I admit too, rejoicingly, that, in Massachusetts, this preventive and praiseworthy discipline has been more extensively applied to political men than in any other state in the Union. Our highest state offices have been filled for years, saving very rare exceptions, with men of distinguished probity and a spotless life. And why, in this department, should we ever grant dispensations and absolutions; or, like the old popes, sell indulgences to sin?
Now, let this doctrine be applied; for I hold it to be no unwarrantable invasion of private character to apply these principles to public men. When public men openly and notoriously practise vice, they make the vice public, and bring it within public jurisdiction. If it is public for example, it is public for criticism; and, under such circumstances, the moral and religious guides of the community are as solemnly bound “truly to find, and due presentment make,” of these offences, as the grand jury is in the case of crimes against the laws of the land. I say, therefore, let us apply this doctrine.
How long have all good citizens in Massachusetts labored in the glorious cause of temperance! They have devoted time, expended talent, lavished money, incurred obloquy; but, as their reward, they have plucked the guilty from perdition; rescued the young, just losing their balance over the precipice of ruin; saved the widow and the fatherless from unutterable woe, and driven demons of discord from domestic Edens. Now why, after all our toils and sacrifices to uphold and carry forward the cause of temperance, and to make its name as honorable as it is blessed; why should we demolish all our work by elevating a man to a high political station, or by upholding him when in it, who, in the face of the nation and of the world, will become so drunken that he cannot articulate his mother tongue? Is this an example you desire to set before the ingenuous and aspiring youth of the land; ay, before your own children?
We have had men in the presidential chair not without faults and blemishes of character; but hitherto we may proudly say, that we never have had one there who drowned his reason in his cups. God grant that we never may. Think of this magnificent ship of state freighted with twenty-three millions of souls, and laden to the scuppers with the wealth of the world’s hopes, with a pilot at the helm—drunk!
We are an industrious and a frugal people. The aptitude is born with us. A true Massachusetts boy seems to take to ingenious labor and to labor-saving contrivances from his birth,—like a duck almost impatient to be hatched, that it may get into the water. We prize and honor the home-bred virtues of diligence and thrift; for they bestow upon us all our comforts, the means of educating our children, and leave us a magnificent surplus for godlike charities to be scattered over the world.
Dr. Franklin has stamped a family likeness upon us all. His economical wisdom is domesticated among us. Take a sound and pure specimen of a Massachusetts farmer or mechanic, and analyze him, and you will find that, of his whole composition, from six to ten ounces in the pound is made up of Dr. Franklin. Now, why should we root out this luxuriant, fruit-bearing virtue? Why welcome and court and feed the prodigalities and sensualities of the old world, to corrupt the pristine virtues of the new? Can he be a republican after the severe simplicity and grandeur of the old Roman type; can he be an exemplary citizen, who must have his thirty, forty, or even fifty thousand dollars a year, to squander upon what I must not call, “to ears polite,” his vices and passions, but, more genteelly, “his tastes and feelings,” while millions of honest laborers thank God if by incessant toil they can earn their daily bread for their families, and the bread of knowledge for their children? Can they be good citizens, or, at least, are they not grievously deluded, who will give such purses to such a man for being the advocate and agent of their special interests, while there are hundreds of suffering men and women, and more suffering children, at their own doors? Do you want your children to grow up inflamed by such examples of excess and wantonness? I know that all this is defended on the ground that something must be done for a great man’s family. Ay, that family! The progeny and costliness of the vices, what Californias shall be able to support? I know, too, that it is also said we must have great talents in the public councils, at whatever price. Well, if this be your philosophy, don’t do the work by halves, but import Lucifer at once!
Now, fellow-citizens, you know that all the men who are guilty of these great derelictions from civil and social duty are the men who uphold the Fugitive Slave law.
I might touch upon more holy relations in life; upon virtues without which there is no home and no domestic sanctuary; without which there may be children, but the sacred institution of the family is gone. But I forbear. I only desire to awaken your attention to the great duty of extending the domain of conscience over politics; of holding public men answerable for those vices which it is a great misnomer to call private when they are committed in the face of the world. “The pulpit is false to its trust” if it does not follow and rebuke them, under whatever robes of official dignity they may hold their revels.
Three great stages of development belong to the world. First, there was the period of physical development, when the tallest man was crowned king, when the strongest muscles enacted the laws, when brute force was “His Royal Majesty,” and claimed and received the homage of mankind. That age has passed; and how contemptible does all its greatness now appear! Then came the age when the mind towered above the body, when a nation’s power no longer consisted in the millions of its men, but in the treasuries of its knowledge; when the intellect took up the vastest concentrations of animal strength, which seemed omnipotent before, lifted them off their fulcrum, and they became like a feather, in the breath of its power. That age is the present. The moral age is yet to be ushered in. In this age, the intellectual forces shall still retain all their dominion and supremacy over the physical world, but the moral shall preside over the intellectual, and move them as God moves the stars, bringing them out of chaos, and wheeling them in circuits of unimaginable grandeur, and for purposes of beneficence yet inconceivable. In that day, the lawgivers of the land shall be no longer “compromisers” between duty and mammon, and the judges shall judge in righteousness. In that day, the merchant, for the lucre of trade, shall not pay tribute in human beings, and send his flesh-tax across the free waters. In that day, the gospel of human brotherhood, of doing as we would be done by, and of loving our neighbors as ourselves, shall no longer be doled out to us by priests of the broad phylactery sort, in homœopathic doses, reduced to the five hundredth dilution. But in that glorious day, the men who sit in the Areopagus of the nation, clothed with the ermine of the law, shall be, as the heathen of old figured the emblem of Justice, blind in the outward eye; and all they know of color shall be to give no color to the law. In that day the successors of St. Paul shall preach what he preached, when standing “in the midst of Mars Hill,”—a God of equity, of righteousness, of justice, of benevolence; the God who made “of one blood all nations of men,” who, alas! to so many in our day is “the unknown God.”
In that day, when a whole people are aroused to ponder, with unwonted intensity, upon the great principles for which Sidney and Vane bled; for which Hampden smote the tyrant of his day; for which the heroes of the revolution pledged fortune, life, and sacred honor; no voice shall strive to seduce them from their sacred work by its Belial cry, “Conquer your prejudices!”