comes to speak, or men come to hear. It is not to speak or to hear about permitting an Athenian citizen to change his tribe; about permitting the Roman knights to have jurisdiction of trials equally with the Senate; it is not about allowing a £10 householder to vote for a member of Parliament; about duties on indigo, or onion-seed, or even tea.

"That strain you hear is of an higher mood."

It is the rallying-cry of patriotism, of liberty, in the sublimest crisis of the State,—of man. It is a deliberation of empire, of glory, of existence, on which they come together. To be or not to be, that is the question. Shall the children of the men of Marathon become slaves of Philip? Shall the majesty of the Senate and people of Rome stoop to wear the chains forging by the military executors of the will of Julius Cæsar? Shall the assembled representatives of France, just waking from her sleep of ages to claim the rights of man,—shall they disperse, their work undone, their work just commencing; and shall they disperse at the order of the king? or shall the messenger be bid to go, in the thunder-tones of Mirabeau,—and tell his master that "we sit here to do the will of our constituents, and that we will not be moved from those seats but by the point of the bayonet?" Shall Ireland bound upward from her long prostration, and cast from her the last links of the British chain, and shall she advance "from injuries to arms, from arms to liberty," from liberty to glory? Shall the thirteen Colonies become, and be free and independent States, and come unabashed, unterrified, an equal, into the majestic assembly of the nations?

These are the thoughts with which all bosoms are distended and oppressed. Filled with these, and with these flashing in every eye, swelling every heart, pervading electric all ages, all orders, like a visitation, "an unquenchable public fire," men come together,—the thousands of Athens around the Bema, or in the Temple of Dionysus,—the people of Rome in the forum, the Senate in that council-chamber of the world,—the masses of France, as the spring-tide, into her gardens of the Tuileries, her club-rooms, her hall of the convention,—the representatives, the genius, the grace, the beauty of Ireland into the Tuscan Gallery of her House of Commons,—the delegates of the Colonies into the Hall of Independence at Philadelphia,—thus men come in an hour of revolution, to hang upon the lips from which they hope, they need, they demand, to hear the things which belong to their national salvation, hungering for the bread of life. R. Choate.

CCLII.

AMERICAN NATIONALITY.

By the side of all antagonisms, higher than they, stronger than they, there rises colossal the fine sweet spirit of nationality, the nationality of America! See there the pillar of fire which God has kindled and lifted and moved for our hosts and our ages. Gaze on that, worship that, worship the highest in that. Between that light and our eyes a cloud for a time may seem to gather; chariots, armed men on foot, the troops of kings may march on us, and our fears may make us for a moment turn from it; a sea may spread before us, and waves seem to hedge us up; dark idolatries may alienate some hearts for a season from that worship; revolt, rebellion, may break out in the camp, and the waters of our springs may run bitter to the taste and mock it; between us and that Canaan a great river may seem to be rolling; but beneath that high guidance our way is onward, ever onward; those waters shall part, and stand on either hand in heaps; that idolatry shall repent; that rebellion shall be crushed; that stream shall be sweetened; that overflowing river shall be passed on foot dryshod, in harvest time; and from that promised land of flocks, fields, tents, mountains, coasts, and ships, from north and south, and east and west, there shall swell one cry yet, of victory, peace, and thanksgiving! R. Choate.

CCLII.

THE SAME CONTINUED.

Think of this nationality first as a state of consciousness, as a spring of feeling, as a motive to exertion, as blessing your country, and as reacting on you. Think of it as it fills your mind and quickens your heart, and as it fills the mind and quickens the heart of millions around you. Instantly, under such an influence, you ascend above the smoke and stir of this small local strife; you tread upon the high places of the earth and of history; you think and feel as an American for America; her power, her eminence, her consideration, her honor, are yours; your competitors, like hers, are kings; your home, like hers, is the world; your path, like hers, is on the highway of empires; our charge, her charge, is of generations and ages; your record, her record, is of treaties, battles, voyages, beneath all the constellations; her image, one, immortal, golden, rises on your eye as our western star at evening rises on the traveller from his home; no lowering cloud, no angry river, no lingering spring, no broken crevasse, no inundated city or plantation, no tracts of sand, arid and burning, on that surface, but all blended and softened into one beam of kindred rays, the image, harbinger, and promiser of love, hope, and a brighter day!

But if you would contemplate nationality as an active virtue, look around you. Is not our own history one witness and one record of what it can do? This day and all which it stands for,—did it not give us these? This glory of the fields of that war, this eloquence of that revolution, this one wide sheet of flame which wrapped tyrant and tyranny and swept all that escaped from it away, forever and forever; the courage to fight, to retreat, to rally, to advance, to guard the young flag by the young arm and the young heart's blood, to hold up and hold on till the magnificent consummation crowned the work,—were not all these imparted or inspired by this imperial sentiment? Has it not here begun the master-work of man, the creation of a national life? Did it not call out that prodigious development of wisdom, the wisdom of constructiveness which illustrated the years after the war, and the framing and adopting of the Constitution? Has it not, in general, contributed to the administering of that government wisely and well since? R. Choate.

CCLIV.

THE SAME CONCLUDED.

Look at it! It has kindled us to no aims of conquest. It has involved us in no entangling alliances. It has kept our neutrality dignified and just. The victories of peace have been our prized victories. But the larger and truer grandeur of the nations, for which they are created, and for which they must one day, before some tribunal, give an account, what a measure of these it has enabled us already to fulfil! It has lifted us to the throne, and has set on our brow the name of the Great Republic. It has taught us to demand nothing wrong, and to submit to nothing wrong; it has made our diplomacy sagacious, wary, accomplished; it has opened the iron gate of the mountains and planted our ensign on the great, tranquil sea.

It has made the desert to bud and blossom as the rose; it has quickened to life the giant brood of useful arts; it has whitened lake and ocean with the sails of a daring, new, and lawful trade; it has extended to exiles, flying as clouds, the asylum of our better liberty.

It has kept us at rest within all our borders; it has repressed without blood the intemperance of local insubordination; it has scattered the seeds of liberty, under law and under order, broadcast; it has seen and helped American feeling to swell into a fuller flood; from many a field and many a deck, though it seeks not war, makes not war, and fears not war, it has borne the radiant flag, all unstained; it has opened our age of lettered glory; it has opened and honored the age of the industry of the people! R. Choate.

CCLV.

THE NATIONAL ENSIGN.

Sir, I must detain you no longer. I have said enough, and more than enough, to manifest the spirit in which this flag is now committed to your charge. It is the national ensign, pure and simple; dearer to all our hearts at this moment, as we lift it to the gale, and see no other sign of hope upon the storm-cloud which rolls and rattles above it, save that which is reflected from its own radiant hues; dearer, a thousand-fold dearer to us all, than ever it was before, while gilded by the sunshine of prosperity and playing with the zephyrs of peace. It will speak for itself far more eloquently than I can speak for it.

Behold it! Listen to it! Every star has a tongue; every stripe is articulate. There is no language or speech where their voices are not heard. There's magic in the web of it. It has an answer for every question of duty. It has a solution for every doubt and perplexity. It has a word of good cheer for every hour of gloom or of despondency.

Behold it! Listen to it! It speaks of earlier and of later struggles. It speaks of victories, and sometimes of reverses, on the sea and on the land. It speaks of patriots and heroes among the living and the dead: and of him, the first and greatest of them all, around whose consecrated ashes this unnatural and abhorrent strife has so long been raging—"the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not." But before all and above all other associations and memories—whether of glorious men, or glorious deeds, or glorious places—its voice is ever of Union and Liberty, of the Constitution and the Laws.

Behold it! Listen to it! Let it tell the story of its birth to these gallant volunteers, as they march beneath its folds by day, or repose beneath its sentinel stars by night. Let it recall to them the strange, eventful history of its rise and progress; let it rehearse to them the wondrous tale of its trials and its triumphs, in peace as well as in war; and, whatever else may happen to it or to them, it will never be surrendered to rebels; never be ignominiously struck to treason; nor be prostituted to any unworthy or unchristian purpose of revenge, depredation, or rapine. And may a merciful God cover the head of each one of its brave defenders in the hour of battle. R. C. Winthrop.

CCLVI.

THE CAUSE.

"Union for the sake of the Union"; "our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country";—these are the mottoes, old, stale, hackneyed, and threadbare as they may have seemed when employed as the watchwords of an electioneering campaign, but clothed with a new power, a new significance, a new gloss, and a new glory, when uttered as the battlecries of a nation struggling for existence; these are the mottoes which can give a just and adequate expression to the Cause in which you have enlisted. Sir, I thank Heaven that the trumpet has given no uncertain sound, while you have been preparing yourselves for the battle.

This is the Cause which has been solemnly proclaimed by both branches of Congress, in resolutions passed at the instance of those true-hearted sons of Tennessee and Kentucky—Johnson and Crittenden—and which, I rejoice to remember at this hour, received your own official sanction as a Senator of the United States.

This is the Cause which has been recognized and avowed by the President of the United States, with a frankness and fearlessness which have won the respect and admiration of all.

This is the Cause which has been so fervently commended to us from the dying lips of a Douglas, and by the matchless living voices of a Holt and an Everett.

This is the Cause in which the heroic Anderson, lifting his banner upon the wings of prayer,—and looking to the guidance and guardianship of the God in whom he trusted, went through that fiery furnace unharmed, and came forth, not indeed without the smell of fire and smoke upon his garments, but with an undimmed and undying lustre of piety and patriotism on his brow.

This is the Cause in which the lamented Lyon bequeathed all that he had of earthly treasure to his country, and then laid down a life in her defense, whose value no millions could measure.

This is the Cause in which the veteran chief of our armies crowned with the laurels which Washington alone had worn before him, and renouncing all inferior allegiance at the loss of fortune and of friends, has tasked, and is still tasking to the utmost the energies of a soul whose patriotism no age could chill. This is the Cause to which the young and noble McClellan, under whose lead it is your privilege to serve, has brought that matchless combination of sagacity and science, of endurance modesty, caution, and courage, which have made him the hope of the hour, the bright particular star of our immediate destiny.

And this, finally, is the Cause which has obliterated, as no other cause could have done, all divisions and distinction of party, nationality, and creed; which has appealed alike to Republican, Democrat, and Union Whig, to native citizen and to adopted citizen; and in which not the sons of Massachusetts or of New England or of the North alone, not the dwellers on the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna only, but so many of those, also, on the Potomac and the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri, on all the lakes, and in all the vast Mesopotamia of the mighty West—yes, and strangers from beyond the seas, Irish and Scotch, German, Italian, and French—the common emigrant and those who have stood nearest to a throne—brave and devoted men from almost every nation under heaven—men who have measured the value of our country to the world by a nobler standard than the cotton crop; and who realize that other and momentous destinies are at stake upon our struggle than such as can be wrought upon any mere material looms and shuttles—all, all are seen rallying beneath a common flag, and, exclaiming with one heart and voice: "The American Union—it must be, and shall be preserved." R. C. Winthrop.

CCLVII.

THE ASSAULT ON CHARLES SUMNER.

On the 22d of May, when the Senate and House had clothed themselves in mourning for a brother fallen in the battle of life, in the distant State of Missouri, the Senator from Massachusetts sat in the silence of the Senate chamber, engaged in employments appertaining to his office, when a member from this House, who had taken an oath to sustain the Constitution, stole into the Senate, that place which had hitherto been held sacred against violence, and smote him as Cain smote his brother. One blow was enough; but it did not satiate the wrath of that spirit which had pursued him through two days. Again, and again, and again, quicker and faster fell the leaden blows, until he was torn away from his victim, when the Senator from Massachusetts fell into the arms of his friends, and his blood ran down the floor of the Senate.

Sir, the act was brief and my comments on it shall be brief also. I denounce it in the name of the Constitution which it violated. I denounce it in the name of the sovereignty of Massachusetts, which was stricken down by the blow. I denounce it in the name of humanity. I denounce it in the name of civilization, which it outraged. I denounce it in the name of that fair play, which bullies and prize-fighters respect. What, strike a man when he is pinioned, when he cannot respond to a blow! Call you that chivalry? In what code of honor did you get your authority for that? God knows my heart. I desire to speak with kindness. I speak in no spirit of revenge. I do not believe the member has a friend who must not in his heart of hearts condemn the act. Even the member himself—if he has left a spark of that chivalry and gallantry attributed to him—must loathe and scorn the act. But much as I reprobate the act, much more do I reprobate the conduct of those who stood by and saw the outrage perpetrated. O, magnanimous Slidell! O, prudent Douglas! O, audacious Toombs!

Sir, there are questions arising out of this, which are far more important than those of a mere personal nature. Of these personal considerations I shall speak when the question comes properly before us, if I am permitted to do so. The higher question involves the very existence of the government itself. If, sir, freedom of speech is not to remain to us, what is the government worth? If we from Massachusetts, or any other State,—senators or members of the House, are to be called to account by some "gallant uncle," when we utter something which does not suit their sensitive nature, we desire to know it.

If the conflict is to be transferred from the peaceful, intellectual field to one where, it is said, "honors are easy and responsibilities equal," then we desire to know it. Massachusetts, if her sons and representatives are to have the rod held over them,—though she utters no threats,—may be called upon to withdraw them to her own bosom, where she can furnish to them that protection which is not vouchsafed to them under the flag of their common country. But while she permits us to remain, we shall do our duty; we shall speak whatever we choose to speak, whatever we will, and however we will, regardless of the consequences.

Sir, the sons of Massachusetts are educated, at the knees of their mothers, in the doctrines of peace and good-will, and God knows we desire to cultivate those feelings,—feelings of social kindness, and public kindness.

The House will bear witness that we have not violated or trespassed upon any of them; but, sir, if we are pushed too long and too far, there are men from the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts who will not shrink from a defence of freedom of speech, and the State they represent: in any field where they may be assailed. A. Burlingame.

CCLVIII.

STRENGTH OF THE GOVERNMENT.

I know that I may be met at once by the objection that our general government is, after all, but a qualified and imperfect government. I may be reminded that it was from Massachusetts that the amendment came which expressly declares that all powers not given, are withheld. And then it may be asked, is there not here a manifest division of sovereignty and of power, and does not this show that much is wanting—that all which is retained at home is wanting—to constitute the full strength of a national government? My answer is twofold. First, I say, the national government has at this moment, by force of the Constitution, all the strength—absolutely all—which it needs, or could profitably use, as a central national government. I answer next, that by the admirable provisions of our Constitution, the reserved powers of every State may be, and, so far as that State does its duty, will be, prepared and developed to their utmost efficiency, and then imparted to the nation in its need.

Do we want a proof and illustration of all this? Very recent events have supplied one, which history will not forget, if we do. How happened it that, a few weeks since, when the general government seemed to be feeble, and was in peril, and the demand—I may as well say the cry for help came forth—why was it that Massachusetts was the first to spring to the rescue? Why was it that she was able, in four days from that in which this cry reached her, to add a new glory to the day of Lexington? Why was it that she could begin that offering of needed aid which has since poured itself in a full, and swollen, and rushing stream, into the war power of the national government? Even as I ask the question, the answer is in all your minds. It is, that Massachusetts could do this because she had done her own duty beforehand. She could do this because, within her own bounds, she had prepared and organized her own strength, and stood ready for the moment when she could place it in the outstretched hands of the government. And other States followed, offering their contributions with no interval—with almost too little of delay; with a haste which was sometimes precipitation; with an importunate begging for acceptance—all of it yet far behind the earnest desire and demand of the people of these States, until at length we stood before an astonished world the strongest government on the face of the earth.

Stronger, therefore, for all the purposes to which our national government should apply its strengths stronger for all the good it can do and all the harm it can prevent, that government is, as it is now constructed, and because it is so constructed, than it could be if it were the single, central, consolidated power of other nations. And it will show its strength, not by preventing all checks and reverses, for that is impossible; but, as I believe, in prompt and thorough recovery from them. T. Parsons.

CCLIX.

THE HIGHER LAW.

In the whole political history of our own country, there has been no sin so atrocious as the repudiation of a higher than human law. It is stark atheism; for, with the law, this position virtually denies also the providence of God, and makes men and nations sole arbiters of their own fortunes. But "the Heavens do rule." If there be institutions or measures inconsistent with immutable rectitude, they are fostered only under the ban of a righteous God; they inwrap the germs of their own harvest of shame, disorder, vice, and wretchedness; nay, their very prosperity is but the verdure and blossoming which shall mature the apples of Sodom. O, how often have our legislators had reason to recall those pregnant words of Jefferson,—sad indeed is it that they should have become almost too trite for repetition, without having worked their way into the national conscience,—"I tremble for my country, when I consider that God is just!" The nations that have passed away, the decaying nations, the convulsed thrones, the smouldering rebellion-fires of the Old World, reveal the elements of national decline and ruin, and hold out baleful signals over the career on which our republic is hurrying; assuring us, by the experience of all climes and ages, that slavery, the unprincipled lust of power and territory official corruption and venality, aggressive war, partisan legislation, are but "sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind."

Our statesmen of the "manifest destiny" type seem to imagine oar country necessary to the designs of Providence. So thought the Hebrews, and on far more plausible grounds, of their commonwealth; but, rather than fulfil to such degenerate descendants the promise made to their great ancestor, "God is able," said the divine Teacher. "of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham."

Our destiny must be evolved, not from the blending of the world's noblest races in our ancestral stock; not from a position in which we hold the keys of the world's commerce, and can say to the North, "Give up," and to the South, "Keep not back;" not from our capacity to absorb and assimilate immigrant millions. Destiny is but the concrete of character. God needs no man or nation. He will bring in the reign of everlasting righteousness; and as a people, we must stand or fall as we accept or spurn that reign. Brethren, scholars, patriots also, I trust,—you whose generous nurture gives you large and enduring influence,—seek for the country of your pride and love, above all things else, her establishment on the eternal right as on the Rock of Ages. Thus shall there be no spot on her fame, no limit to her growth, no waning to her glory. A. P. Peabody.

CCLX.

"STEP TO THE CAPTAINS OFFICE AND SETTLE."

This old watchword, so often heard by travellers in the early stages of steam-navigation, is now and then ringing in our ears with a very pointed and pertinent application. It is a note that belongs to all the responsibilities of this life for eternity. There is a day of reckoning, a day for the settlement of accounts. All unpaid bills will then have to be paid; all unbalanced books will have to be settled. There will be no loose memorandums forgotten; there will be no heedless commissioners for the convenience of careless consciences; there will be no proxies; there will be no bribed auditors. Neither will there be such a thing as a hesitating conscience; but the inward monitor, so often drugged and silenced on earth, will speak out. There will be no doubt nor question as to the right and wrong. There will be no vain excuses! nor any attempt to make them. There will be no more sophistry, no more considerations of expediency, no more pleading of the laws of men and the customs of society, no more talk about organic sins being converted into constructive righteousness, or collective and corporate frauds releasing men from individual responsibilities.

When we see a man, a professed Christian, running a race with the worshippers of wealth and fashion, absorbed in the vanities of the world, or endeavoring to serve both God and mammon, we hear the voice, Step to the captain's office and settle! When we see editors and politicians setting power in the place of goodness, and expediency in the place of justice and law in the place of equity, and custom in the place of right, putting darkness for light, and evil for good, and tyranny for general benevolence, we think of the day when the issuers of such counterfeit money will be brought to light, and their sophistries and lies exposed,—for among the whole tribe of unprincipled politicians there will be great consternation when the call comes to step to the captain's office and settle. When we see unjust rulers in their pride of power fastening chains upon the bondmen, oppressing the poor, and playing their pranks of defiant tyranny before high heaven, then also come these words to mind, like a blast from the last trumpet, Step to the captain's office and settle! G. B. Cheever

CCLXI.

THE MURDER OF THE SOUL.

There are some people whose sympathies have been excited upon the subject of slavery, who, if they can only be satisfied that the slaves have enough to eat, think it is all very well, and that nothing more is to be said or done.

If slaves were merely animals, whose only or chief enjoyment consisted in the gratification of their bodily appetites, there would be some show of sense in this conclusion. But, in fact, however crushed and brutified, they are still men; men whose bosoms beat with the same passions as our own; whose hearts swell with the same aspirations,—the same ardent desire to improve their condition; the same wishes for what they have not; the same indifference towards what they have; the same restless love of social superiority; the same greediness of acquisition; the same desire to know; the same impatience of all external control.

The excitement which the singular case of Caspar Hauser produced a few years since in Germans is not yet forgotten. From the representations of that enigmatical personage, it was believed that those from whose custody he declared himself to have escaped, had endeavored to destroy his intellect, or rather to prevent it from being developed, so as to detain him forever in a state of infantile imbecility. This supposed attempt at what they saw fit to denominate the murder of the soul, gave rise to great discussions among the German jurists; and they soon raised it into a new crime, which they placed at the very head of social enormities.

It is this very crime, the murder of the soul, which is in the course of continuous and perpetual perpetration throughout the southern States of the American Union; and not upon a single individual only, but upon nearly one half of the entire population.

Consider the slaves as men, and the course of treatment which custom and the laws prescribe is an artful, deliberate and well-digested scheme to break their spirit; to deprive them of courage and of manhood; to destroy their natural desire for an equal participation in the benefits of society; to keep them ignorant, and therefore weak; to reduce them, if possible, to a state of idiocy; to crowd them down to a level with the brutes. R. Hildreth.

CCLXII.

JUDICIAL TRIBUNALS.

Let me here say that I hold judges, and especially the Supreme Court of the country, in much respect; but I am too familiar with the history of judicial proceedings to regard them with any superstitious reverence. Judges are but men, and in all ages have shown a full share of frailty. Alas! alas! the worst crimes of history have been perpetrated under their sanction. The blood of martyrs and of patriots, crying from the ground, summons them to judgment.

It was a Judicial tribunal which condemned Socrates to drink the fatal hemlock, and which pushed the Saviour barefoot over the pavements of Jerusalem, bending beneath his cross. It was a judicial tribunal which, against the testimony and entreaties of her father, surrendered the fair Virginia as a slave; which arrested the teachings of the great apostle to the Gentiles, and sent him in bonds from Judea to Rome; which, in the name of the Old Religion, adjudged the saints and fathers of the Christian Church to death, in all its most dreadful forms; and which afterwards, in the name of the New Religion, enforced the tortures of the Inquisition, amidst the shrieks and agonies of its victims, while it compelled Galileo to declare, in solemn denial of the great truth he had disclosed, that the earth did not move round the sun.

It was a judicial tribunal which, in France, during the long reign of her monarchs, lent itself to be the instrument of every tyranny, as during the brief reign of terror it did not hesitate to stand forth the unpitying accessory of the unpitying guillotine. Ay, sir, it was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry the Eighth, from the unjust divorce of his queen, to the beheading of Sir Thomas More; which lighted the fires of persecution that glowed at Oxford and Smithfield, over the cinders of Latimer, Ridley, and John Rogers; which, after elaborate argument, upheld the fatal tyranny of ship-money against the patriotic resistance of Hampden; which, in defiance of justice and humanity, sent Sydney and Russell to the block; which persistently enforced the laws of Conformity that our Puritan Fathers persistently refused to obey; and which afterwards, with Jeffries on the bench, crimsoned the pages of English history with massacre and murder—even with the blood of innocent woman.

Ay, sir, and it was a judicial tribunal in our country, surrounded by all the forms of law, which hung witches at Salem,—which affirmed the constitutionality of the Stamp Act, while it admonished "jurors and the people" to obey,—and which now, in our day has lent its sanction to the unutterable atrocity of the Fugitive Slave Bill. C. Sumner.

CCLXIII.

SLAVERY THE MAINSPRING OF THE REBELLION.

The whole quantity of slave-owners, great and small, according to the recent census, is not more than four hundred thousand; out of whom there are not more than one hundred thousand who are interested to any considerable extent in this peculiar species of property; and yet this petty oligarchy—itself controlled by a squad still more petty—in a population of many millions, has aroused and organized this gigantic rebellion. The future historian will record that the present rebellion—notwithstanding its protracted origin, the multitudes it has enlisted, and its extensive sweep—was at last precipitated by fewer than twenty men; Mr. Everett says, by as few as ten. It is certain that thus far it has been the triumph of a minority; but of a minority moved, inspired, combined, and aggrandized by slavery.

And now this traitorous minority, putting aside all the lurking, slimy devices of conspiracy steps forth in the full panoply of war. Assuming to itself all the functions of a government, it organizes States under a common head—sends ambassadors into foreign countries—levies taxes—borrows money—issues letters of marque—and sets armies in the field, summoned from distant Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, as well as from nearer Virginia, and composed of the whole lawless population—the poor who cannot own slaves as well as the rich who own them—throughout the extensive region where, with satanic grasp, this slaveholding minority claims for itself

"—ample room and verge enough The characters of hell to trace."

Pardon the language which I employ. The words of the poet do not picture too strongly the object proposed. And now these parricidal hosts stand arrayed openly against that paternal Government to which they owed loyalty, protection, and affection Never in history did rebellion assume such a front. Call their numbers four hundred thousand or two hundred thousand—what you will—they far surpass any armed forces ever before marshalled in rebellion; they are among the largest ever marshalled in war. And all this is in the name of slavery, and for the sake of slavery, and at the bidding of slavery. The profligate favorite of the English monarch—the famous Duke of Buckingham—was not more exclusively supreme—even according to those words by which he was exposed to the judgment of his contemporaries:

"Who rules the kingdom? The king.
"Who rules the king? The Duke.
"Who rules the Duke? The Devil."

The prevailing part here attributed to the royal favorite belongs now to slavery, which in the rebel States is a more than royal favorite.

Who rules the rebel States? The President.
Who rules the President? Slavery.
Who rules slavery?—

The latter question I need not answer. But all must see—and nobody can deny—that slavery is the ruling idea of this rebellion. It is slavery which marshals these hosts and breathes into their embattled ranks its own barbarous fire. It is slavery which stamps its character alike upon officers and men. It is slavery which inspires all, from the general to the trumpeter. It is slavery which speaks in the words of command, and which sounds in the morning drum-beat. It is slavery which digs trenches and builds hostile forts. It is slavery which pitches its white tents and stations its sentries over against the national capital. It is slavery which sharpens the bayonet and casts the bullet; which points the cannon and scatters the shell, blazing, bursting with death. Wherever this rebellion shows itself—whatever form it takes—whatever thing it does—whatever it meditates—it is moved by slavery; nay, it is slavery itself, incarnate, living, acting, raging, robbing, murdering, according to the essential law of its being. C Sumner.

CCLXIV.

ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.

Mr. President, with unspeakable delight I hail this measure and the prospect of its speedy adoption. It is the first instalment of that great debt which we all owe to an enslaved race, and will be recognized in history as one of the victories of humanity. At home, throughout our own country, it will be welcomed with gratitude, while abroad it will quicken the hopes of all who love freedom. Liberal institutions will gain everywhere by the abolition of slavery at the national Capital. Nobody can read that slaves were once sold in the markets of Rome, beneath the eyes of the sovereign Pontiff without confessing the scandal to religion, even in a barbarous age; and nobody can hear that slaves are now sold in the markets of Washington, beneath the eyes of the President, without confessing the scandal to liberal institutions. For the sake of our good name, if not for the sake of justice, let the scandal disappear.

Slavery, beginning in violence, can have no legal or constitutional existence, unless through positive words expressly authorizing it. As no such positive words can be found in the Constitution, all legislation by Congress supporting slavery must be unconstitutional and void, while it is made still further impossible by positive words of prohibition guarding the liberty of every person within the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress. But the question is asked, Shall we vote money for this purpose? I cannot hesitate; and I place it at once under the sanction of that commanding charity proclaimed by prophets and enjoined by apostles, which all history recognizes and which the Constitution cannot impair. From time immemorial every government has undertaken to ransom its subjects from captivity,—and sometimes a whole people has felt its resources well bestowed in the ransom of its prince. Religion and humanity have both concurred in this duty, as more than usually sacred. "The ransom of captives is a great and excelling office of justice," exclaims one of the early fathers. The power thus commended has been exercised by the United States under important circumstances with the coöperation of the best names of our history, so as to be without question.

If slavery be unconstitutional in the national Capital, and if it be a Christian duty, sustained by constitutional examples, to ransom slaves, then your swift desires cannot hesitate to adopt the present bill, and it becomes needless to enter upon other questions, important perhaps, but irrelevant. C. Sumner.

CCLXV.

THE SAME CONCLUDED.

Of course, I scorn to argue the obvious truth that the slaves here are as much entitled to freedom as the white slaves that enlisted the early energies of our Government. They are men by the grace of God, and this is enough. There is no principle of the Constitution, and no rule of justice, which is not as strong for the one as for the other. In consenting to the ransom proposed, you will recognize their manhood, and, if authority be needed, you will find it in the example of Washington, who did not hesitate to employ a golden key to open the house of bondage.

Let this bill pass, and the first practical triumph of freedom for which good men have longed, dying without the sight—for which a whole generation has petitioned, and for which orators and statesmen have pleaded—will at last be accomplished. Slavery will be banished from the national Capital. This metropolis, which bears a venerated name, will be purified; its evil spirit will be cast out; its shame will be removed; its society will be refined; its courts will be made better; its revolting ordinances will be swept away; and even its loyalty will be secured. If not moved by justice to the slave, then be willing to act for your own good and in self-defence. If you hesitate to pass this bill for the blacks, then pass it for the whites. Nothing is clearer than that the degradation of slavery affects the master as much as the slave; while recent events testify that wherever slavery exists, there treason lurks, if it does not flaunt. From the beginning of this rebellion, slavery has been constantly manifest in the conduct of the masters, and even here in the national Capital, it has been the traitorous power which has encouraged and strengthened the enemy. This power must be suppressed at every cost, and if its suppression here endangers slavery elsewhere, there will be a new motive for determined action.

Amidst all present solicitudes the future cannot be doubtful. At the national Capital slavery will give way to freedom; but the good work will not stop here. It must proceed. What God and nature decree rebellion cannot arrest. And as the whole wide-spreading tyranny begins to tumble, then, above the din of battle, sounding from the sea and echoing along the land, above even the exaltations of victory on well-fought fields, will ascend voices of gladness and benediction, swelling from generous hearts wherever civilization bears sway, to commemorate a sacred triumph whose trophies, instead of tattered banners, will be ransomed slaves. C. Sumner.

CXLXVI.

EXTRACT FROM FAREWELL ADDRESS AT NEW ORLEANS.

I shall speak in no bitterness, because I am not conscious of a single personal animosity. Commanding the Army of the Gulf, I found you captured, but not surrendered; conquered, but not orderly; relieved from the presence of an army, but incapable of taking care of yourselves. I restored order, punished crime, opened commerce, brought provisions to your starving people, reformed your currency, and gave you quiet protection, such as you had not enjoyed for many years. The enemies of my country unrepentant and implacable, I have treated with merited severity. I hold that rebellion is treason, and that treason persisted in is death, and any punishment short of that due a traitor gives so much clear gain to him from the clemency of the government. Upon this thesis have I administered the authority of the United States, because of which I am not unconscious of complaint. I do not feel that I have erred in too much harshness, for that harshness has ever been exhibited to disloyal enemies to my country, and not to my loyal friends. To be sure, I might have regaled you with the amenities of British civilization, and yet been within the supposed rules of civilized warfare. You might have been smoked to death in caverns, as were the Covenanters of Scotland, by the command of a general of the royal house of England; or roasted, like the inhabitants of Algiers during the French campaign; your wives and daughters might have been given over to the ravisher, as were the unfortunate dames of Spain in the Peninsular war; or you might have been scalped and tomahawked, as our mothers were at Wyoming by the savage allies of Great Britain, in our own Revolution; your property could have been turned over to indiscriminate "loot," like the palace of the Emperor of China; works of art which adorned your buildings might have been sent away, like to paintings of the Vatican; your sons might have been blown from the mouths of cannon, like the Sepoys at Delhi; and yet all this would have been within the rules of civilized warfare as practised by the most polished and the most hypocritical nations of Europe. For such acts the records of the doings of some of the inhabitants of your city toward the friends of the Union, before my coming, were a sufficient provocative and justification. But I have not so conducted. On the contrary, the worst punishment inflicted, except for criminal acts punishable by every law, has been banishment with labor to a barren island, where I encamped my own soldiers before marching here.

It is true I have levied upon the wealthy rebels, and paid out nearly half a million of dollars to feed forty thousand of the starving poor of all nations assembled here, made so by this war. I saw that this rebellion was a war of the aristocrats against the middling men—of the rich against the poor; a war of the landowner against the laborer; that it was a struggle for the retention of power in the hands of the few against the many; and I found no conclusion to it, save in the subjugation of the few and the disenthralment of the many. I, therefore, felt no hesitation in taking the substance of the wealthy, who had caused the war, to feed the innocent poor, who had suffered by the war. And I shall now leave you with the proud consciousness that I carry with me the blessings of the humble and loyal, under the roof of the cottage and in the cabin of the slave! and so am quite content to incur the sneers of the salon, or the curses of the rich. B. F. Butler.

CCLXVII.

CONCLUSION OF FAREWELL ADDRESS AT NEW ORLEANS.

I found you trembling at the terrors of servile insurrection All danger of this I have prevented by so treating the slave that he had no cause to rebel. I found the dungeon, the chain, and the lash your only means of enforcing obedience in your servants. I leave them peaceful, laborious, controlled by the laws of kindness and justice. I have demonstrated that the pestilence can be kept from your borders. I have added a million of dollars to your wealth in the form of new land from the batture of the Mississippi. I have cleansed and improved your streets, canals, and public squares, and opened new avenues to unoccupied land. I have given you freedom of elections greater than you have ever enjoyed before. I have caused justice to be administered so impartially that your own advocates have unanimously complimented the judges of my appointment. You have seen, therefore, the benefit of the laws and justice of the government against which you have rebelled. Why, then, will you not all return to your allegiance to that government,—not with lip-service, but with the heart.

I conjure you, if you desire ever to see renewed prosperity, giving business to your streets and wharves—if you hope to see your city become again the mart of the Western world, fed by its rivers for more than three thousand miles, draining the commerce of a country greater than the mind of man hath ever conceived—return to your allegiance. If you desire to leave to your children the inheritance you received from your fathers—a stable constitutional government; if you desire that they should in the future be a portion of the greatest empire the sun ever shone upon—return to your allegiance.

There is but one thing that stands in the way. There is but one thing that at this hour stands between you and the Government—and that is slavery. The institution, cursed of God, which has taken its last refuge here, in His providence will be rooted out as the tares from the wheat, although the wheat be torn up with it. I have given much thought to the subject. I came among you, by teachings, by habit of mind, by political position, by social affinity, inclined to sustain your domestic laws, if by possibility they might be with safety to the Union. Months of experience and observation have forced the conviction that the existence of slavery is incompatible with the safety either of yourselves or of the Union. As the system has gradually grown to its present huge dimensions, it were best if it could gradually be removed; but it is better, far better, that it should be taken out at once, than that it should longer vitiate the social, political, and family relations of your country. I am speaking with no philanthropic views as regards the slave, but simply of the effect of slavery on the master.

See for yourselves. Look around you and say whether this saddening, deadening influence has not all but destroyed the very framework of your society. I am speaking the farewell words of one who has shown his devotion to his country at the peril of his life and his fortune, who, in these words, can have neither hope nor interest, save the good of those he addresses; and let me here repeat, with all the solemnity of an appeal to Heaven to bear me witness, that such are the views forced upon me by experience. Come, then, to the unconditional support of the Government. Take into your own hands your own institutions; remodel them according to the laws of nations and of God, and thus attain that great prosperity assured to you by geographical position, only a portion of which was heretofore yours. B. F. Butler.

CCLXVIII.

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE UNION.

I am not for the Union as it was. I have the honor to say, as a Democrat, and as an Andrew Jackson Democrat, I am not for the Union as it was, because I saw, or thought I saw, the troubles in the future which have burst upon us; but having undergone those troubles, having spent all this blood and this treasure, I do not mean to go back again and be cheek by jole, as I was before, with South Carolina, if I can help it. Mark me now; let no man misunderstand me; and I repeat, lest I may be misunderstood (for there are none so difficult to understand as those who do not wish to)—mark me again,—I say, I do not mean to give up a single inch of the soil of South Carolina If I had been living at that time, and had the position, the will, and the ability, I would have dealt with South Carolina as Jackson did, and kept her in the Union at all hazards; but now that she has gone out, I would take care that when she comes in again she should come in better behaved; that she should no longer be the firebrand of the Union, ay, that she should enjoy what her people never yet enjoyed, the blessings of a republican form of government. And, therefore, in that view I am not for the reconstruction of the Union as it was. I have spent treasure and blood enough upon it, in conjunction with my fellow-citizens, to make it a little better, and I think we can have a better Union. It was good enough if it had been let alone. The old house was good enough for me, but the South pulled it down, and I propose, when we build it up, to build it up with all the modern improvements.

And one of the logical sequences, it seems to me, that follow inexorably and inevitably, from the proposition that we are dealing with alien enemies, is the question, what is our duty in regard to the confiscation of their property? And that would seem to me to be very easy of settlement under the Constitution, and without any discussion, if my proposition is right. Has it not been held from the beginning of the world down to this day, from the time the Israelites took possession of the land of Canaan, which they got from alien enemies, has it not been held that the whole of the property of those alien enemies belongs to the conqueror, and that it has been at his mercy and his clemency what should be done with it? And for one, I would take it and give it to the loyal man—loyal from the heart,—at the South, enough at least to make him as well as he was before; and I would take the rest of it and distribute it among the volunteer soldiers who have gone forth in the service of their country; and so far as I know them, if we should settle South Carolina with them, in the course of a few years, I should be quite willing to receive her back into the Union. B. F. Butler.

CCLXIX.

SPEECH AT THE UNION SQUARE MEETING IN NEW YORK.

But we are called upon to act. There is no time for hesitation or indecision—no time for haste and excitement. It is a time when the people should rise in the majesty of their might, stretch forth their strong arm, and silence the angry waves of tumult. It is time the people should command peace. It is a question between union and anarchy—between law and disorder. All politics for the time being are and should be committed to the oblivion of the grave. The question should be, "Our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country." We should go forward in a manner becoming a great people, But six months ago, the material prosperity of our country was at its greatest height. To-day, by the fiat of madness, we are plunged in distress and threatened with political ruin, anarchy, and annihilation. It becomes us to stay the hands of this spirit of disunion. The voice of the Empire State can be potential in this unnatural strife. She has mighty power for union. She has great wealth and influence, and she must bring forward that wealth and exert that influence. She has numerous men, and she must send them to the field, and in the plenitude of her power command the public peace. This is a great commercial city—one of the modern wonders of the earth. With all the great elements that surround her, with her commercial renown, with her architectural magnificence, and with her enterprise and energy, she is capable of exercising a mighty power for good in silencing the angry waves of agitation.

While I would prosecute this war in a manner becoming a civilized and a Christian people, I would do so in no vindictive spirit. I would do it as Brutus set the signet to the death-warrant of his son—"Justice is satisfied, and Rome is free." I love my country; I love this Union. It was the first vision of my early years; it is the last ambition of my public life. Upon its altar I have surrendered my choicest hopes. I had fondly hoped that in approaching age it was to beguile my solitary hours, and I will stand by it as long as there is a Union to stand by and when the ship of the Union shall crack and groan, when the skies lower and threaten, when the lightnings flash, the thunders roar, the storms beat, and the waves run mountain-high, if the ship of State goes down, and the Union perishes, I would rather perish with it than survive its destruction. Let us, my friends, stay up the hands of Union men in other sections of the country. How much have they sacrificed of advantage of national wealth, of political promotion! Let us aid them and cheer them on. Let us, my fellow-citizens, rally round the flag of our country, the flag of our fathers, the glorious flag known and honored throughout the earth, and now rendered more illustrious by the gallant Anderson. In the spirit of peace and forbearance he waved it over Fort Sumter. The pretended authorities of South Carolina and the other Southern States attacked him because they seemed to consider him a kind of minister plenipotentiary. Let us maintain our flag in the same noble spirit that animated him, and never desert it while one star is left. If I could see my bleeding, torn, maddened, and distracted country once more restored to quiet and lasting peace under those glorious stars and stripes, I should almost be ready to take the oath of the infatuated leader in Israel—Jephthah and swear to sacrifice the first living thing that I should meet on my return from victory. D. S. Dickinson.

CCLXX.

THE PERPETUITY OF THE UNION.

Give up the Union? Never! The Union shall endure, and its praises shall be heard when its friends and its foes, those who support, and those who assail, those who bare their bosoms in its defence, and those who aim their daggers at its heart, shall all sleep in the dust together. Its name shall be heard with veneration amid the roar of the Pacific's waves, away upon the river of the North and East where liberty is divided from monarchy, and be wafted in gentle breezes upon the Rio Grande. It shall rustle in the harvest and wave in the standing corn, on the extended prairies of the West, and be heard in the bleating folds find lowing herds upon a thousand hills. It shall be with those who delve in mines, and shall hum in the manufactories of New England, and in the cotton-gins of the South. It shall be proclaimed by the Stars and Stripes in every sea of earth, as the American Union, one and indivisible; upon the great thoroughfares, wherever steam drives, and engines throb and shriek, its greatness and perpetuity shall be hailed with gladness. It shall be lisped in the earliest words, and ring in the merry voices of childhood, and swell to Heaven upon the song of maidens. It shall live in the stern resolve of manhood, and rise to the mercy-seat upon woman's gentle availing prayer. Holy men shall invoke its perpetuity at the altars of religion, and it shall be whispered in the last accents of expiring age. Thus shall survive and be perpetuated the American Union; and when it shall be proclaimed that time shall be no more, and the curtain shall fall, and the good shall be gathered to a more perfect union, still may the destiny of our dear land recognize the conception, that

"Perfumes as of Eden flowed sweetly along,
And a voice, as of angels, enchantingly sung,
Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise,
The Queen of the world, and the child of the skies."
D. S. Dickinson.

CCLXXI.

OUR REFORMERS.

What to-day is the position of the men who, for the past thirty years, have worked to bring our practice into conformity with the principles of the Government, and who, in the struggle against established and powerful interests, have accepted political disability and humiliated lives? Have any of these been put in governing places where their proved fidelity would guarantee the direct execution of what is to-day the nearly unanimous will of the people? Certainly not yet. So far, the virtue of the reformers is its own reward. While they are yet living, their mantles have fallen upon the shoulders of others to whom you have given high position, but they are still laboring in narrow paths—broadening, to be sure, and brightening—for the rough ground is passed, and their sun of victory is already rising. We give deep sympathy and honor to the men who, in the interests of civilization, separated themselves from mankind to penetrate the chill solitudes of the Arctic regions. Their names remain an added constellation in polar skies. But, we know that bitter skies and winter winds are not so unkind as man's ingratitude. And why, then, do we withhold sympathy and honor from these men who have so unflinchingly trod their isolated paths of self-appointed duty, accepting political and social excommunication—these heroes of the moral solitudes? But even as it is, our reformers have a better lot than history usually records for such; they have the satisfaction not only to see but to enter, with the people whom they led, into the promised land. And perhaps they are well satisfied to repose, and to rest upon their finished work, feeling surely that they have been faithful servants and that their country will yet say to them, "Well done!"

Sometimes, in unfamiliar countries, the traveller finds himself shrouded in fog and the way so hidden, the features of the country so singularly cleansed from the reality, that he cannot safely move. But if some friendly mountain side lets him ascend a few hundred feet above, he finds himself suddenly in a clear atmosphere with a blue sky and a shining sun. Below him the smaller objects that misled and bewildered him lie hidden; before him stand out, salient and clear, the leading ridges and great outlines of the country which point out to him the right way, and show him where he may reach a place of security and repose for the night, and he goes on his journey confidently. And so it is with those men who devote their lives, unflinchingly and singly, to the public good to the maintenance of principles and the advocacy of great reforms. They live in a pure atmosphere. And such ought also to be the character of the men whom we elevate to our high places. Raised into that upper air, and charged with the general safety, they are expected to be impersonal; they are expected to see over and beyond the personal ambitions and individual interests which of necessity influence men acting individually; their horizon is universal, and they see broadly defined the great principles which lead a nation continuously on to a settled prosperity and a sure glory. And as a condition of our material safety we should see to it that only such men are put in such places. Men capable of receiving a conviction and realizing a necessity—men able to comprehend the spirit of the age and the country in which we live, and fearless in working up to it. J. C. Fremont.

CCLXXII.

PUBLIC RUMOR.

The counsel for the prosecution has said that if the Reverend defendant has not been duly charged with heretical teachings by actual evidence, he has been so charged by public rumor; and he gravely contends that a clergyman charged by public rumor may be required to exculpate himself before an ecclesiastical council. There is a passion known among men as the most eager, implacable, remorseless of passions, a moral curiosity, named by psychologists the odium theologicum. It thrives on the slightest possible food. It lives on air. Public rumor is substantial enough for its richest diet. Public Rumor! I was educated to despise it. An established public opinion, we must treat with due respect, but disparaging rumor, however public, I should be ashamed to own as a motive for one action of my life. When the counsel for the prosecution passed his eulogy on the memory of Dr. Croswell, I could not but think what a rebuke his whole life was to public rumor. If ever man was the destined victim of public rumor, that man was William Croswell. Not left to its low haunts, but elevated by Episcopal sanction, promulgated by Episcopal proclamation, it charged him with teaching doctrines and observances "degrading to the character of the Church and perilling the souls of the people." But in patience and confidence he lived it all down. He went forward in the discharge of his noble duties, in daily prayers, daily public service, daily ministrations to the poor, sick and afflicted, not without much suffering from the relentless attacks of party spirit,—sufferings which shortened his days on earth,—and the daily beauty of his life made ugly the countenance of detraction and defamation. Public confidence, a plant of slow growth, grew about him. Public justice was rendered to him without a movement of his own. He fell, at his post, with all his armor on. At the time of the evening sacrifice, the angel touched him and he was called away. He fell, with his face to the altar, with the words of benediction on his lips, surrounded by a devoted congregation, mourned by an entire community. All men rose up and called him blessed. From the distinguished Rector of St. Paul's, exclaiming, in the words of the prophet, "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof!" to the humble orphan child in the obscure alley, who missed his daily returning visit,—all, all, with one accord, sent up their voices as incense to Heaven.

I had the privilege to be one of the number who received him on his entrance into this city, to take charge of his newly formed parish. I am proud and grateful to remember that I was one of those on whom, in his long struggle, in a measure, according to my ability, he leaned for support. And after seven years, I believe seven years to the very day that we received him, I had the melancholy privilege, with that same company, of bearing his body up that aisle which he had so often ascended in his native dignity and in the beauty of holiness.

I should be an unworthy parishioner, pupil, I may say friend of his, if I allowed myself to defer for a moment to public rumor on a question of character or principle. I should be forgetful of his example if I permitted any one to do so who looked to me for counsel or direction. No, gentlemen, let us all, laymen or clergymen, call to mind his life and his death, and let public rumor blow past us as the idle wind. R. H. Dana, Jr.

CCLXXIII.

THE POLITICAL ENFRANCHISEMENT OF THE NORTH.

Mr. Chairman; Will the people of the Free States unite in one earnest effort to recover their personal and political equality, and to retrieve the honor of the country? It must be done! But, let us not deceive ourselves. The task is no easy one. Oligarchies have ruled the world. Our national government has always been qualified by the element of a slaveholding aristocracy. This aristocracy is powerful,—powerful in its unity of interest, the common slave property, with its values and its perils. It is powerful in its character as a caste. Unlike all other modern aristocracies it is a caste, and the most formidable, exclusive and ineradicable of all castes—a caste founded on race and color. It is powerful in the ordinary elements of power which oligarchies possess. The slaveholding education gives elements of control, the bearing and habit of command, and the assertion of superiority. This exercises its influence over weak minds. People doubtful of their own gentility bow to the established aristocracy of slavery. The thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun.

What forces are we to bring into the field against them?—the divided, heterogeneous masses of a free and equal people. The vast class of the timid, mercenary and time-serving belong to the strongest. Slavery has had them. We shall never have them until we show ourselves the strongest. Will the trading and moneyed interests, so powerful in the Northern cities, do their duty? Is there force enough, virtue enough, in our thirteen millions to assert their political equality, to achieve their own enfranchisement, to make freedom national and slavery sectional; to secure the future to freedom? The few next years will answer this question. You appeal to the spirit of 1776. Remember that the Dutch revolution was as glorious as our own. Holland began in civil and religious liberty, with heroism, freedom, industry and prosperity. In time the Dutch learned to make material interests their ruling motive. They ceased to live for ideas, and where are they now? Prosperous, educated, industrious and—despised! The high tone, the glory is gone!

But is such to be the fate of Massachusetts,—of New England? Massachusetts, in times past, has lived and suffered for ideas, for principles, for abstractions. Powerful influences have been exerted, from the highest quarters, to bring her into subjection to material interests and unheroic maxims, to sap the chivalry and enthusiasm of her youth. But it is not too late, Let her slough this all off in her hour of trial! Let her cast off her disguises and her rags together, and stand forth in the garb and attitude of a hero! This work must be done. If the men of scholarship and accomplishments and wealth who have heretofore enjoyed prominence, do not feel themselves up to the work, the people will call the cobbler from his stall, the factory-boy from his loom, the yeoman from his plough, but the work shall be done. Fishermen and tent-makers renovated the world. The Roman centurion was sent to a fisherman who lodged at the house of a tanner by the seaside, to hear what, should be done for mankind.

Why do we hesitate? What provocation more do we propose to wait for? They have added Slave States by a coup d'état: shall we wait until they have added Cuba and Mexico? They are forcing slavery upon the Territories: must we wait until they have succeeded? They have violated one solemn compact: how many more must they break before we assert our right? They have struck down a Senator in his place. They are already designating the next victim: must we wait until he has fallen? The Senator from Georgia spoke truth when he said the deed was done in the right time and right manner. There needed an act as bad as it could be made to rouse the spirit of the North. Let the priest be slain at the altar-stone. Let these Herods mingle blood with their sacrifices. It is needed. We have been so long sentient that the spirit of freedom must be roused by violence. It is not fit that the land of the Pilgrims should bear the shame longer! By the duty we owe to justice and liberty throughout the world, by the natural pride of men, by the cultivated honor of gentlemen, it is not fit that we bear the shame longer! R. H. Dana, Jr.

CCLXXIV.

THE EDUCATION OF THE WAR.

Over and above the ordinary and universal means of intellectual development, the Divine Providence, now and then, prepares extraordinary means to the same end, in those social convulsions and calamities that shake whole nations with the mighty upheavals of thought and passion. A war of secession and disintegration is upon us. The nation's integrity and its very life are at stake. It is an epoch that the most sluggish minds cannot sleep through. They who never thought before must think now. They who never felt before must feel now. The intellect of the nation is aroused in the presence of this immense issue. It is an educational epoch. Its perils, trials, sacrifices, are the school-discipline of God. The mind of the people grows up whole cubits of stature in a short time. The heart of the people is moved to its deepest depths,—of all classes, but most of the most numerous and the governing class, the agricultural. And the heart is always the head's best ally. Deep feeling begets strong thinking. Sentiments of patriotism and loyalty, newborn and fervid, awaken and reinforce the intellect, raise up character, enlarge the whole man. And this reviving and reinvigorating influence will not pass away with the trials that produced it. When God educates it is not for a day, but for generations. When He quickens a new life in the soul of a people, it is a life that lasts. When He touches the human harp with His own mighty, but tender hand, the sound remains in the strings for an age, and for ages.

Long after this war shall have closed, and its distresses passed away, its moral and intellectual compensations will remain. Every village will have its war-worn veterans to tell the story of Antietam, and Gettysburg, and Port Hudson, and many another field of daring achievement. Almost every farm-house in the land will have its sacred and inspiring memories of a father, son, or brother, who fought for his country, whom they, and their posterity after them, must henceforth love and take thought for as their very mother.

And every village graveyard will have its green mounds, that shall need no storied monuments to clothe them with a peculiar consecration,—graves that hold the dust of heroes,—graves that all men approach with reverent steps,—graves out of whose solemn silence shall whisper inspiring voices, telling the young from generation to generation, how great is their country's worth and cost, and how beautiful and noble it was to die for it. G. Putnam.

CCLXXV.

WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY FEBRUARY 22, 1864.

Meanwhile, the military signs of the hour are auspicious. Already we seem to see the dawn breaking in the horizon. In these latter months, we have heard it from all loyal tongues, and seen it in all loyal faces—the confident hope that the day of triumph and peace is ready to break and shine on into noonday fulness.

The nation's banner, torn and soiled in battle, but with every star and stripe kept whole and radiant in its fair expanse, shall be brought back to the Capitol; and it may well be that he, the illustrious civic leader, who first flung it to the breeze in the nation's necessity, should be the man whose hands shall be privileged to furl it again in Peace,—he, who sits worthily in the chair that once held Washington; he, so honest and pure in his great function, so wise and prudent, so faithful and firm;—God bless and preserve Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States!

Therefore, if it be in our hearts this day, bending at the shrine of Washington, to renew our vow to preserve the country which he gave us for a sacred inheritance, we can do it with good hope. And verily we must vow, and keep the vow, cost what it may of time or wealth, or blood,—for his sake, and our own, and our children's, and humanity's sake, we must.

It is true, there is no perpetuity for national existence, or for individual influence or renown. Earthly empires must decay at last, and with them the vital presence, the living influence of their founders and fathers.

This magnificent polity—his, ours—must, doubtless, one day, share the common fate, and where it goes down, the star of Washington must set with it, and his name pass, an unheeded word, into the dead annals of the obsolete ages. But O! not yet—say it, Americans!—not now!

The laurel chaplet must not be torn from his brow while it is still so fresh and green, and not yet fully wreathed. His statues must not be pushed from their pedestals to be crumbled into common earth, until the centuries have had time to hallow them with their venerable stains.

This fair palace of national freedom, of which he was the master-builder, must not crumble into ruin, till it shall have given a shelter and a home, security, glory, and peace, to the children's children, and the remote posterity of those for whom he reared it with the loving ardor of his great soul and the strength of his mighty arm.

It must not, need not, shall not be. To think of it for a moment is base recreancy and intolerable shame. Forbid it, thou God of nations, and our fathers God! Forbid it, ye, my countrymen, as ye have the power—ay, ten times the power that is requisite. Only rise up again, and yet again, in your strength, and by all that is dear and sacred in the name and fame of your country's Father, swear that it shall not be, and then it cannot be. Give anew your heart and soul and faith, unswerving fidelity, whole-hearted loyalty—your voice, your strength, your wealth all that you are or possess, to this great cause, give these unitedly, fervently, with one shout, one blow, and in perfect accord, and then it will not be. Then the mad enterprise of rebellion is crushed, and the fiend goes howling back, baffled, to his place. Then your birthright is rescued from the destroyer, And when this anniversary shall return, next year, or the next, yonder marble form in our Capitol shall exchange the look of majestic sorrow which seems to have gathered over it, for a smile of grateful joy; and those lips of stone shall move and grow fervid with words of exultant and benedictory congratulation.

Forth, then, friends and compatriots, to the work that shall save the storm-tossed ark of our liberties and our hopes. G. Putnam.

CCLXXVI.

OUR HEROIC DEAD.

There is a history in almost every home of Massachusetts, which will never be written; but the memory of kindred has it embalmed forever. The representatives of the pride and hope of uncounted households, departing, will return no more. The shaft of the archer, attracted by the shining mark, numbers them among his fallen. In the battles of Big Bethel, of Bull Run, of Ball's Bluff, of Roanoke Island, of Newbern, of Winchester, of Yorktown, of Williamsburg, of West Point, of Fair Oaks, the battles before Richmond from Mechanicsville to Malvern Hill, of James Island, of Baton Rouge, of Cedar Mountain, of Bull Run again, of Chantilly of Washington in North Carolina, of South Mountain, of Antietam, of Fredericksburg, of Goldsborough,—through all the capricious fortunes of the war, the regiments of Massachusetts have borne her flag by the side of the banner of the Union. And, beyond the Atlantic slope, every battle-field has drunk the blood of her sons, nurtured among her hills and sands, from which in adventurous manhood they turned their footsteps to the West. Officers and enlisted men have vied with each other in deeds of valor. This flag, whose standard-bearer, shot down in battle, tossed it from his dying hand nerved by undying patriotism, has been caught by the comrade, who in his turn has closed his eyes for the last time upon its starry folds as another hero-martyr clasped the splintered staff and rescued the symbol at once of country and of their blood-bought fame.

How can fleeting words of human praise gild the record of their glory? Our eyes suffused with tears, and blood retreating to the heart, stirred with unwonted thrill, speak with the eloquence of nature, uttered but unexpressed. From the din of the battle, they have passed to the peace of eternity. Farewell! warrior, citizen, patriot, lover, friend,—whether in the humbler ranks or bearing the sword of official power, whether private, captain, surgeon, or chaplain, for all these in the heady fight have passed away,—Hail! and Farewell! Each hero must sleep serenely on the field where he fell in a cause "sacred to liberty and the rights of mankind."

"Worn by no wasting, lingering pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way."
J. A. Andrew.

CCLXXVII.

HONOR TO OUR HEROES.

The heart swells with unwonted emotion when we remember our sons and brothers, whose constant valor has sustained on the field, during nearly three years of war, the cause of our country, of civilization, and liberty. Our volunteers have represented Massachusetts, during the year just ended, on almost every field and in every department of the army where our flag has been unfurled. At Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and Fort Wagner, at Chickamauga, Knoxville, and Chattanooga,—under Hooker, and Meade, and Banks, and Gillmore, and Rosecrans, Burnside, and Grant; in every scene of danger and of duty, along the Atlantic and the Gulf, on the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Mississippi and the Rio Grande,—under Dupont and Dahlgren, and Foote, and Farragut and Porter,—the sons of Massachusetts have borne their part, and paid the debt of patriotism and valor. Ubiquitous as the stock they descend from, national in their opinions and universal in their sympathies, they have fought shoulder to shoulder with men of all sections and of every extraction. On the ocean, on the rivers, on the land, on the heights where they thundered down from the clouds of Lookout Mountain the defiance of the skies, they have graven with their swords a record imperishable,

The Muse herself demands the lapse of silent years to soften, by the influences of Time, her too keen and poignant realization of the scenes of War—the pathos, the heroism, the fierce joy, the grief of battle. But, during the ages to come, she will brood over their memory. Into the hearts of her consecrated priests will breathe the inspirations of lofty and undying Beauty, Sublimity and Truth, in all the glowing forms of speech, of literature and plastic art. By the homely traditions of the fireside—by the head-stones in the church-yard consecrated to those whose farms repose far off in rude graves by the Rappahannock, or sleep beneath the sea,—embalmed in the memories of succeeding generations of parents and children, the heroic dead will live on in immortal youth. By their names, their character, their service, their fate, their glory, they cannot fail:—

"They never fail who die
In a great cause; the block may soak their gore;
Their heads may sodden in the sun, their limbs
Be strung to city gates and castle walls;
But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years
Elapse and others share as dark a doom,
They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which overpower all others, and conduct
The world at last to Freedom."

The edict of Nantes maintaining the religious liberty of the Huguenots gave lustre to the fame of Henry the Great, whose name will gild the pages of philosophic history after mankind may have forgotten the martial prowess and the white plume of Navarre. The Great Proclamation of Liberty will lift the Ruler who uttered it, our Nation and our Age, above all vulgar destiny.

The bell which rang out the Declaration of independence, has found at last a voice articulate, to "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof." It has been heard across oceans, and has modified the sentiments of cabinets and kings. The people of the Old World have heard it, and their hearts stop to catch the last whisper of its echoes. The poor slave has heard it, and with bounding joy, tempered by the mystery of religion, he worships and adores. The waiting Continent has heard it, and already foresees the fulfilled prophecy, when she will sit "redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the irresistible Genius of Universal Emancipation." J. A. Andrew.

CCLXXVIII.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CONTEST.

I hold this armed contest to be a great historical movement, and to have high moral interest and significance because it is to determine the character of the institutions under which we, and those who come after us, are to live. You are not merely sustaining the administration of President Lincoln against unlawful combinations, but you are fighting on the side of law, order, government, civilization and progress. The result of this war is to settle the question whether they who are hereafter to inhabit this magnificent country are or are not to have that primal blessing of a good government, without which the most abundant material resources are as valueless as scientific books or philosophical installments would be among the most barbarous tribes of Africa or Australia. Surely there cannot be imagined a war more worthy of calling forth all the energies of a great people than this.

And if I am asked to define my meaning more distinctly and precisely, I say that the questions now submitted to the stern arbitrament of war are substantially these: Is the Constitution of the United States a compact or a law? Is this Union a Commonwealth, a State, or is it merely a confederacy or a copartnership? Is there a right of secession in the separate States, singly or collectively, other than the right of revolution? These are momentous questions, and if they can be settled in no other way than by a war, then such a war is worth the price it costs, great as that is. For if the right of secession be fairly and logically deducible from the Constitution—if any State, upon its own mere motion, with cause or without cause, can withdraw from the Union as a partner may dissolve a copartnership—then the Constitution itself is a stupendous failure, the men who made it were bungling journeymen and not master-mechanics, and to institutions of our country, so far from deserving our gratitude and admiration, are worthy only of our contempt. The hour has come, and the men have come, to settle these issues, fraught with such vital consequences to unborn millions. The dusky clouds, surcharged with electric fires, that stand front to front in mid air and darken the heavens with their power, have been long in gathering; let the storm continue till the air is cleared—and no longer.

I want to have it now determined that for all future time any State, or any cluster of States, that may attempt to coerce or bully a legal and constitutional majority by the threat of secession, shall be met with the answer: "You don't go out of this Union unless you are strong enough to fight your way out." I want to have the armed heel of the country crush the serpent head of secession, now and forever, so that it shall never again glare with its baleful eyes, or brandish its venomous tongue. Let not the fate and fortunes of this glorious country be committed to the keeping of a clumsy, misshapen raft, compacted of twenty-four or thirty-four logs, good enough to float down a river, but sure to go to pieces when it gets into deep water; Let let them be embarked on board a goodly ship, well found, well fastened, well manned—in which every timber and plank has been so fashioned as to contribute to the beauty and strength of the whole fabric, with a good seaman at the helm, the Constitution in the binnacle, and the stars and stripes at the masthead. When the time of my departure shall come, let me feel, let me know, that I leave those whom I love under the protection of a government good enough to secure the affection of its subjects, and strong enough to enforce their obedience. Remember that if a strong government be sometimes bad, a weak government is never good. G. S. Hillard.

CCLXXIX.

THE MILITARY CAPACITY OF THE PEOPLE.

We have cause for gratitude in the military capacity which our people have developed. We had no great standing armies. We had but a single thoroughly furnished military school. There was no military profession proper, inviting young men on the threshold of life to choose the trade of arms. A soldier's garb was a rare spectacle, and every child ran to the window to gaze at the passing glitter. Whence should come our fighting men if the bugle should blow? You must have men before you have soldiers. Our institutions raised men. Proverbially the Yankee can turn his hand to anything. He likes to do well what he undertakes. He has a pride in showing himself equal to his position. Above all, he has force of personal character. When a Northern regiment makes a charge, it is not merely the weight of so much physical humanity; there goes weight of character with it. Why, there is an accomplished schoolmaster there, and the best blacksmith of the village, and a solid merchant, and a dexterous lawyer, and the handiest coachman of the stable, and a well known stage-driver on a prominent public route, and a butcher with an unerring cleaver, and a jolly tar whose vessel never missed stays with his hand at the wheel; do you suppose that these men are going to charge like so many nameless Hessians? Why, it is a personal matter with every one of them. They go in under orders, to be sure, but they have not lost the sense of individual responsibility. The thing is to be well done because they are there. I know it, my friends, the personal character of our recruits lends weight and irresistibleness to them as soldiers.

There have been no braver men, no stouter soldiers, in all war's red annals, than these armed clerks, farmers, college boys, and their comrades of every peaceful calling. Each community keeps the name of some young hero, nobler than Spartan mothers ever welcomed on his shield. Redder blood never stained the earth, than those full libations our new mustered ranks have poured out for union, law, and liberty. There has been no fighting in the bloody past of human story, where muzzle to muzzle and steel to steel, bold hearts have more truly played the man, than in those battles of two years past in which our citizen armies have saved our nationality. Never have the hardships of the camp, the march, the field, and the trenches, and the merciless privations of imprisonment been more heroically endured. It was not needed—and our President said it well—to consecrate the sacred acres of Gettysburg; that was already done by the deep baptism that had laved those hills, and not that field only, but all the sands and sods and waves our boys' brave blood have crimsoned. No land beneath the blue heavens was ever kept by stouter living bulwarks; no mourners ever had a nobler heritage than those that mourn our soldier-dead. A. L. Stone.

CCLXXX.

LIMIT TO HUMAN DOMINION.

God has given the land to man, but the sea He has reserved to Himself. "The sea is His, and He made it." He has given man "no inheritance in it; no, not so much as to set his foot on." If he enters its domain, he enters it as a pilgrim and a stranger. He may pass over it, but he can have no abiding place upon it. He cannot build his house, nor so much as pitch his tent within it. He cannot mark it with his lines, nor subdue it to his uses, nor rear his monuments upon it. It steadfastly refuses to own him as its lord and master. Its depths do not tremble at his coming. Its waters do not flee when he appeareth. All the strength of all his generations is to it as a feather before the whirlwind; and all the noise of his commerce, and all the thunder of his navies, it can hush in a moment within the silence of its impenetrable abysses. Whole armies have gone down into that unfathomable darkness, and not a floating bubble marks the place of their disappearing. If all the populations of the world, from the beginning of time, were cast into its depths the smooth surface of its oblivion would close over them in an hour; and if all the cities of the earth, and all the structures and monuments ever reared by man were heaped together over that grave for a tombstone, it would not break the surface of the deep or lift back their memory to the light of the sun and the breath of the upper air. The sea would roll its billows in derision, a thousand fathoms deep, above the topmost stone of that mighty sepulchre. The patient earth submits to the rule of man, and the mountains bow their rocky heads before the hammer of his power and the blast of his terrible enginery. The sea cares not for him; not so much as a single hair's breadth can its level be lowered or lifted by all the art, and all the effort, and all the enginery of all the generations of time. He comes and goes upon it, and a moment after it is as if he had never been there. He may engrave his titles upon the mountain top, and quarry his signature into the foundations of the globe, but he cannot write his name on the sea. And thus, by its material uses and its spiritual voices, does the sea ever speak to us, to tell up that its builder and maker is God. He hewed its channels in the deep, and drew its barriers upon the stand, and cast its belted waters around the world. He fitted it to the earth and the sky, and poised them skilfully, the one against the other, when He "measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighted the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance." He gave the sea its wonderful laws, and armed it with its wonderful powers, and set it upon its wonderful work.

"O'er all its breadth His wisdom walks,
On all its waves His goodness shines."
L. Swain.

CCLXXXI.

THE BATTLE OF CIVILIZATIONS.

Our war is only an appeal from the nineteenth century of freedom and ballots to the system of the sixteenth century. The old conflict,—a new weapon, that is all. The South thought because once, twice, thrice, the spaniel North had gotten down on her knees, that this time, also, poisoned by cotton-dust, she would kiss her feet. But instead of that, for the first time in our history, the North has flung the insult back, and said: "By the Almighty, the Mississippi is mine, and I will have it." Now, when shall come peace? Out of this warlike conflict, when shall come peace? Just as it came in the conflict of parties and discussion. Whenever one civilization gets the uppermost positively, then there will be peace, and never till then.

There is no new thing under the sun. The light shed upon our future is the light of experience. Seventy years have not left us ignorant of what the aristocracy of the South means and plans. The South needs to rule, or she goes by the board. She is a wise power. I respect her for it. She knows that she needs to rule. What does Mr. Jefferson Davis plan? Do you suppose he plans for an imaginary line to divide South Carolina from New York and Massachusetts? What good would that do? An imaginary line would not shut out ideas. But she must bar out those ideas. That is the programme in the South. He imagines he can broaden his base by allying himself to a weaker race. He says: "I will join marriage with the weak races of Mexico and the Southwest, and then, perhaps, I can draw to my side the Northwest, with its interests as an agricultural population, naturally allied to me, and not to the Northeast, with its tariff set of States." And he thinks thus, a strong, quiet, slaveholding empire, he will bar New England and New York out in the cold, and will have comparative peace.

But if he bar New England out in the cold, what then? She is still there. And give it only the fulcrum of Plymouth Rock an idea will upheave the continent. Now, Davis knows that better than we do,—a great deal better. His plan, therefore is to mould an empire so strong, so broad, that it can control New England and New York. He is not only to found a slaveholding despotism, but he is to make it so strong that, by traitors among us, and hemming us in by power, he is to cripple, confine, break down, the free discussion of these Northern States. Unless he does that, he is not safe. He knows it. Now I do not say he will succeed, but I tell you what I think is the plan of a statesmanlike leader of this effort. To make slavery safe, he must mould Massachusetts, not into being a slaveholding Commonwealth, but into being a silent, unprotesting Commonwealth; that Maryland and Virginia, the Carolinas, and Arkansas, may be quiet, peaceable populations. He is a wise man. He knows what he wants, and he wants it with a will, like Julius Cæsar of old. He has gathered every dollar and every missile south of Mason and Dixon's line to hurl a thunderbolt that shall serve his purpose. And if he does achieve a separate confederacy, and shall be able to bribe the West into neutrality, much less alliance, a dangerous time, and a terrible battle, will these Eastern States have. For they will never make peace. The Yankee who comes out of Cromwell's bosom will fight his Naseby a hundred years, if it last so long, but he will conquer. In other words, Davis will try to rule. If he conquers, he is to bring, in his phrase, Carolina to Massachusetts. And if we conquer, what is our policy? To carry Massachusetts to Carolina. In other words, carry Northern civilization all over the South. It is a contest between civilizations. Which ever conquers supersedes the other. W. Phillips.

CCLXXXII.

SECESSION THE DEATH OF SLAVERY.

Severed from us, South Carolina must have a government. You see now a reign of terror,—threats to raise means. That can only last a day. Some system must give a support to a government. It is an expensive luxury. You must lay taxes to support it. Where will you levy your taxes? They must rest on productions. Productions are the result of skilled labor. You must educate your laborer, if you would have the means for carrying on a government. Despotisms are cheap; free governments are a dear luxury,—the machinery is complicated and expensive. If the South wants a theoretical republic, she must pay for it, she must have a basis for taxation. How will she pay for it? Why, Massachusetts, with a million workmen,—men, women, and children,—the little feet that can just toddle bringing chips from the wood-pile.—Massachusetts only pays her own board and lodging, and lays by about four per cent a year. And South Carolina, with one half idlers, and the other half slaves, a slave doing only half the work of a freeman,—only one quarter of the population actually at work, how much do you suppose she lays up? Lays up a loss! By all the laws of political economy, she lays up bankruptcy; of course she does! Put her out, and let her see how sheltered she has been from the laws of trade by the Union! The free labor of the North pays her plantation patrol; we pay for her government, we pay for her postage, and for everything else. Launch her out, and let her see if she can make the year's ends meet! And when she tries, she must educate her labor in order to get the basis for taxation. Educate slaves! Make a locomotive with its furnaces of open wirework, fill them with anthracite coal, and when you have raised it to a white heat, mount and drive it through a powder magazine, and you are safe, compared with a slaveholding community educating its slaves. But South Carolina must do it, in order to get the basis for taxation to support an independent government. The moment she does it, she removes the safeguard of slavery.

What is the contest in Virginia now? Between the men who want to make their slaves mechanics, for the increased wages it will secure, and the men who oppose, for fear of the influence it will have on the general security of slave property and white throats. Just that dispute will go on, wherever the Union is dissolved. Slavery comes to an end by the laws of trade. Hang up your Sharpe's rifle, my valorous friend! The slave does not ask the help of your musket. He only says, like old Diogenes to Alexander, "Stand out of my light!" Just take your awkward proportions, you Yankee Democrat and Republican, out of the light and heat of God's laws of political economy, and they will melt the slaves' chains away! W. Phillips.

CCLXXXIII.

THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT.

No matter where you meet a dozen earnest men pledged to a new idea,—wherever you have met them, you have met the beginning of a revolution. Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back. The child feels; he grows into a man, and thinks; another, perhaps, speaks, and the world acts out the thought. And this is the history of modern society. Men undervalue the Anti-slavery movement, because they imagine you can always put your finger on some illustrious moment in history, and say, here commenced the great change which has come over the nation. Not so. The beginning of great changes is like the rise of the Mississippi. A child must stoop and gather away the pebbles to find it. But soon it swells broader and broader, bears on its ample bosom the navies of a mighty republic, fills the Gulf, and divides a continent.

I remember a story of Napoleon which illustrates my meaning. We are apt to trace his control of France to some noted victory, to the time when he camped in the Tuileries, or when he dissolved the Assembly by the stamp of his foot. He reigned in fact when his hand was first felt on the helm of the vessel of state, and that was far back of the time when he had conquered in Italy, or his name had been echoed over two continents. It was on the day when five hundred irresolute men were met in that Assembly which called itself, and pretended to be, the government of France. They heard that the mob of Paris was coming the next morning, thirty thousand strong, to turn them, as was usual in those days, out of doors. And where did this seemingly great power go for its support and refuge? They sent Tallien to seek out a boy-lieutenant,—the shadow of an officer,—so thin and pallid that, when he was placed on the stand before them, the President of the Assembly, fearful, if the fate of France rested on the shrunken form, the ashy cheek before him, that all hope was gone, asked, "Young man, can you protect the Assembly?" And the stern lips of the Corsican boy parted only to reply, "I always do what I undertake!" Then and there Napoleon ascended his throne; and the next day, from the steps of St. Roche, thundered forth the cannon which taught the mob of Paris, for the first time, that it had a master. That was the commencement of the Empire. So the Anti-slavery movement commenced unheeded in that "obscure hole" which Mayor Otis could not find, occupied by a printer and a black boy. W. Phillips.

CCLXXXIV.

"TOUCH NOT SLAVERY"

What! you the descendants of those men of iron who preferred a life-or-death struggle with misery on the bleak and wintry coast of New England to submission to priestcraft and kingcraft; you, the offspring of those hardy pioneers who set their faces against all the dangers and difficulties that surround the early settler's life; you, who subdued the forces of wild nature, cleared away the primeval forest, covered the end less prairie with human habitations; you, this race of bold reformers who blended together the most incongruous elements of birth and creed, who built up a government which you called a model republic, and undertook to show mankind how to be free; you, the mighty nation of the West, that presumes to defy the world in arms, and to subject a hemisphere to its sovereign dictation; you, who boast of recoiling from no enterprise ever so great, and no problem ever so fearful—the spectral monster of Slavery stares you in the face, and now your blood runs cold, and all your courage fails you? For half a century it has disturbed the peace of this Republic; it has arrogated to itself your national domain; it has attempted to establish its absolute rule, and to absorb even your future development; it has disgraced you in the eyes of mankind, and now it endeavors to ruin you if it cannot rule you; it raises its murderous hand against the institutions most dear to you; it attempts to draw the power of foreign nations upon your heads; it swallows up the treasures you have earned by long years of labor; it drinks the blood of your sons and the tears of your wives and now, every day it is whispered in your ears, "Whatever Slavery may have done to you, whatever you may suffer, touch it not! No matter how many thousand millions of your wealths it may cost, no matter how much blood you may have to shed in order to disarm its murderous hand, touch it not! No matter how many years of peace and prosperity you may have to sacrifice in order to prolong its existence, touch it not! And if it should cost you your honor, touch it not!"

Listen to this story: On the Lower Potomac, as the papers tell us, a negro comes within our lines, and tells the valiant defenders of the Union that his master conspires with the rebels, and has a quantity of arms concealed in a swamp; our soldiers go and find the arms; the master reclaims the slave; the slave is given up; the master ties him to his horse, drags him along eleven miles to his house, lashes him to a tree, and, with the assistance of his overseer, whips him three hours—three mortal hours; then the negro dies. That black man served the Union; Slavery attempts to destroy the Union; the Union surrenders the black man to Slavery, and he is whipped to death—touch it not! Let an imperishable blush of shame cover every cheek in this boasted land of freedom—but be careful not to touch Slavery! Ah, what a dark divinity is this, that we must sacrifice to it our peace, our prosperity, our blood, our future, our honor! What an insatiable vampire is this that drinks out the very marrow of our manliness! Pardon me; this sounds like a dark dream, like the offspring of a hypochondriac imagination; and yet—have I been unjust in what I have said? Carl Schurz.

CCLXXXV.

OHIO.

Ohio rises before the world as the majestic witness to the beneficent reality of the democratic principle. A commonwealth younger in years than he who addresses you, not long ago having no visible existence but in the emigrant wagons, now numbers almost as large a population as that of all England when it gave birth to Raleigh, and Bacon, and Shakespeare, and began its continuous attempts at colonizing America. Each one of her inhabitants gladdens in the fruit of his own toil. She possesses wealth that must be computed by thousands of millions; and her frugal, industrious and benevolent people, at once daring and prudent, unfettered in the use of their faculties, restless in enterprise, do not squander the accumulations of their industry in vain show, but ever go on to render the earth more productive, more beautiful, and more convenient to man; mastering for mechanical purposes the unwitting forces of nature; keeping exemplary good faith with their public creditors; building in half a century more. churches than all England has raised since this continent was discovered; endowing and sustaining universities and other seminaries of learning. Conscious of the dynamic power of mind in action as the best of fortresses, Ohio keeps no standing army but that of her school-teachers, of whom she pays more than twenty thousand; she provides a library for every school-district; she counts among her citizens more than three hundred thousand men who can bear arms, and she has more than twice that number of children registered as students in her public schools. Here the purity of domestic morals is maintained by the virtue and dignity of woman. In the heart of the temperate zone of this continent, in the land of corn, of wheat, and the vine, the eldest daughter of the Ordinance of 1787, already the young mother of other commonwealths that bid fair to vie with her in beauty, rises in her loveliness and glory, crowned with cities, and challenges the admiration of the world. Hither should come the political skeptic, who, in his despair, is ready to strand the ship of state; for here he may learn how to guide it safely on the waters. Should some modern Telemachus, heir to an island empire, touch these shores, here he may observe the vitality and strength of the principle of popular power; take from the book of experience the lesson that in public affairs great and happy results follow in proportion to faith in the efficacy of that principle, and learn to rebuke ill-advised counsellors who pronounce the most momentous and most certain of political truths a delusion and a failure. G. Bancroft.

CCLXXXVI.

THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN THE NORTH AND SOUTH.

It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. The question is, What will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us: "Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery." But we do let them alone—have never disturbed them—so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

Nor can we justifiably withhold this, an any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we can not justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces either of destruction to the government or of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT. A. Lincoln.

CCLXXXVII.

THE PRETEXT OF REBELLION.

If war must come—if the bayonet must be used to maintain the Constitution—I can say, before God, my conscience is clear. I have struggled long for a peaceful solution of the difficulty. I have not only tendered those States what was theirs of right, but I have gone to the very extreme off magnanimity, The return we receive is war, armies marched upon our Capital obstructions and danger to our navigation, letters of marque to invite pirates to prey upon our commerce, a concerted movement to blot out the United States of America from the map of the globe. The question is, Are we to be stricken down by those who, when they can no longer govern, threaten to destroy? What cause, what excuse do disunionists give us for breaking up the best government on which the sun of heaven ever shed its rays? They are dissatisfied with the result of a Presidential election. Did they never get beaten before? Are we to resort to the sword when we get defeated at the ballot-box? I understand that the voice of the people expressed in the mode appointed by the Constitution must command the obedience of every citizen. They assume, on the election of a particular candidate, that their rights are not safe in the Union. What evidence do they present of this? I defy any man to show any act on which it is based. What act has been omitted or been done? I appeal to these assembled thousands, that so far as the constitutional rights of the Southern States—I will say the constitutional rights of slaveholders—are concerned, nothing has been done, and nothing omitted, of which they can complain.

There has never been a time, from the day that Washington was inaugurated first President of these United States, when the rights of the Southern States stood firmer under the laws of the land than they do now; there never was a time when they had not as good a cause for disunion as they have to-day. What good cause have they now that has not existed under every administration? If they say the Territorial question—now, for the first time, there is no act of Congress prohibiting slavery anywhere. If it be the non-enforcement of the laws, the only complaints that I have heard have been of the too vigorous and faithful fulfillment of the Fugitive Slave Law. Then what reason have they? The slavery question is a mere excuse. The election of Lincoln is a mere pretext. The present secession movement is the result of an enormous conspiracy formed more than a year since—foraged by leaders in the Southern Confederacy more than twelve months ago. They use the slavery question as a means to aid the accomplishment of their ends. They desired the election of a Northern candidate, by a sectional vote, in order to show that the two sections cannot live together. When the history of the two years from the Lecompton charter down to the Presidential election shall be written, it will be shown that the scheme was deliberately made to break up this Union. They desired a Northern Republican to be elected by a purely Northern vote, and now assign this fact as a reason why the sections may not longer live together. If the disunion candidate in the late Presidential contest had carried the united South, their scheme was, the Northern candidate successful, to seize the Capital last spring, and, by a united South and divided North, hold it. That scheme was defeated in the defeat of the disunion candidate in several of the Southern states. The conspiracy is now known. Armies have been raised, war is levied to accomplish it. There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against them. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots or traitors. S. A. Douglass.

CCLXXXVIII.

NO NEUTRALS; ONLY PATRIOTS OR TRAITORS.

But this is no time for a detail of causes. The conspiracy is now known. Armies have been raised, war is levied to accomplish it. There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against them. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots or tractors. We cannot close our eyes to the sad and solemn fact that war does exist. The government must be maintained, its enemies overthrown; and the more stupendous our preparations the less the bloodshed, and the shorter the struggle will be. But we must remember certain restraints on our action even in time of war. We are a Christian people, and the war must be prosecuted in a manner recognized by Christian nations. We must not invade constitutional rights. The innocent must not suffer, nor women or children be the victims. Savages must not be let loose. But while I sanction no war on the rights of others, I will implore my countrymen not to lay down their arms until our own rights are recognized. The Constitution and its guarantees are our birth right, and I am ready to enforce that inalienable right to the last extent. We cannot recognize secession. Recognize it once, and you have not only dissolved government, but you have destroyed social order, and upturned the foundations of society You have inaugurated anarchy in its worst form, and will shortly experience all the horrors of the French Revolution.

Then we have a solemn duty,—to maintain the government. The greater our unanimity, the speedier the day of peace. We have prejudices to overcome from a fierce party contest waged a few short months since. Yet these must be allayed. Let us lay aside all criminations and recriminations as to the origin of these difficulties. When we shall have again a country, with the United States flag floating over it, and respected on every inch of American soil, it will then be time enough to ask who and what brought all this upon us. I have said more than I intended to say. It is a sad task to discuss questions so fearful as civil war; but sad as it is, bloody and disastrous as I expect the war will be, I express it as my conviction, before God, that it is the duty of every American citizen to rally round the flag of his country. S. A. Douglass.

CCLXXXIX.

ON THE ORDINANCE OF SECESSION IN THE GEORGIA CONVENTION.

This step, once taken, can never be recalled; and all the baleful and withering consequences that follow will rest on the convention for all coming time. When we and our posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war, which this act of yours will inevitably invite and call forth; when your green fields of waving harvests shall be trodden down by the murderous soldiery and the very car of war sweeping over our land; our temples of justice laid in ashes; all the horrors and desolation of war upon us, who but this convention will be held responsible for it? and who but him who shall have given his vote for this unwise and ill-timed measure shall be held to strict account for this suicidal act by the present generation, and probably cursed and execrated by posterity for all coming time, for the wide and desolating ruin that will inevitably follow this act you now propose to perpetrate?

Pause, I entreat you, and consider for a moment what reasons you can give that will ever satisfy yourselves in calmer moments,—what reasons you can give to your fellow-sufferers in the calamity that it will bring upon us? What reason can you give the nations of the earth to justify it? They will be the calm and deliberate judges in the case, and to what cause, or one overt act can you point, on which to rest the plea of justification? What right has the North assailed? What interest of the South has been invaded? What justice has been denied? and what claim founded in justice and right has been withheld? can either of you to-day name one governmental act of wrong deliberately and purposely done by the government at Washington of which the South has a right to complain? I challenge the answer! While, on the other hand, let me show the facts (and believe me, gentlemen, I am not here the advocate of the North, but am here the firm friend and lover of the South and her institutions, and for this reason I speak thus plainly and faithfully for yours, mine, and every other man's interest, the words of truth and soberness,) let me show the facts, I say, of which I wish you to judge, and I will only state facts which are clear and undeniable, and which now stand as records authentic in the history of our country.

When we of the South demanded the slave-trade, or the importation of Africans for the cultivation of our lands, did they not yield the right for twenty years? When we asked a three-fifths representation in Congress for our slaves, was it not granted? When we asked and demanded the return of any fugitive from justice, or the recovery of those persons owing labor or allegiance, was it not incorporated in the constitution? and again ratified and strengthened in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850? Do you reply that in many instances they have violated this compact, and have not been faithful to their engagements? As individuals and local communities they may have done so; but not by the sanction of government; for that has always been true to Southern interests.

Leaving out of the view, for the present, the countless millions of dollars you must expend in a war with the North, there will be thousands and tens of thousands of your sons and brothers slain in battle, and opened up as sacrifices upon the altar of ambition,—and for what, we ask again? It is for the overthrow of the American government, established by our common ancestry cemented and built up by their sweat and blood, and founded on the broad principles of Right, Justice, and Humanity? And, as such, I must declare here, as I have often done before, and which has been repeated by the greatest and wisest of statesman and patriots in this and other lands, that it is the best and freest government,—the most equal in its rights,—the most just in its decisions—the most lenient in its measures: and the most inspiring in its principles to elevate the race of men, that the sun in heaven ever shone upon.

Now, for you to attempt to overthrow such a government as this, under which we have lived for more than three quarters of a century, in which we have gained our wealth, our standing as a nation, our domestic safety while the elements of peril are round us with peace and tranquility accompanied with unbounded prosperity and rights unassailed—is the height of madness, folly and wickedness, to which I can neither lend my sanction nor my vote. A. H. Stephens.

CCXC.

"THE HIRELING LABORERS" OF THE NORTH.

The Senator from South Carolina [Mr. Hammond] exclaims: "The man who lives by daily labor, your whole hireling class of manual laborers, are essentially slaves; and they feel galled by their degradation." What a sentiment is this to hear uttered in the councils of this democratic republic! This language of scorn and contempt is addressed to senators who were not nursed by a slave; whose lot it was to toil with their own hands,—to eat bread, earned, not by the sweat of another's brow, but by their own.

Sir, should the Senator and his agitators and lecturers come to Massachusetts, on a mission to teach our "hireling class of manual laborers," our "slaves," the "tremendous secret of the ballot-box," and to help "combine and lead them," these stigmatized "hirelings" would reply to the Senator and his associates: "we are freemen; we are the peers of the gifted and the wealthy; we know 'the tremendous secret of the ballot-box;' and we mould and fashion these institutions that bless and adorn our free Commonwealth! These public schools are ours, for the education of our children; these libraries, with their accumulated treasures, are ours; these multitudinous and varied pursuits of life, where intelligence and skill find their reward, are ours. Labor is here honored and respected, and great examples incite us to action.

"All around us, in the professions, in the marts of commerce, on the exchange where merchant princes and capitalists do congregate, in these manufactories and workshops where the products of every clime are fashioned into a thousand forms of utility and beauty, on these smiling farms fertilized by the sweat of free labor, in every position of private and of public life,—are our associates, who were but yesterday what you call 'hireling laborers,' and therefore, 'essentially slaves!' In every department of human effort are noble men who sprang from our ranks,-men whose good deeds will be felt, and will live in the grateful memories of men, when the stones reared by the hands of affection to their honored names shall crumble into dust. Our eyes glisten and our hearts throb over the bright, glowing, and radiant pages of our history that record the deeds of patriotism of the sons of New England who sprang from our ranks, and wore the badges of toil. While the names of Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Nathaniel Greene, and Paul Revere, live on the brightest pages of our history, the mechanics of Massachusetts and New England will never want illustrious examples to incite us to noble aspirations and noble deeds.

"Go home, sir, and say to your privileged class, which you vauntingly say leads progress, civilization, and refinement, that in the opinion of the 'hireling laborers' of Massachusetts, if you have no sympathy for your African bondsmen, you should, at least, sympathize with the millions of your own race, whose labor your have dishonored and degraded by slavery! You should teach your millions of poor and ignorant white men, so long oppressed by your policy, the 'tremendous secret that the ballot-box is stronger than an army with banners!' You should 'combine' and lead them to the adoption of a policy which shall secure their own emancipation from a degrading thraldom!" H. Wilson.

CCXCI.

THE DEATH OF SLAVERY THE LIFE OF THE NATION.

We of America have been accustomed to contemplate, with something of gratified and patriotic pride, the wondrous progress of our country, and the strength and stability of our Government. Gazing with beaming eye and throbbing heart upon the grandeur and beauty of this splendid edifice of constitutional government in America, we came to believe that it was as imperishable as the memory of its illustrious builders. We dreamed for our native land a glorious destiny—a magnificent career among the nations during the coming ages. But our firm, confident faith is now shaken—our bright hopes are now dimmed—our lofty pride is now humbled—our gorgeous visions of the future glories of the Republic are now obscured by the storm of battle. Our country, the land of so much of affection, of pride and of hope, now presents to the startled and astonished gaze of mankind an appalling, humiliating, and saddening spectacle. Treasonable menaces of other days have now ripened into treasonable deeds. Civil war holds its carnival, and reaps its bloody harvest. The nation is grappling with a gigantic conspiracy—struggling for existence—for the preservation of its menaced life—against a rebellion that finds no parallel in the annals of the world.

Why is it that the land resounds with the measured tread of a million of armed men? Why is it that our bright waters all stained and our green fields reddened with fraternal blood? Why is it that the young men of America, in the pride and bloom of early manhood, are summoned from homes, from the mothers who bore them, from the wives and sisters who love them, to the fields of bloody strife—there to do soldiers' duties, bear soldiers' burdens, and fill soldiers' graves? Why is it that thousands of the men and the women of Christian America are sorrowing, with aching hearts and tearful eyes, for the absent, the loved, and the lost? Why is it that the heart of loyal America throbs, heavily oppressed with anxiety and gloom, for the future of the country?

These crimes against the peace of the country and the life of the nation are all, all to eternize the hateful dominion of man over the souls and bodies of his fellow-men—to make slavery perpetual and its power forever dominant in Christian and Republican America. These sacrifices of property of health, of life—these appalling sorrows and agonies now upon us, are all the inflictions of slavery, in its gigantic effort to found a slaveholding empire in America. Yes, slavery is the "architect of ruin" who organized this mighty conspiracy against the unity and existence of the Republic. Slavery is the traitor that plunged the Nation into the fire, and blood, and darkness of civil war. Slavery is the criminal whose hands are dripping with the blood of our murdered sons. Before the tribunal of mankind, of the present and of coming ages—before the bar of the ever-living God—the loyal heart of America holds slavery responsible for every dollar sacrificed, for every drop of blood shed, for every pang of toil, of agony, and of death for every tear wrung from suffering or affection, in this godless rebellion now upon us. For these treasonable deeds, these crimes against freedom, humanity, and the life of the Nation, slavery should be doomed by the loyal people of America to a swift, utter, and ignominious annihilation.

Slavery, bold, proud, domineering with hate in its heart, scorn in its eye, defiance in its mien, has pronounced against the existence of republican institutions in America, against the supremacy of the Government, the unity and life of the Nation. Slavery, hating the cherished institutions that tend to secure the rights and enlarge the privileges of mankind, despising the toiling masses, as "mudsills" and "white slaves," defying the Government, its Constitution and its laws, has openly pronounced itself the mortal and unappeasable enemy of the Republic. Slavery stands now the only clearly pronounced foe our country has on the globe. Therefore, every word spoken, every line written, every act performed, that keeps the breath of life, for a moment, in slavery, is against the existence and perpetuity of democratic institutions against the dignity of the toiling millions of America—against the liberty, the peace, the honor, the renown, and the life of the Nation. In the lights of to-day that flash upon us from camp and battle-field, the loyal eye, heart, and brain of America sees and feels and realizes that THE DEATH OF SLAVERY IS THE LIFE OF THE NATION! The loyal voice of patriotism throughout all the land pronounces, in clear accents, that AMERICAN SLAVERY MUST DIE THAT THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC MAY LIVE! H. Wilson.

CCXCII.

THE FANATICISM OF MASSACHUSETTS.

This, sir, is not the first time in her history that Massachusetts has drawn upon herself reproach and rebuke for unbending adherence to the rights of human nature. In the days of her colonial existence, her unshrinking devotion to the rights of mankind often drew upon her the censure of the pliant supporters of the British Crown; but the world now quotes and commends her inspiring example. Now her abhorrence of human slavery brings upon her the condemnation of its advocates and apologists, but the hour will yet come, in the march of time, when her unwavering fidelity to an unpopular cause in spite of obloquy and reproach, will be a source of inspiration to men struggling to recover lost rights. Massachusetts clings with the tenacity of profound conviction to the teachings of her own illustrious sons. She was taught by Benjamin Franklin that "slavery is an atrocious debasement of human nature;" by John Adams that "consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust;" by John Quincy Adams that "slavery taints the very sources of moral principle"—"establishes false estimates of virtue and vice;" by Daniel Webster that "it is a continual and permanent violation of human rights"—"opposed to the whole spirit of the Gospels and to the teachings of Jesus Christ;" by William Ellery Channing that "to extend and perpetuate the evil, we cut ourselves off from the communion of nations; we sink below the civilization of our age; we invite the scorn, indignation and abhorrence of the world." Massachusetts cannot forget or repudiate these words of her immortal sons.

The distinguishing opinion of Massachusetts concerning slavery in America is often flippantly branded in these Halls, as wild, passionate, unreasoning fanaticism. Senators of the South! tell me, I pray you tell me, if it be fanaticism for Massachusetts to see in this age, what your peerless Washington saw in his age "the direful effects of slavery?" Is it fanaticism for Massachusetts to believe as your Henry believed, that "slavery is as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible, and destructive to liberty?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe as your Madison believed, that "slavery is a dreadful calamity?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Monroe, that "slavery has preyed upon the vitals of the union and has been prejudicial to all the States in which it has existed?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Martin that "slavery lessens the sense of the equal rights of mankind, and habituates us to tyranny and oppression?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Pinckney that "it will one day destroy the reverence for liberty, which is the vital principle of a Republic?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Henry Clay, that "slavery is a wrong, a grievous wrong, and no contingency can make it right?" Surely, Senators who are wont to accuse Massachusetts of being drunk with fanaticism, should not forget that the noblest men the South has given to the service of the Republic, in peace and in war, were her teachers. H. Wilson.

CCXCIII.

DEFENCE OF MASSACHUSETTS.

Massachusetts, in her heart of hearts, loves liberty—loathes slavery. I glory in her sentiments; for the heart of our common humanity is throbbing in sympathy with her opinions. But she is not unmindful of her constitutional duties, of her obligations to the Union and to her sister States. Up to the verge of constitutional power she will go in maintenance of her cherished convictions; but she has not shrunk, and she does not mean to shrink, from the performance of her obligations as a member of this Confederation of constellated States. She has never sought, she does not seek, to encroach, by her own acts or by the action of the Federal Government, upon the constitutional rights of her sister States. Jealous of her own rights, she will respect the rights of others. Claiming the power to control her own domestic policy, she freely accords that power to her sister States. Concealing the rights of others, she demands her own. Loyal to the Union, she demands loyalty in others. Here, and now, I demand of her accusers that they file their bill of specifications, and produce the proofs of their allegations, or forever hold their peace.

In other days, when Adams, Webster, Davis, Everett, Cushing, Choate, Winthrop, Mann, Rantoul, and their associates graced these chambers, Massachusetts was then, as she is now, the object of animadversion and assault. I have sometimes thought, Mr. President, that these continual assaults upon the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were prompted—not by her faults, but by her virtues rather—not by the sense of justice, but by the spirit of envy and jealousy and uncharitableness. Unawed, however, by censure or menace, she continues in her course, upward and onward, to the accomplishment of her high destinies. She is but a speck, a mere patch on the surface of America, hardly more than one four-hundredth part of the territory of the Republic, with a rugged soil and still more rugged clime. But on that little spot of the globe is a Common wealth where common consent is recognized as the only just basis of fundamental law, and personal freedom is secured in its completest individuality. In that Commonwealth are one and a quarter million of freemen, with skilled hand and cultivated brain,—with mechanic arts and manufactures on every streamlet, and commerce on the waves of all the seas—with institutions of moral and mental culture open to all, and art, science, and literature illustrated by glorious names—with benevolent institutions for the sons and daughters of misfortune and poverty, and charities for humanity the wide world over, The heart, the soul, the reason of Massachusetts send up unceasing aspirations for the unity, indivisibility, and perpetuity of the North American Republic; but if it shall be rent, torn, dissevered, she will not lose her faith in God and humanity, she will not go down with the falling fortunes of her country without making a struggle to preserve and perpetuate free institutions. So long as the ocean shall roll at her feet, so long as God shall send her health-giving breezes and sunshine and rain, she will endeavor to illustrate, in the future as in the past, the daily beauty of freedom secured and protected by law. H. Wilson.

CCXCIV.

EMANCIPATION.

Shall these once slaves but now freemen be remanded back to bondage? No: "personal property once forfeited is always forfeited." No: slaves once legally free are always free. No, no; thrice no, by the ashes of our fathers, by the altar of our God! The "chosen curses," and the "hidden thunder in the stores of heaven" will forbid the rendition—a crime to them, a malediction to their masters, a shame to us, and a disgrace to the age. If these children of wrong and oppression are the lawful spoil of our victorious arms, give up to the enemy your proudest national memorials—the sword of Washington, the staff of Franklin, that time-worn but immortal parchment which just authoritatively published your Independence to the world—give up to him the blood-stained flags and trophies which, upon the bristling crest of battle, our heroic defenders have wrenched from his desperate grasp; give up to him this Capitol itself and throw at his feet the President's head, before you give up the most abject of these bondsmen disenthralled; for in surrendering them you will squander one of those priceless moments, big with the future, worth more than a whole generation of either bond or free, the rare and pregnant occasion placed in your hand by the fortune of war of wiping forever African slavery from the American continent.

If this deliverance is ever vouchsafed, then shall we be purged forever of the sole source of our weakness and dissension in the past; then will pass away forever the sole cloud that threatens the glory of our future; then will the American Union be transfigured into a more erect and shining presence, and tread with firm footsteps a loftier plane, and cherish nobler theories, and carry its head nearer the stars; then will it be no profanation to wed its redeemed and unpolluted name to that of immortal Liberty; then Liberty and Union will go on, hand in hand, and, under a holier inspiration and with more benign and blessed auspices, will revive their grand mission of peacefully acquiring and peacefully incorporating contiguous territories, and peacefully assimilating their inhabitants; then from the Orient to the Occident, from the flowery shores of the great Southern Gulf to the frozen barriers of the great Northern Bay, will they unite in spreading a civilization, not intertwined with slavery, but purged of its contamination, a civilization which means universal emancipation, universal enfranchisement, universal brotherhood.

Despair not, then, soldiers, statesmen, citizens, women, we are fighting energetically for a nation's life. The cloud which now shuts down before your vision will yet disclose its silver lining. Peace shall be born from war, and out of chaos order shall yet emerge. We shall dwell together in harmony, and but one nation shall inhabit our sea-girt borders. We seem sailing along the land, hearing the ripple that breaks upon the shore, where our recreated and regenerated Republic, after it has passed through this fiery furnace of war, these gates of death, shall be permanently installed. We shall yet tread its meadows and pastures green, trade in its marts, live in its palaces worship in its temples, and legislate in its Capitol. H. C. Deming.

CCXCV.

PROTECTION FOR TENNESSEE.

The amendments to the Constitution which constitute the Bill of Rights, declare that "a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Our people are denied this right secured to them in their own constitution and the constitution of the United States; yet we hear no complaints here of violations of the Constitution in this respect. We ask the Government to interpose to secure us this constitutional right. We want the passes in our mountains opened, we want deliverance and protection for a down-trodden and oppressed people who are struggling for their independence without arms. If we had had ten thousand stand of arms and ammunition when the contest commenced, we should have asked no further assistance. We have not got them. We are a rural people; we have villages and small towns—no large cities. Our population is homogeneous, industrious, frugal, brave, independent; but now harmless and powerless, and oppressed by usurpers. You may be too late in coming to our relief or you may not come at all though I do not doubt you will come—and they may trample us under foot; they may convert our plains into graveyards, and the caves of our mountains into sepulchers; but they will never take us out of this Union, or make us a land of slaves—no, never! We intend to stand as firm as adamant, and as unyielding as our own majestic mountains that surround us. Yes, we will be as fixed and as immovable as are they upon their bases. We will stand as long as we can; and if we are overpowered and Liberty shall be driven from the land, we intend before she departs to take the flag of our country with a stalwart arm, a patriotic heart, and an honest tread, and place it upon the summit of the loftiest and most majestic mountain. We intend to plant it there, and leave it, to indicate to the inquirer who may come in after times, the spot where the Goddess of Liberty lingered and wept for the last time, before she took her flight from a people once prosperous, free, and happy.

We ask the Government to come to our aid. We love the Constitution as made by our fathers. We have confidence in the integrity and capacity of the people to govern themselves. We have lived entertaining these opinions; we intend to die entertaining them. We may meet with impediments, and may meet with disasters, and here and there a defeat; but ultimately freedom's cause must triumph, for—

"Freedom's battle once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won."

Yes, we must triumph. My faith is strong, based on the eternal principles of right that a thing so monstrously wrong as this rebellion cannot triumph. I say, let the battle go on—it is freedom's cause—until the Stars and Stripes ( God bless them!) shall again be unfurled upon every cross-road, and from every house-top throughout the Confederacy North and South. Let the Union be reinstated; let tie law be enforced; let the Constitution be supreme. A. Johnson.

CCXCVI.

THE SUBMISSIONISTS.

With the curled lip of scorn we are told by the disunionists that, in thus supporting a Republican Administration in its endeavors to uphold the Constitution and the laws, we are "submissionists," and when they have pronounced this word, they suppose they have imputed to us the sum of all human abasement. Well, let it be confessed, we are "submissionists," and weak and spiritless as it may be deemed by some, we glory in the position we occupy. The law says, "Thou shalt not swear falsely;" we submit to this law, and while in the civil or military service of the country, with an oath to support the Constitution of the United States resting upon our consciences, we would not, for any earthly consideration, engage in the formation or execution of a conspiracy to subvert that very Constitution and with it the Government to which it has given birth. Write us down, therefore, "submissionists."

Nor are we at all disturbed by the flippant taunt that, in thus submitting to the authority of our Government, we are necessarily cowards. We know whence this taunt comes, and we estimate it at its true value. We hold that there is a higher courage in the performance of duty than in the commission of crime. The tiger of the jungle and the cannibal of the South Sea Islands have that courage in which the revolutionists of the day make their especial boast; the angels of God and the spirits of just men made perfect have had, and have that courage which submits to the law. Lucifer was a non-submissionist, and the first secessionist of whom history has given us any account, and the chains which he wears fitly express the fate due to all who openly defy the laws of their Creator and of their country. He rebelled because the Almighty would not yield to him the throne of heaven. The principle of the Southern rebellion is the same. Indeed, in this submission to the laws, is found the chief distinction between good men and devils. A good man obeys the laws of truth, of honesty, of morality, and all those laws which have been enacted by competent authority for the government and protection of the country in which he lives; a devil obeys only his own ferocious and profligate passions.

The principle on which this rebellion proceeds, that laws have in themselves no sanctions, no binding force upon the conscience, and that every man, under the promptings of interest, or passion, or caprice, may at will, and honorably, too, strike at the government that shelters him, is one of utter demoralization, and should be trodden out as you would tread out a spark that has fallen on the roof of your dwelling. Its unchecked prevalence would resolve society into chaos, and leave you without the slightest guarantee for life, liberty, or property. It is time, that, in their majesty, the people of the United States should make known to the world that this Government, in its dignity and power, is something more than a moot court, and that the citizen who makes war upon it is a traitor, not only in theory but in fact, and should have meted out to him a traitor's doom. The country wants no bloody sacrifice, but it must and will have peace, cost what it may. J. Holt.

CCXCVII.

ADDRESS TO KENTUCKY VOLUNTEERS.

Soldiers, next to the worship of the Father of us all, the deepest and grandest of human emotions is the love of the land that gave us birth. It is an enlargement and exaltation of all the tenderest and strongest sympathies of kindred and of home. In all centuries and climes it has lived and has defied chains and dungeons and racks to crush it. It has strewed the earth with its monuments, and has shed undying lustre on a thousand fields on which it has battled. Through the night of ages, Thermopylæ glows like some mountain peak on which the morning sun has risen, because twenty-three hundred years ago, this hallowing passion touched its mural precipices and its crowning crags.

It is easy, however, to be patriotic in piping times of peace, and in the sunny hour of prosperity. It is national sorrow, it is war, with its attendant perils and horrors, that tests this passion, and winnows from the masses those who, with all their love of life, still love their country more. While your present position is a most vivid and impressive illustration of patriotism, it has a glory peculiar and altogether its own.

The mercenary armies which have swept victoriously over the world, and have gathered so many of the laurels that history has embalmed, were but machines drafted into the service of ambitious spirits whom they obeyed, and little understood or appreciated the problems their blood was poured out to solve. But while you have all the dauntless physical courage which they displayed, you add to it a thorough knowledge of the argument on which this mighty movement proceeds, and a moral heroism which, breaking away from the entanglements of kindred, and friends, and State policy enables you to follow your convictions of duty, even though they should lead you up to the cannon's mouth. It must, however, be added, that with elevation of position come corresponding responsibilities. Alike in the inaction of the camp, and amid the fatigues of the march, and the charge and shouts of battle, you will remember that you have in your keeping not only your own personal reputation, but the honor of your native State, and, what is infinitely more inspiring, the honor of that blood-bought and beneficent Republic whose children you are. Any irregularity on your part would sadden the land that loves you; any faltering in the presence of the foe would cover it with immeasurable humiliation.

Soldiers, when Napoleon was about to spur on his legions to combat on the sands of an African desert, pointing them to the Egyptian pyramids that loomed up against the far-off horizon, he exclaimed, "From yonder summits forty centuries look down upon you." The thought was sublime and electric; but you have even more than this. When you shall confront those infuriated hosts, whose battle-cry is, "Down with the government of the United States," let your answering shout be, "The Government as our fathers made it;" and when you strike, remember that not only do the good and the great of the past look down upon you from heights infinitely above those of Egyptian pyramids, but that uncounted generations yet to come are looking up to you, and claiming at your hands the unimpaired transmission to them of that priceless heritage which has been committed to our keeping. I say its unimpaired transmission—in all the amplitude of its outlines, in all the symmetry of its matchless proportions, in all the palpitating fulness of its blessings; not a miserably shrivelled and shattered thing, charred by the fires and torn by the tempests of revolution, and all over polluted and scarred by the bloody poniards of traitors. J. Holt.

CCXCVIII.

THE AMERICAN QUESTION IN ENGLAND.

Citizens of Carlyle, I have endeavored to present to your view a faithful picture of the religion and politics, the objects and the aims, of the rebel confederate States of America; of those States that at this moment, through their commissioned emissaries on this side the Atlantic, are seeking admission into the Commonwealth of Christian nations! One of these accredited representatives is, while I am speaking, upon our shores; and on the behalf of the object of these men some of our leading journals are daily writing laborious articles; for them our shipbuilders are constructing warlike vessels, not to meet an equal foe in fair fight, but to plunder and destroy defenseless merchantmen, engaged in the lawful and laudable trade of carrying the legitimate products of one country to the markets of another; for these men our capitalists are raising money, that, if possible, they may render successful a rebel slaveholders' revolt—a revolt which for wickedness and infamy has no parallel save in the impious rebellion of Lucifer and his compeers.

Yonder, across the wide waste of waters, four millions of helpless slaves—the victims of the cruelty and lust of Southern men-stealers—raise their fettered hands and imploringly inquire what part you will take in the conflict which involves their fate and that of their posterity; whether you will give aid and comfort to their oppressors, or whether you will send them words of sympathy and hope, and give encouragement and support to the friends of freedom in the North, who are nobly sacrificing property and life for their redemption. What answer will you return to this appeal? What think you is the duty of England in this life-or-death contest between the North and the South? Of England, whose heart was with the cause of the heroic black population of Hayti, when, under the leadership of the immortal Toussaint l'Ouverture, they were resisting unto blood, in the cause of liberty, the mercenary hordes of Napoleon? Of England who, with disinterested ardor, fought the battle of the Greeks against the Turks? Of England, who has so often raised her voice on behalf of bleeding, crusaded, denationalized Poland? Who has welcomed in her cities, and cherished in her homes, the illustrious patriot Louis Kossuth? Whose best wishes and earnest prayers have ever attended the efforts in the cause of freedom of Mazzini and Garibaldi?

In what do the struggles in which England has heretofore sympathized, differ from that which is now convulsing America? Is it not a contest between a vile slaveholding oligarchy on the one hand, and the upholders of free democratic institutions and the friends of emancipation on the other? The only difference, if difference there be, is this, that the conspirators against human rights in the South are fighting for objects immeasurably more base and more deeply stained with guilt than any which were ever sought by the crowned kings and despots of the Old World. The confederate banditti of the South are fighting for what their Vice-president avows is a new idea—a government based upon the perpetual enslavement of the laboring class. In a conflict between liberty and slavery between a free democratic government and the foulest despotism which the enemies of mankind ever conspired together to establish, where should England stand? On the side of two hundred and fifty thousand traitors and tyrants, or on the side of four millions of slaves? England with her past history and glorious traditions, England that extinguished the accursed slave trade, and abolished colonial slavery, whose cathedrals and council chamfers and market places are adorned with the statues of Howard and Wilberforce, and Clarkson, and Buxton, and Sturge?

It may be granted that, when the Government of the North first armed for the defence of the national life, it did not at once decree the universal abolition of slavery; and I have given, as I think, good and sufficient reasons why it did not and could not. The action of the President at the beginning was restricted to constitutional objects. Those objects were—the enforcement of the laws; the suppression of a local insurrection; the reintegration of the disputed territory; the protection of the Capitol and its archives from the spoliating hands of traitors. But the seat of government saved; the President seated firmly in the chair; the Congress duly assembled; and the machinery of the Constitution set to work; and then commenced, and were carried out, a series of measures such as were never before accomplished in the same space of time by any government in the world. First we saw the National District purged from the pollution and shame of slavery; then, the prohibition of slavery forever in the vast Territories of the Northwest; then, the enforcement of the laws against the slave trade, and the execution of Gordon the slave trader; then, an offer of compensation to such slave States as would adopt measures of emancipation; then, the recognition of the independence of the black republics of Hayti and Liberia; and finally, a proclamation of freedom to all the slaves within the rebel States.

It was said of Napoleon that he would go down to posterity with the code which bears his name, in his hand. It may be said of Abraham Lincoln, that he will descend to future time, holding in his hand the Great Charter of the Negro's rights his Emancipation Proclamation of January, 1863. With such a President, at the head of such a people, engaged in such a cause, need I answer the questions I have so often put to you, on which side should England be found in the great American struggle? G. Thompson.

CCXCIX.

PATRIOTISM.

Right and wrong, justice and crime, exist independently of our country. A public wrong is not a private right for any citizen. The citizen is a man bound to know and do the right, and the nation is but an aggregation of citizens. If a man should shout, in the delirium of his dinner, "My country, by whatever means extended and bounded: my country, right or wrong;" he merely repeats the words of the thief who steals in the streets or of the trader who swears falsely at the Custom-House, both of them chuckling "My fortune, however acquired." Thus, gentlemen, we see that a man's country is not a certain area of land—of mountains, rivers, and woods—but it is principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.

In poetic minds and in popular enthusiasm this feeling becomes closely associated with the soil and symbols of the country. But the secret sanctification of the soil and the symbol is the idea which they represent, and this idea the patriot worships through the name and the symbol, as a lover kisses with rapture the glove of his mistress and wears a lock of her hair upon his heart.

So, with passionate heroism, of which tradition is never weary of tenderly telling, Arnold Von Winkelreid gathers into his bosom the sheaf of foreign spears, that his death may give life to his country. So Nathan Hale, disdaining no service that his country demands, perishes untimely, with no other friend than God and the satisfied sense of duty. So George Washington, at once comprehending the scope of the destiny to which his country was devoted, with one hand put aside the crown, and with the other sets his slaves free. So, through all history from the beginning, a noble army of martyrs has fought fiercely and fallen bravely for that unseen mistress, their country. So, through all history to the end, as long as men believe in God, that army must still march and fight and fall—recruited only from the flower of mankind—cheered only by their own hope of humanity, strong only in their confidence in their cause. G. W. Curtis.

CCC.

POLITICAL MORALITY.

Have we no interest that the controlling force in this country shall be a moral force?—that it shall conspire with the great idea of Liberty, and not degrade and destroy it? The theory of our institutions is our pride. But it is a pitiful truth that our public life has become synonymous with knavery. If a politician is introduced, you feel of your pockets. It is shameful that it is universally conceded that the best men, the men of intelligence and probity, generally avoid politics, and that the word itself has come to mean something not to be touched without defilement. Consequently, what good men will not touch, bad men will. It is understood that bribery carries the election; and the Presidency is the result of an adroit process of financial engineering. I have myself been shown a handful of bank-notes publicly displayed in the ante-room of a Legislature, and sagaciously told: "That is the logic for legislators." Men think they cannot afford to go to Congress, and send other men to do their duties to the State—forgetting that we can have nothing without paying for it, and that if we hope to enjoy the best government in the world we must give time and labor, each one of us, and not suppose that the country will govern itself nor bad men govern it well.

Remember that the greatness of our country is not in its achievement, but in its promise—a promise which cannot be fulfilled without that sovereign moral sense—without a sensitive national conscience. If it were a question of the mere daily pleasure of living, the gratification of taste, opportunity of access to the great intellectual and æsthetic results of human genius, and whatever embellishes human life, no man could hesitate for a moment between the fulness of foreign lands in these respects, and the conspicuous poverty of our own. What have we done? We have subdued and settled a vast domain. We have made every inland river turn a mill, and wherever, on the dim rim of the globe, there is a harbor, we have lighted it with an American sail. We have bound the Atlantic to the Mississippi, so that we drift from the sea to the prairie upon a cloud of vapor; and we are stretching one hand across the continent to fulfil the hope of Columbus in a shorter way to Cathay, and with the other we are grasping under the sea to clasp there the hand of the old continent, that so the throbbing of the ocean may not toss us further apart, but be as the beating of one common pulse of the world.

Yet these are the results common to all national enterprise, and different with us only in degree, not in kind. These are but the tools with which to shape a destiny. Commercial prosperity is only a curse, if it be not subservient to moral and intellectual progress; and our prosperity will conquer us, if we do not conquer our prosperity. G. W. Curtis.

CCCI.

IDEAS THE LIFE OF A PEOPLE.

The leaders of our Revolution were men of whom the simple truth is the ugliest praise. Of every condition in life, they were singularly sagacious, sober and thoughtful. Lord Chatham spoke only the truth when he said to Franklin, of the men who composed the first colonial Congress: "The Congress is the most honorable assembly of statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times." Given to grave reflection, they were neither dreamers nor missionaries, and they were much too earnest to be rhetoricians. It is a curious fact, that they were generally men of so calm a temper that they lived to extreme age. With the exception of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, they were most of them profound scholars, and studied the history of mankind that they might know men. They were so familiar with the lives and thoughts of the wisest and best minds of the past that a classic aroma hangs about their writings and their speech; and they were profoundly convinced of what statesmen always know, and the adroitest mere politicians never perceive—that ideas are the life of a people—that the conscience, not the pocket, is the real citadel of a nation, and that when you have debauched and demoralized that conscience by teaching that there are no natural rights, and that therefore there is no moral right or wrong in political action, you have poisoned the wells and rotted the crops in the ground. The three greatest living statesmen of England knew this also—Edmund Burke knew it, and Charles James Fox, and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. But they did not speak for the King or parliament, or the English nation. Lord Gower spoke for them when he said in Parliament: "Let the Americans talk about their natural and divine rights! their rights as men and citizens! their rights from God and nature! I am for enforcing these measures!" My lord was contemptuous, and the King hired the Hessians, but the truth remained true. The Fathers saw the scarlet soldiers swarming over the sea, but more steadily they saw that national progress had been secure only in the degree that the political system had conformed to natural Justice. They knew the coming wreck of property and trade, but they knew more surely that Rome was never so rich as when she was dying, and, on the other hand, the Netherlands, never so powerful as when they were poorest. Farther away, they read the names of Assyria, Greece, Egypt. They had art, opulence, splendor. Corn enough grew in the valley of the Nile. The Syrian sword was as sharp as any. They were merchant princes, and the clouds in the sky were rivalled by their sails upon the sea. They were soldiers, and their frown frightened the world. "Soul, take thine ease." those Empires said, languid with excess of luxury and life. Yes: but you remember the King who had built his grandest palace, and was to occupy it upon the morrow, but when the morrow came the palace was a pile of ruins. "Woe is me!" cried the King, "who is guilty of this crime?" "There is no crime," replied the sage at his side; "but the mortar was made of sand and water only, and the builders forgot to put in the lime." So fell the old empires, because the governors forgot to put justice into their governments. G. W. Curtis.

CCCII.

THE SAME CONCLUDED.

These things our fathers saw and pondered. I do not mean that when the Writs of Assistance were issued, or the Stamp Act proposed, or Port Bill passed, they did not oppose them upon technical and legal grounds. Undoubtedly they did. But their character, and habits, and studies, were such that, as the tyranny encroached, they rose naturally into the sphere of fundamental truths, as into a purer and native air. In great crises, men always revert to first principles, as in sailing out of sight of land the mariner consults celestial laws. So the Fathers began at the beginning, with God and human nature, and derived their government from truths which they disdained to prove, asserting them to be self-evident. Thus the Revolution was not the struggle of a class only, but of a people. It was not merely the rebellion of subjects whose pockets were threatened, it was the protest of men whose instincts had been outraged. As Mr. Webster was fond of saying, it was fought on a preamble. A two-penny tax on tea or paper was not the cause, it was only the occasion, of the Revolution. The spirit which fought the desperate and disastrous battle on Long Island yonder was not a spirit which could be quieted by the promise of sugar gratis. The chance of success was slight—the penalty of failure was sure. But they believed in God, they kissed wife and child, left them in His hand, and kept their powder dry. Then to Valley Forge, the valley of the shadow of death—with feet bleeding upon the sharp ground—with hunger, thirst, and cold dogging their steps—with ghastly death waiting for them in the snow, they bore that faith in ideas which brought their fathers over a pitiless sea to a pitiless shore.

Ideas were their food; ideas were their coats and camp-fires. They knew that their ranks were thin and raw, and the enemy trained and many. But they knew, also, that the only difficulty with the proverb that God fights upon the side of the strongest battalions is that it is not true. If you load muskets with bullets only, the result is simply a question of numbers. But one gun loaded with an idea is more fatal than the muskets of a whole regiment. A bullet kills a tyrant, but an idea kills tyranny, What chance have a thousand men fighting for a sixpence a day against a hundred fighting for life and liberty, for home and native land? In such hands, the weapons themselves feel and think. And so the family firelocks and rusty swords, the horse-pistol and old scythes of our fathers thought terribly at Lexington and Monmouth, at Saratoga and Eutaw Springs. The old Continental muskets thought out the whole Revolution. The English and Hessian arms were better and brighter than ours; but they were charged only with saltpetre. Our guns were loaded and rammed home with ideas. G. W. Curtis.

CCCIII.

EMANCIPATION THE WAR POLICY OF THE PRESIDENT.

At length the skies are cleared, and the oracles have spoken. The ultimate
achievement is already determined in the irreversible purpose of the loyal
States; and that purpose is, a restored republic from the Gulf to the
Lakes,—and a Republic of Freemen.

When the war first broke out, the free States became at once united for the safety of the capital and for vengeance upon those who had dishonored the common flag. Time passed on; the capital was supposed to be secure; changing fortune visited our arms; the people of the North became divided; some insisted upon an instant order of emancipation; others insisted upon no emancipation at all. One there was, as it has seemed to me, who abided the time of Providence and possessed his soul in patience; he was the President. He waited, counselled, struggled for a restored Union, before which and in comparison with which all other things should be subordinated. Within seventeen months after the first gun—so short are the historic stages in our time—he issued his proclamation of freedom with three months of notice. It saved the heart of the North and of a portion of Europe.

In the mean time the loyal arms had rescued several States from the clutch of revolt, and the inquiry everywhere arose, when, and how, and in what manner, the policy of emancipation should be applied. Then again it was, in the fulness of time, that the second Presidential proclamation came forth for the restoration of the States upon the basis of the equality of all men before God. Upon that he will stand, and upon that we shall stand, with no faltering or retracing step, until from the waters of the Gulf to the woods of the North, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific sea, this broad beat of empire shall possess an invincible people with no clanking manacle to fetter the creatures of God.

Accepting this, then, as the fixed policy of the States which are to subjugate the rebellion, we may felicitate ourselves upon the part we are permitted to bear in human events—that a measure, which in other countries and in more peaceful ages would have required a quarter or a half a century for its accomplishment, has become the announced edict of the loyal people of the United States, within the space of thirty-four months. The abolishment of the slave trade by the British Government, initiated by Wilberforce, supported by Pitt and Fox, and Burke and Granville, was accomplished only after seventeen years of parliamentary agitation.

When Mr. Fox, in 1806 submitted this, which proved to be the last motion he ever made in Parliament, and lived to witness its success, nobly did he declare: "That if, during the forty years he had sat in Parliament, he had been so fortunate as to accomplish that object, and that only, he should think he had done enough." If Mr. Fox might take to his heart that gratulation over the first sanction extorted from the Legislature of Great Britain for the abolition of the slave trade, may I not reclaim it with redoubled force for the American Magistrate under whose decree four millions of men will burst the bondage of ages, and mount enriched and ennobled to the enfranchisements of immortality.

The literature of England is rich with the eloquence of eulogium upon the statesman whose star was in the ascendant when freedom became the policy of the Empire; but I choose to appropriate it to him upon this side of the ocean, who has achieved the highest honor of mortal lot; who has won a triumph which leaves every other triumph of humanity and justice out of sight behind it, and for which, to the end of time, mankind will revere his name and bless his memory. A. H. Bullock.

CCCIV.

THE DUTY OF THE HOUR.

As to duty, that is clear from what I have already told you. We owe allegiance to the Government of the Union, and its history to the breaking out of the present foul rebellion, the memory of the men who gave it to us, the untold blessings it has conferred upon us, the support it has given to constitutional liberty everywhere, the gratitude we owe to Washington, whom Providence, it has been said, left childless, that his country might call him father, will all unite in making that allegiance a pleasure as well as a duty. To be false to such a Government, to palter even with the treason that seeks its downfall, to associate with the wicked men or the madmen who are in arms against it, would be as vile a dishonor and as base a crime as fallen man ever perpetrated.

Peace, in such a crisis—the cry of our opponents—how is it to be attained? How, upon their plan, but by a gross violation of our clearest obligations—or total disregard of an allegiance to which we are bound, not only by the Constitution, but by the pledge our ancestors gave for us? The force the Government is raising is not, as is falsely alleged by the conspirators, to subjugate States or citizens. It is but to vindicate the Constitution and the laws, and maintain the existence of the government. It is but to suppress the "insurrection," force the citizen to return to his duty, and restore him to the unequalled benefits of the Union. And when this is done, as done it will be if there is justice in Heaven, the authors of the present calamity will be consigned to the execrations of the civilized world, and punished, perhaps, if that is possible, more severely by the people whom, by arts and subterfuges, they have so deluded and deceived. R. Johnson.

CCCV.

THE FIRST GUN FIRED AT SUMTER.

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was literally to launch the first missile, figuratively, to "fire the Southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was given into the trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incendiary whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus. The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote every loyal American full in the face. As when the foul witch used to torture her miniature image, the person it represented suffered all that she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his mother's Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and hope for in the future,—the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory. O. W. Holmes.

CCCVI.

OUR COUNTRY'S CALL.

We shall have success if we truly will success,—not other wise. It may be long in coming,—Heaven only knows through what trials and humblings we may have to pass before the full strength of the nation is duly arrayed and led to victory, We must be patient, as our fathers were patient; even in our worst calamities we must remember that defeat itself may be a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it costs ourselves. But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who vindicated the insulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her assailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have among you the scared and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood for your temporal salvation. They bore your Nation's emblems bravely through the fire and smoke of the battlefield; nay, their own bodies are starred with bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as belonging to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the soil which they defended, In every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as children amidst the clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds, with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them. By those wounds of living heroes, by those graces of fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of violated sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the sake of men everywhere and of our common humanity, for the glory of God and the advancement of His kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you to stand by her through good report and through evil report, in triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western civilization, Queen of the broad continent, arbitress in the councils of earth's emancipated peoples; until the flag that fell from the wall of Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme, over all her ancient inheritance, every fortress, every capital, every ship, and this warring land is once more a united nation. O. W. Holmes.

CCCVII.

MANHOOD AND COUNTRY BEFORE WEALTH AND LUXURY.

Let us say it plainly it will not hurt our people to be taught that there are other things to be cared for besides money making and money spending; that the time has come when manhood must assert itself by brave deeds and noble thoughts; when womanhood must assume its most sacred office, "to warn, to comfort," and, if need be, "to command" those whose services their country calls for. This Northern section of the land has become a great variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities are the long-extended counter. We have grown rich for what? To put gilt bands on coachmen's hats? To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest silks which the toiling artisans of France can send us? To look through plate-glass windows, and pity the brown soldiers,—or sneer at the black ones? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two below its old minimum? to color meerschaums? to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in diamonds? to dredge our maiden's hair with gold-dust? to float through life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues to the beaches, and back again from the beaches to the avenues? Was it for this that the broad domain of the Western hemisphere was kept so long unvisited by civilization?—for this, that Time, the father of empires, unbound the virgin zone of this youngest of his daughters, and gave her, beautiful in the long veil of her forests, to the rude embrace of the adventurous Colonists?

All this is what we see around us, now,—now, while we are actually fighting this great battle, and supporting this great load of indebtedness. Wait till the diamonds go back to the Jews of Amsterdam; till the plate-glass window bears the fatal announcement, For Sale, or to Let; till the voice of our Miriam is obeyed as she sings:—

"Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms!"

till the gold-dust is combed from golden locks, and hoarded to buy bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the platform of the horse-car; till the music-grinders cease because none will pay them; till there are no peaches in the windows at twenty-four dollars a dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples selling at the street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and it is a felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;—but till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is carrying us farther and farther, every hour, beyond the influence of the great failing which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin which was our fatal inheritance! O. W. Holmes.

CCCVIII.

OUR COUNTRY'S GREATEST GLORY.

The true glory of a nation is in an intelligent, honest, industrious Christian people. The civilization of a people depends on their individual character; and a constitution which is not the outgrowth of this character is not worth the parchment on which it is written. You look in vain in the past for a single instance where the people have preserved their liberties after their individual character was lost. It is not in the magnificence of its palaces, not in the beautiful creations of art lavished on its public edifices, not in costly libraries and galleries of pictures, not in the number or wealth of its cities, that we find pledges of a nation's glory. The ruler may gather around him the treasures of the world, amid a brutalized people; the senate chamber may retain its faultless proportions long after the voice of patriotism is hushed within its wails; the monumental marble may commemorate a glory which has forever departed. Art and letters may bring no lesson to a people whose heart is dead.

The true glory of a nation is in the living temple of a loyal, industrious, and upright people. The busy click of machinery, the merry ring of the anvil, the lowing of peaceful herds, and the song of the harvest-home, are sweeter music than pæans of departed glory, or songs of triumph in war. The vine-clad cottage of the hillside, the cabin of the woodsman, and the rural home of the farmer are the true citadels of any country. There is a dignity in honest toil which belongs not to the display of wealth or the luxury of fashion. The man who drives the plough, or swings his axe in the forest, or with cunning fingers plies the tools of his craft, is as truly the servant of his country, as the statesman in the senate or the soldier in battle. The safety of a nation depends not alone on the wisdom of its statesmen or the bravery of its generals. The tongue of eloquence never saved a nation tottering to its fall; the sword of a warrior never stayed its destruction. There is a surer defence in every Christian home. I say Christian home, for I allow of no glory to manhood which comes not from the cross. I know of no rights wrung from tyranny, no truth rescued from darkness and bigotry, which has not awaited on a Christian civilization.

Would you see the image of true glory, I would show you villages where the crown and glory of the people was in Christian schools, where the voice of prayer goes heaven-ward, where the people have that most priceless gift—faith in God. With this as the basis, and leavened as it will be with brotherly love, there will be no danger in grappling with any evils which exist in our midst; we shall feel that we may work and bide our time, and die knowing that God will bring victory. Bishop Whipple.

CCCIX.

OUR NATIONAL ANNIVERSARY.

We celebrate to-day no idle tradition—the deeds of no fabulous race; for we tread in the scarcely obliterated footsteps of an earnest and valiant generation of men, who dared to stake life, and fortune, and sacred honor, upon a declaration of rights, whose promulgation shook tyrants on their thrones, gave hope to fainting freedom, and reformed the political ethics of the world.

The greatest heroes of former days have sought renown in schemes of conquest, based on the love of dominion or the thirst for war; and such had been the worship of power in the minds of men, that adulation had ever followed in the wake of victory. How daring then the trial of an issue between a handful of oppressed and outlawed colonists, basing their cause, under God, upon an appeal to the justice of mankind and their own few valiant arms. And how immeasurably great was he, the fearless commander, who, after the fortunes and triumphs of battle were over, scorned the thought of a regal throne for a home in the hearts of his countryman. Amidst the rejoicings of this day, let us mingle something of gratitude with our joy—something of reverence with our gratitude—and something of duty with our reverence.

Let us cultivate personal independence in the spirit of loyalty to the State. and may God grant that we may always be able to maintain the sovereignty of the State in the spirit of integrity to the Union. Thus shall still be shed imperishable honors upon the American name thus perpetuated, through all coming time, the heritage which has been bequeathed to us by our fathers. Whatever shall be the fate of other governments, ours thus sustained, shall stand forever. As has been elsewhere said, nation after nation may rise and fall, kingdoms and empires crumble into ruin, but our own native land, gathering energy and strength from the lapse of time, shall go on and still go on its destined way to greatness and renown. And when thrones shall crumble into dust, when sceptres and diadems shall have been forgotten, till Heaven's last thunder shall shake the world below, the flag of the republic shall still wave on, and its Stars, its Stripes, and its Eagle, shall still float in pride, and strength, and glory,

"Whilst the earth bears, a plant,
Or the sea rolls a wave."

A. H. Rice.

CCCX.

SOUTHERN USURPATIONS AND NORTHERN CONCESSIONS.

Why did these Southerners make war upon the country, converting their own domain into a receptacle of stolen goods, and the hiding-place of mercenaries, murderers, and madmen, and ours into one vast recruiting tent? Tell me, you cowardly and traitorous Northmen, who talk about peace before the last armed foe has expired on the soil his attainted blood defiles, or of compromise, while yet the walls of our hospitals resound with the groans of the mangled, and are damp with the death-dew of the expiring? Tell me, you traitors, Davis, Pickens, Stephens, and Floyd? what do you say provoked you to the point where forbearance ceased to be a virtue? What had we of the North usurped that belonged to you? I inquire not now of what some among us may have said. I challenge any act of usurpation by the non-slaveholding States against your rights as members of the confederacy. Facts are incontrovertible. What had we done? What provision of the Federal Constitution had we violated? For once lay aside your declamation and abuse, and soberly and truthfully state your grievances.

You know, and we know, and the world knows, that we made no encroachment upon your reserved rights as a party to the compact between your fathers and ours. You know, also, that we have been so terrified at your reiterated threats against the family peace and general welfare, that, in our anxiety to preserve national concord, we have sacrificed personal honor and State pride. You called us "mudsills" and "greasy mechanics," until labor almost began to be ashamed of its God-given dignity. You beat our representatives in the national council chambers, because they expressed the views of those whom they served. You denied us freedom of speech in all your borders. This and much else, before the last burden, which broke our uncomplaining patience into active, and, as you are destined to learn, terrible resistance and deserved retribution. But what had we done? How sinned against you? In 1820 you wanted a geographical limit assigned to your peculiar institution and we passed the law known as the Missouri Compromise. You got sick of this when it appeared that slavery would not be a gainer thereby, as it was supposed, and begged a repeal of the act. It was repealed. In 1850, you clamored for further legislation in favor of your property in human beings, and the fugitive slave law was placed on the nation's statute book. You continually cried, "Give, give!" and we gave. But nothing would satisfy your rapacity; you had resolved to quarrel with us. Do you remind me that we did not return your escaped slaves? This is only half the truth. Whenever you came after your chattel, with legal proofs of ownership, we caught and caged him, and sent him back to you, often at our own expense. If you did not think it worth your while to hunt up your runaway, it was none of our concern. Sometimes a man among us, more of a humanitarian than a jurisconsult, and better versed in the law of nature than the law of the land, illegally, but conscientiously, aided your bondman to escape. John Brown did so, and you hanged him for it! But no State, as such, and no authority within a State, ever hesitated or refused to fulfil its constitutional obligations to you on this head. But you did not mean to be satisfied. You meant to rebel. You have rebelled, and you must abide the consequences. R. Busteed.

CCCXI.

MONUMENTAL HONORS TO PUBLIC BENEFACTORS.

What parent, as he conducts his son to Mount Auburn or to Bunker Hill, will not, as he pauses before their monumental statues, seek to heighten his reverence for virtue, for patriotism, for science, for learning, for devotion to the public good, as he bids him contemplate the form of that grave and venerable Winthrop, who left his pleasant home in England to come and found a new republic in this untrodden wilderness; of that ardent and intrepid Otis, who first struck out the spark of American independence; of that noble Adams, its most eloquent champion on the floor of Congress; of that martyr Warren, who laid down his life in its defense; of that self-taught Bowditch, who, without a guide, threaded the starry mazes of the heavens; of that Story, honored at home and abroad as one of the brightest luminaries of the law, and, by a felicity of which I believe there is no other example, admirably portrayed in marble by his son? What citizen of Boston, as he accompanies the stranger around our streets, guiding him through our busy thoroughfares, to our wharves, crowded with vessels which range every sea and gather the produce of every climate, up to the dome of this capitol, which commands as lovely a landscape as can delight the eye or gladden the heart, will not, as he calls his attention at last to the statues of Franklin and Webster, exclaim:—"Boston takes pride in her natural position, she rejoices in her beautiful environs, she is grateful for her material prosperity; but richer than the merchandise stored in palatial warehouses, greener than the slopes of sea-girt islets, lovelier than this encircling panorama of land and sea, of field and hamlet, of lake and stream, of garden and grove, is the memory of her sons, native and adopted; the character, services and fame of those who have benefited and adorned their day and generation. Our children, and the schools at which they are trained, our citizens, and the services they have rendered:—these are our monuments, these are our jewels, these our abiding treasures." E. Everett.

CCCXII.

THE CRIME OF THE REBELLION.

I call the war which the Confederates are waging against the Union a "Rebellion," because it is one, and in grave matters it is best to call things by their right names. I speak of it as a crime, because the Constitution of the United States so regards it, and puts "rebellion" on a par with "invasion." The Constitution and law not only of England, but of every civilized country regard them in the same light; or rather they consider the rebel in arms as far worse than the alien enemy. To levy war against the United States is the constitutional definition of treason, and that crime is, by every civilized government: regarded as the highest which citizen or subject can commit. Not content with the sanctions of human justice, of all the crimes against the law of the land it is singled out for the denunciations of religion. The litanies of every church in Christendom, as far as I am aware, from the metropolitan cathedrals of Europe to the humblest missionary chapel in the islands of the sea, concur with the Church of England in imploring the Sovereign of the universe, by the most awful adjurations which the heart of man can conceive or his tongue utter, to deliver us from "sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion." And reason good,—for while a rebellion against tyranny; a rebellion designed, after prostrating arbitrary power, to establish free government on the basis of justice and truth, is an enterprise on which good men and angels may look with complacency; an unprovoked rebellion of ambitious men against a beneficent government, for the purpose—the avowed purpose-of establishing, extending, and perpetuating any form of injustice and wrong, is an imitation on earth of that first foul revolt of "the Infernal serpent," against which the Supreme Majesty of Heaven sent forth the armed myriads of his angels, and clothed the right arm of his Son with the three-bolted thunders of Omnipotence.

Lord Bacon, "in the true marshalling of the sovereign degrees of honor," assigns the first place to "the Conditores Imperiorum, founders of States and Commonwealths "; and truly to build up from the discordant elements of our nature; the passions, the interests, and the opinions of the individual man; the rivalries of family, clan, and tribe; the influences of climate and geographical position; the accidents of peace and war accumulated for ages, to build up, from these oftentimes warring elements, a well-compacted, prosperous and powerful State, if it were to be accomplished by one effort, or in one generation, would require a more than mortal skill. To contribute in some notable degree to this the greatest work of man, by wise and patriotic counsel in peace, and loyal heroism in war, is as high as human merit can well rise, and far more than to any of those to whom Bacon assigns this highest place of honor, whose names can hardly be repeated without a wondering smile,—Romulus; Cyrus, Cæsar, Ottoman, Israel,—is it due to our Washington, as the founder of the American Union. But if to achieve or help to achieve this greatest work of man's wisdom and virtue gives title to a place among the chief benefactors, rightful heirs of the benedictions, of mankind, by equal reason shall the bold bad men who seek to undo the noble work,—Eversores Imperiorum, destroyers of States,—who for base and selfish ends rebel against beneficent governments, seek to overturn wise constitutions, to lay powerful republican unions at the foot of foreign thrones, bring on civil and foreign war, anarchy at home, dictation abroad, desolation, ruin,—by equal reason, I say, yes a thousand fold stronger, shall they inherit the execrations of ages. E. Everett.

CCCXIII.

A TRIBUTE TO OUR HONORED DEAD.

How bright are the honors which await those who with sacred fortitude and patriotic patience have endured all things that they might save their native land from division and from the power of corruption. The honored dead! They that die for a good cause are redeemed from death. Their names are gathered and garnered. Their memory is precious. Each place grows proud for them who were born there. There is to be, ere long, in every village, and in every neighborhood, a glowing pride in its martyred heroes. Tablets shall preserve their names. Pious love shall renew their inscriptions as time and the unfeeling elements efface them. And the national festivals shall give multitudes of precious names to the orator's lips. Children shall grow up under more sacred inspirations, whose elder brothers dying nobly for their country, left a name that honored and inspired all who bore it. Orphan children shall find thousands of fathers and mothers to love and help those whom dying heroes left as a legacy to the gratitude of the public.

Oh, tell me not that they are dead—that generous hosts that airy army of invisible heroes. They hover as a cloud of witnesses above this nation. Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society, and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?

Ye that mourn, let gladness mingle with your tears. It was your son: but now he is the nation's. He made your household bright: now his example inspires a thousand households. Dear to his brothers and sister's, he is now brother to every generous youth in the land. Before, he was narrowed, appropriated, shut up to you. Now he is augmented, set free, and given to all. Before he was yours: he is ours. He has died from the family that he might live to the nation. Not one name shall be forgot ten or neglected: and it shall by-and-by be confessed of our modern heroes, as it is of an ancient hero, that he did more for his country by his death than by his whole life.

Neither are they less honored who shall bear through life the marks of wounds and sufferings. Neither epaulette nor badge is so honorable as wounds received in a good cause. Many a man shall envy him who henceforth limps. So strange is the transforming power of patriotic ardor, that men shall almost covet disfigurement. Crowds will give way to hobbling cripples, and uncover in the presence of feebleness and helplessness. And buoyant children shall pause in their noisy games, and with loving rererence honor them whose hands can work no more, and whose feet are no longer able to march except upon that journey which brings good men to honor and immortality. Oh, mother of lost children! set not in darkness nor sorrow whom a nation honors. Oh, mourners of the early dead, they shall live again, and live forever. Your sorrows are our gladness. The nation lives because you gave it men that love it better than their own lives. And when a few more days shall have cleared the perils from around the nation's brow, and she shall sit in unsullied garments of liberty, with justice upon her forehead, love in her eyes, and truth upon her lips, she shall not forget those whose blood gave vital currents to her heart, and whose life, given to her, shall live with her life till time shall be no more.

Every mountain and hill shall have its treasured name, every river shall keep some solemn title, every valley and every lake shall cherish its honored register; and till the mountains are worn out, and the rivers forget to flow, till the clouds are weary of replenishing springs, and the springs forget to gush, and the rills to sing, shall their names be kept fresh with reverent honors which are inscribed upon the book of National Remembrance. H. W. Beecher.

CCCXIV.

ON THE CONFISCATION BILL.

Few of those engaged in this rebellion will ever be made to suffer in their persons; and if they are to be left in the full possession and enjoyment of their cotton, their lands, and their negroes, the innocent will have been made to suffer while the guilty will go unpunished. Shall the fathers of the gallant sons whose mangled bodies have been borne back to Illinois by hundreds, from the bloody fields of Belmont, of Donelson, and Pea Ridge, be ground down by onerous taxes, which shall descend upon their children to the third and fourth generations, to defray the expenses of defending the Government against traitors, and we forbear to touch even the property of the authors of these calamities, whose persons are beyond our reach? Suppose ye that the loyal people of this country will submit to such injustice?

I believe I represent as loyal, as patriotic and as brave a constituency as any other Senator. I claim nothing more. While I am proud of the part which the soldiers of my own State took in defeating the enemy in the West, I do not claim for them any superiority over the other soldiers of the Republic. The brave men who besieged Donelson, and who, after fighting through the day for three consecutive days, lay each night on the ground without shelter, exposed to the rain and sleet, were chiefly Illinoisans. It was there that rebellion received the heavy blow which has staggered it ever since. Forty dead bodies were borne from that bloody field to one small town in my State, and buried in a common grave. The Union forces at Pea Ridge were also largely made up of soldiers from Illinois. Suppose ye that I can go back to Illinois, among the relatives of those who have been cruelly destroyed, and propose to levy taxes upon them in order to conciliate and compensate the murderers, for that is really what exempting rebel property from confiscation amounts to? Sir, I know not if they would submit to such injustice; and yet there are those who not only talk of an amnesty to the men who have brought these troubles upon the country, but oppose providing the mild punishment of confiscation of property for those who shall continue hereafter to war upon the Government, and whose persons are beyond our reach. Do gentlemen regard it as conciliatory to oblige us to lay taxes upon those whose habitations have been consumed, to reward those who have burned them? upon those whose whole property has been stolen, to reward the thieves? upon those whose relatives have been slain, to compensate the murderers? In my judgment, justice, humanity, and mercy herself all demand that we at once provide that the supporters of this cruel and wicked rebellion should henceforth be made to feel its burdens. When the rebels, whose hands are dripping with the blood of loyal citizens, shall have grounded their arms, it will be time enough to talk of clemency; but to have our sympathies excited in their behalf now, when fighting to overthrow the Government, is cruelty to the loyal men who have rallied to its support. L. Trumbull.

CCCXV.

THE CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE.

Sir, what are the remedies that are proposed for the present condition of things, and what have they been from the beginning? They have been propositions of compromise; and Senators have spoken of peace, and of the horrors of civil war; and gentlemen who have contended for the right of the people of the Territories to regulate their own affairs, and who have been horrified at the idea of a geographical line dividing free States from slave States, free territory from slave territory,—and we have proclaimed that the great principle upon which the Revolution was fought was that of the right of the people to govern themselves, and that it was a monstrous doctrine for Congress to interfere in any way with its own Territories—these gentlemen come forward here with propositions to divide the country on a geographical line; and not only that, but to establish slavery south of the line; and they call this the Missouri Compromise! The proposition known as the Crittenden Compromise is no more like the Missouri Compromise than is the government of Turkey like that of the United States. The Missouri Compromise was a law declaring that in all the territory which we had acquired from Louisiana, north of a certain line of latitude, slavery or involuntary servitude should never exist. But it said nothing about the establishment of slavery south of that line. It was a compromise made in order to admit Missouri into the Union as a slave State, in 1820. That was the consideration for the exclusion of slavery from all the country north of 36° 30'. Now, sir, I have no objection to the restoration of the Missouri Compromise as it stood in 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Bill repealed it.

The proposition known as the Crittenden Compromise declares not only that "in the territory south of the said line of latitude, slavery of the African race is thereby recognized as existing, and shall not be interfered with by Congress;" but it provides further, that, in the territory we shall hereafter acquire south of that line, slavery shall be recognized, and not interfered with by Congress; but "shall be protected as property by all the departments of the territorial government during its continuance;" so that, if we make acquisitions on the south of territories now free, and where by the laws of the land the footsteps of slavery have never been, the moment we acquire jurisdiction over them, the moment the stars and stripes of the Republic float over those free territories, they carry with them African slavery, established beyond the power of Congress and beyond the power of any territorial legislature or of the people, to keep it out: and we are told that this is the Missouri Compromise!

Now, sir, why cannot we have peace, I ask, upon the compromise measures of 1850? Why disturb them? They were enacted by great men. They gave peace to the country. Why is it necessary now to overturn them? Restore the old Missouri Compromise as it stood; let us go back to the settlement made in 1850, and there let us stand. What more would Senators have? The South were satisfied with that settlement. Have we disturbed it? Are we proposing to disturb it? Not at all. You yourselves disturbed it, and brought these difficulties upon the country.

I have always insisted that the people of the Northern States were in no manner responsible for slavery in the Southern states; and why? Because they had no power in regard to it. Each State has a right to manage its own domestic affairs. I will not interfere with it where I have no authority by the Constitution to interfere; but I will never consent, the people of my State will never consent, the people of the great Northwest, numbering more in white population than all your Southern States together, never will consent by their act to establish African slavery anywhere. No, sir; I will never agree to put into the Constitution of the country a clause establishing or making perpetual slavery anywhere. No, sir; no human being shall ever be made a slave by my vote. Not one single foot of God's soil shall ever be dedicated to African slavery by my act—never! Never! L. Trumbull.

CCCXVI.

REPLY TO SENATOR BRECKINRIDGE.

The Senator from Kentucky stands up here in opposition to what he sees is the overwhelming sentiment of the Senate, and utters reproof, malediction and prediction combined. I would ask him, sir, what would you havre us to do now—a rebel army within twenty mites of us, advancing or threatening to advance to destroy your Government? Will the Senator yield to rebellion? Will he shrink from armed insurrection? Will his State justify it? Will its better public opinion allow it? Shall we send a flag of truce? What would he have? Or would he conduct this war so feebly that the whole world would smile at us in derision? What would he have? These speeches of his, sown broadcast over the land—what clear, distinct meaning have they? Are they not intended for disorganization in our very midst? Are they not intended to dull our weapons? Are they not intended to destroy our zeal? Are they not intended to animate our enemies? Sir, are they not words of brilliant, polished treason, even in the very Capitol of the Confederacy?

Be with the enemy or with us.

I come, then, to emancipation. And, first, I ask my countrymen to proclaim emancipation to the slaves as a matter of necessity to ourselves; for unless it be by accident, we are not to come out of this contest as one nation, except by emancipation. Confiscation of the property of the rebels may be necessary and just; but it is not enough. It will not save us in "this rugged and awful crisis." It is inadequate to meet the exigency in which the country is placed. We must have emancipation. The political salvation of the country demands it; and it is inevitable. The time is approaching when emancipation must take place, and we have now, I think, only a choice of ways. Emancipation may be achieved by the slaves themselves; it may be effected by the Government of the United States; it may come through the desperation of the slaveholding rebels themselves. But come it must. I say, then, let us, at the head of our armies, on the soil of South Carolina, proclaim Freedom—freedom to all her slaves, and then enforce the proclamation as far and as fast as we have opportunity. Let the blow fall first on that State which first rebelled, as a warning and a penalty for her perfidy in this business, which began at the moment that her delegates penned their names to the Constitution.

Next, Florida, impotent in her treachery, with less than a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, and with property not equal to that of a single ward in this city, and that purchased with the money of the people,—emancipate her slaves, and invite the refugees from slavery in the South, for the moment to assemble there, if they desire, and take possession of the soil.

And next in this work of emancipation I name Texas, a State purchased by a costly war with Mexico and which went out of the Union because she could not extend slavery in the Union. Let us teach her people that in the Union or out of the union, slavery is not to be extended. Emancipate the slaves in Texas, and invite men from the army, invite men from the North, invite men from Ireland, invite men from Germany,—the friends of freedom, of every name and every nation?—bid them welcome to the millions of acres of fertile lands we shall there confiscate, and they will form a barrier of freemen, a wall of liberty, over which, or through which, or beneath which it will be impossible for slavery to extend itself.

These three States may be sufficient for warning, for refuge, and for security against the spread of slavery; but I would have it distinctly understood, that by the next anniversary of the birth of the Father of his Country, we shall emancipate the slaves in all the disloyal and rebellious States if they do not previously return to their allegiance.

But justice to the slaves, no less than necessity to us, demands emancipation. Certainly they have been subjected to a sufficient apprenticeship under slavery, through two centuries, to prepare them for freedom if ever they are to be prepared. I say, then, justice to the slave demands emancipation. Let us maintain the principles of the declaration of Independence. The fundamental difference on which the North and South have divided for thirty years is on that part of the Declaration which says "All men are created equal." They have denied it; we have undertaken to maintain it. Jefferson meant, when he penned that immortal truth, not that men are equal physically, intellectually, or morally, but that no one is born under any political subserviency to his fellow man. Let us maintain the doctrine now. These slaves are men; Jefferson did not hesitate to call them "brethren." The declaration concerning the equality of men applies to them as to us; and now that in the progress of events the South has relieved us from responsibility in regard to eleven disloyal States, let us stand forth as a nation in our original strength and purity, maintaining the ideas to which our fathers gave utterance. That we may have ground on which to stand and defend ourselves in this contest, let us declare in the presence of these slaveholders and rebels, in the presence of Europe, that we proclaim THE EQUALITY OF ALL MEN. G. S. Boutwell.

CCCXVIII.

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF LOUISIANA.

Mr. President and Fellow-citizens—At the request of the Committee of Arrangements, I am present as a spectator, to witness the imposing and grand ceremonies of this interesting occasion, and reluctantly to express in words my great gratification at the progress that has been made in the restoration of Louisiana to the Union of States, and in the majestic evidence before me of the returning loyalty of its people. I have watched with the deepest interest the momentous events in the struggle through which we are passing, from its inception to the present hour. In common with the mass of my countrymen I have sorrowed at reverses, and rejoiced in victories. I have mourned over the heroes who have fallen on the field of battle—my brothers in blood, my brothers in arms—and have joined in the honors which a grateful people have showered upon the gallant spirits who upon the sea and upon the land have led our hosts to victory. They never can be forgotten. Day by day and hour by hour, I have observed the receding armies of the enemy, until more than half the territory covered by the shadow of the rebel flag at the beginning of the war, has fallen into the possession of the Government, and is covered by the Stars and Stripes—the emblem of Liberty, now and forever, here and everywhere.

We have, indeed, enough to rejoice our hearts in the progress of our armies, and to give joy to the festivities of this glad hour,—

"But much remains
To conquer still. Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war."

In order to maintain the ground we have recovered with such terrible sacrifice of precious life, and to enable the gallant leaders and heroic men of our armies to retire to the walks of civil life again, it is necessary that civil institutions of government should be reëstablished, and a new, subdued, yet patriotic spirit, like that which held

"The helm of Rome, when robes, not arms,
Repelled the fierce Epirote and the bold African,"

should animate our people and restore the pristine purity and power of the nation.

Louisiana has not been faithless to her duties, nor is she now, nor will she be in the future. Among the truest spirits in the hour of trial were her sons and her daughters. Among the bravest and truest upon the field of battle have been her volunteers. She was the first in this great revolution of ideas rather than arms, to organize her public schools upon a war footing, and infuse into the uncorrupted hearts of their pupils this new sentiment of nationality, by the daily repetition, with the morning prayers, of the magnificent anthems of American liberty. She was the first to institute the system of compensated labor, that makes the restoration of the institution of slavery on this continent impossible that compels us to prepare for the elevation of the oppressed race among us, and the ultimate recognition of all their rights. She is the first in this revolution of ideas to give to the social element of the people a national interest and a national spirit in the great drama of life through which we are passing. And here, to-day, with this splendid pageant—here, to-day, at the inauguration which consummates an election by the people of more than ordinary purity and of unrestricted freedom—here, to-day she is to recognize, as a national sentiment for the new age and the new history, the doctrine that Union AND Liberty, now and forever, must be, and will be, one and inseparable.

In proportion to the confidence with which the people of the American continent shall view the results of this day's history so will arise, in all parts of our land, a cry of joy as of a people liberated from the bondage of slavery and death. And from the hearthstone and the altar will arise the prayer of the good and wise, that this first gleam of light will prove a joyful harbinger of a perpetual day of peace, prosperity, and power. N. P. Banks.

CCCXIX.

THE BIBLE—ITS INFLUENCE.

This Book has taken such a hold on the world as no other. The literature of Greece, which goes up like incense from that land of temples and heroic deeds, has not half the influence of this Book from a nation alike despised in ancient and modern times. It is read of a Sunday in all the thirty thousand pulpits of our land. In all the temples of Christendom is its voice lifted up, week by week. The sun never sets on its gleaming page. It goes equally to the cottage of the plain man and the palace of the king. It is woven into the literature of the scholar, and colors the talk of the street. The bark of the merchant cannot sail the sea without it; no ship of war goes to the conflict but the Bible is there! It enters men's closets; mingles in all the grief and cheerfulness of life. The affianced maiden prays God in Scripture for strength in her new duties; men are married by Scripture. The Bible attends them in their sickness; when the fever of the world is on them, the aching head finds a softer pillow if such leaves lie underneath. The mariner, escaping from shipwreck, clutches this first of his treasures, and keeps it sacred to God. It goes with the peddler, in his crowded pack; cheers him at eventide, when he sits down dusty and fatigued; brightens the freshness of his morning face. It blesses us when we are born; gives names to half Christendom; rejoices with us; has sympathy for our mourning; tempers our grief to finer issues. It is the better part of our sermons. It lifts man above himself; our best of uttered prayers are its storied speech, wherewith our fathers and the patriarchs prayed.

The timid man, about awaking from this dream of life, looks through the glass of Scripture and his eye grows bright; he does not fear to stand alone, to tread the way unknown and distant, to take the death-angel by the hand, and bid farewell to wife, and babes, and home. Men rest on this their dearest hopes. It tells them of God, and of his blessed Son; of earthly duties and of heavenly rest. Foolish men find it the source of Plato's wisdom, and the science of Newton, and the art of Raphael; wicked men use it to rivet the fetters of the slave. Men who believe nothing else that is Spiritual, believe the Bible all through; without this they would not confess, say they, even that there was a God. T. Parker.

CCCXX.

THE BIBLE—ITS DEEP AND LASTING POWER.

For this deep and lasting power of the Bible there must be an adequate cause. That nothing comes of nothing is true all the world over. It is no light thing to hold, with an electric chain, a thousand hearts, though but an hour, beating and bounding with such fiery speed. What is it then to hold the Christian world, and that for centuries? Are men fed with chaff and husks? The authors we reckon great, whose word is in the newspaper, and the market-place, whose articulate breath now sways the nation's mind, will soon pass away, giving place to other great men of a season, who in their turn shall follow them to eminence and then to oblivion. Some thousand "famous writers" come up in this century, to be forgotten in the next. But the silver cord of the Bible is not loosed, nor its golden bowl broken, as Time chronicles its tens of centuries passed by. Has the human race gone mad? Time sits as a refiner of metal; the dross is piled in forgotten heaps, but the pure gold is reserved for use, passes into the ages, and is current a thousand years hence as well as to-day. It is only real merit that can long pass for such. Tinsel will rust in the storms of life. False weights are soon detected there. It is only a heart that can speak deep and true, to a heart; a mind to a mind; a soul to a soul; wisdom to the wise, and religion to the pious. There must then be in the Bible, mind, conscience, heart and soul, wisdom and religion. Were it otherwise, how could millions find it in their lawgiver, friend, and prophet? Some of the greatest of human institutions seem built on the Bible; such things will not stand on heaps of chaff but on mountains of rocks. T. Parker.

CCCXXI.

SUPPORT OF THE GOVERNMENT BY FORCE.

What we have to do is clear. The dictate of wisdom, the impulse of patriotism, the instinct of safety and preservation, the lessons of the past, the hopes of the future, all bid us uphold the constitutional Government of the United States, and by the power of force—a power which, of necessity, underlies all government—carry it triumphantly through this conflict, till its legitimate results are attained. Upon this power of force, the conspirators against this Government have relied from the beginning. They have expected to appeal to it, as is evident from the extent to which the Northern forts, arsenals, and people have been robbed of arms and munitions of war, which, during the last administration, were sent into the Southern States in numbers altogether disproportionate to their population, and unauthorized by law. If they believed in the right of peaceable secession from the Government of the United States, as a right clearly admitted and secured by the Constitution, it is strange that they should have made such far-sighted preparations to maintain this right by forcible resistance to its authority. To this power, these conspirators and those whom they had beguiled from their allegiance, made a direct appeal when they fired their first shot upon Fort Sumter. This appeal, the United States Government is compelled to meet, and by the strong arm of its military power, at the point of the bayonet, and beneath the smoke and blaze of its guns, enforce the obedience which reason, if it had not been dethroned, would never have refused, and recover the allegiance which patriotism, if it had not been deceived and bewildered, would never have relinquished. In this case, it is not the Government that inaugurates civil war, but the men who, by treason and rebellion, are seeking to overturn it; and for this gigantic crime,—the crime of disturbing the peace of thirty millions of people, of attempting to dismember a Union fraught with manifest advantages to all embraced in it, and to overturn, by force, a Government benignant in its sway, and mighty in its protection, its benefits, and its blessings,—for this crime they have no justification.

Under civil institutions, republican and representative in their character, where there are legitimate, constitutional channels provided for the expression of the popular will, through which the Government can be modified, its organic or its statute laws reached, altered, amended, so as to meet the wishes of the majority, or protect the rights of a minority, there can be no justification of rebellion that will stand before the world, or secure a verdict of approval from the pen of impartial history. If we would secure for ourselves that approval, let us stand be this constitutional Government of the United States, and at whatever cost, carry it thorough to the legitimate results of this conflict. S. K. Lothrop.