III.
It remains to show, in the third place, that the Antislavery Enterprise, which stands before you at once necessary and practicable, is commended by inherent Dignity. Here reasons are obvious and unanswerable.
Its object is benevolent; nor is there in the dreary annals of the Past a single enterprise more clearly and indisputably entitled to this character. With unsurpassed and touching magnanimity, it seeks to benefit the lowly whom your eyes have not seen, and who are ignorant even of your labors, while it demands and receives a self-sacrifice calculated to ennoble an enterprise of even questionable merit. Its true rank is among works properly called philanthropic,—the title of highest honor on earth. “I take goodness in this sense,” says Lord Bacon in his Essays, “the affecting of the weal of men, which is that the Grecians call Philanthropia, … of all virtues and dignities of the mind the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing, no better than a kind of vermin.”[16] Lord Bacon was right, and perhaps unconsciously followed a higher authority; for, when Moses asked the Lord to show him his glory, the Lord said, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee.”[17] Ah! Sir, Peace has trophies fairer and more perennial than any snatched from fields of blood, but, among all these, the fairest and most perennial are the trophies of beneficence. Scholarship, literature, jurisprudence, art, may wear their well-deserved honors; but an enterprise of goodness deserves, and will yet receive, a higher palm than these.
In other aspects its dignity is apparent. It concerns the cause of Human Freedom, which from earliest days has been the darling of History. By all the memories of the Past, by the stories of childhood and the studies of youth, by every example of magnanimous virtue, by every aspiration for the good and true, by the fame of martyrs swelling through all time, by the renown of patriots whose lives are landmarks of progress, by the praise lavished upon our fathers, are you summoned to this work. Unless Freedom be an illusion, and Benevolence an error, you cannot resist the appeal. Who can doubt that our cause is nobler even than that of our fathers? for is it not more exalted to struggle for the freedom of others than for our own?
Its practical importance at this moment gives to it additional eminence. Whether measured by the number of beings it seeks to benefit, by the magnitude of the wrongs it hopes to relieve, by the difficulties with which it is beset, by the political relations which it affects, or by the ability and character it enlists, the cause of the slave now assumes proportions of grandeur which dwarf all other interests in our broad country. In its presence the machinations of politicians, the aspirations of office-seekers, and the subterfuges of party, all sink below even their ordinary insignificance. For myself, Sir, I see among us at this time little else by which an honest man, wishing to leave the world better than he found it, can be tempted out upon the exposed steeps of public life. I see little else which can afford any of those satisfactions an honest man should covet. Nor is there any cause so surely promising final success:—
“Oh! a fair cause stands firm and will abide;
Legions of angels fight upon her side!”[18]
It is written that in the last days there shall be scoffers, and even this Enterprise, thus philanthropic, does not escape their aspersions. As the objections to its Necessity were twofold, and the objections to its Practicability twofold, so also are the aspersions twofold,—first, in the form of hard words, and, secondly, by personal disparagement of those engaged in it.
1. The hard words are manifold as the passions and prejudices of men; but they generally end in the imputation of “fanaticism.” In such a cause I am willing to be called “fanatic,” or what you will; I care not for aspersions, nor shall I shrink before hard words, either here or elsewhere. They do not hurt. “My dear Doctor,” said Johnson to Goldsmith, “what harm does it do any man to call him Holofernes?” From that great Englishman, Oliver Cromwell, I have learned that one cannot be trusted “who is afraid of a paper pellet”; and I am too familiar with history not to know that every movement for reform, in Church or State, every endeavor for Human Liberty or Human Rights, has been thus assailed. I do not forget with what facility and frequency hard words are employed: how that grandest character of many generations, the precursor of our own Washington, without whose example our Republic might have failed, the great William, Prince of Orange, founder of the Dutch Republic, the United States of Holland,—I do not forget how he was publicly branded as “a perjurer and a pest of society”; and, not to dwell on general instances, how the enterprise for the abolition of the slave-trade was characterized on the floor of Parliament, by one eminent speaker as “mischievous,” and by another as “visionary and delusive”; and how the exalted characters which it enlisted were arraigned by still another eminent speaker,—none other than that Tarleton, so conspicuous as commander of the British horse in the Southern campaigns of our Revolution, but more conspicuous in politics at home,—“as a junto of sectaries, sophists, enthusiasts, and fanatics”; and yet again were arraigned by no less a person than a prince of the blood, the Duke of Clarence, afterwards William the Fourth of England, as “either fanatics or hypocrites,” in one of which categories he openly placed William Wilberforce.[19] Impartial History, with immortal pen, has redressed these impassioned judgments; nor has the voice of the poet been wanting:—