It would be a great calamity for this nation to lose all of its mighty riches, and have nothing left but the soil we stand on. But, in seven or eight generations, it would all be restored again; for all the wealth of America has been won in less time. We are not two hundred and fifty years from Jamestown and Plymouth. It would be a great misfortune to lose all the foremost families of the nation. But England lost hers in the War of the Roses; France, in her Revolution. Nature bore great men anew, and fresh families sprung up as noble as the old. But, if this generation in America could believe that there was no law of God for you and me to keep,—say the acts of Congress what they might say,—no law to tame the ambition of men of mountain greatness, and curb the eagle's flight of human tyranny, that would be a calamity which the nation would never recover from. No! then religion would die out; affection fall dead; conscience would perish; intellect give up the ghost, and be no more. No law higher than human will! No watchmaker can make a long pendulum vibrate so quick as a short. In this very body there is that law. I wake and watch and will; my private caprice turns my hand, now here, now there. But who controls my breath? Who bids this heart beat all day long, and all the night, sleep I or wake? Whose subtle law holds together these particles of flesh, of blood, and bone in marvellous vitality? Who gives this eye its power to see, and opens wide the portal of the ear? and who enchants, with most mysterious life, this wondrous commonwealth of dust I call myself? It is the same Hand whose law is "higher than the Blue Ridge," an "eagle's flight above the Alleghanies." Who rules the State, and, out of a few stragglers that fled here to New England for conscience sake, built up this mighty, wealthy State? Was it Carver and Winthrop who did all this; Standish and Saltonstall? Was it the cunning craftiness of mightiest men that consciously, well knowing what they did, laid the foundations of our New England State and our New England Church? Why, the boys at school know better. It was the eternal God whose higher law the Pilgrim and the Puritan essayed to keep, not knowing whereunto the thing would grow. Shall the fool say in his heart there is no God? He cannot make a hair grow on his head but by the eternal law of his Father in heaven. Will the politician say there is no law of God for States? Ask the sorrowing world; let Austria and Hungary make reply. Nay, ask the Southern States of America to show us their rapid increase in riches, in civilization; to show us their schools and their scholars, their literature, their science, and their art! No law of God for States! It is writ on the iron leaf of destiny, "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a curse to any people." Let the wicked hand of the South join with the Northern wicked hand, iniquity shall not prosper. But the eye of the wicked shall fail; they shall not escape; their hope shall be as giving up the ghost, because their tongue and their doings are against the Lord, to provoke the eyes of his glory. Their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust, if they cast away the law of the Lord, and despise the word of the Holy One.
In America the people are strongly attached to the institutions, constitutions, and statutes of the land. On the whole, they are just establishments. If not, we made them ourselves, and can make them better when we will. The execution of laws is also popular. Nowhere in the world is there a people so orderly, so much attached to law, as the people of these Northern States. But one law is an exception. The people of the North hate the fugitive slave law, as they have never hated any law since the stamp act. I know there are men in the Northern States who like it,—who would have invented slavery, had it not existed long before. But the mass of the Northern people hate this law, because it is hostile to the purpose of all just human law, hostile to the purpose of society, hostile to the purpose of individual life; because it is hostile to the law of God,—bids the wrong, forbids the right. We disobey that, for the same reason that we keep other laws: because we reverence the law of God. Why should we keep that odious law which makes us hated wherever justice is loved? Because we must sometimes do a disagreeable deed to accomplish an agreeable purpose? The purpose of that law is to enable three hundred thousand slaveholders to retake on our soil the men they once stole on other soil! Most of the city churches of the North seem to think that is a good thing. Very well: is it worth while for fifteen million freemen to transgress the plainest of natural laws, the most obvious instincts of the human heart, and the plainest duties of Christianity, for that purpose? The price to pay is the religious integrity of fifteen million men; the thing to buy is a privilege for three hundred thousand slaveholders to use the North as a hunting-field whereon to kidnap men at our cost. Judge you of that bargain.
But I must end this long discourse. The other day I spoke of the vices of passion: great and terrible evils they wrought. They were as nothing to the vices of calculation. Passion was the flesh, ambition the devil. There are vices of democracy, vices of radicalism; very great vices they are too. You may read of them in Hume and Alison. They are painted black as night and bloody as battle in tory journals of England, and the more vulgar tory journals of America. Democracy wrought terrible evils in Britain in Cromwell's time; in France at her Revolution. But to the vices, the crimes, the sins of aristocracy, of conservatism,—they are what the fleeting lust of the youth is to the cool, hard, calculating, and indomitable ambition of the grown man. Radicalism pillaged Governor Hutchinson's house, threw some tea into the ocean; conservatism set up its stamp act, and drove America into revolution. Radicalism helped Shadrach out of court; conservatism enacted the fugitive slave bill. Radicalism sets up a republic that is red for six months; conservatism sets up a red monarchy covered with blood for hundreds of years. Judge you from which we have the most to fear.
Such are the safeguards of society; such our condition. What shall we do? Nobody would dare pretend to build a church except on righteousness; that is, the rock of ages. Can you build a state on any other foundation—that house upon the sand? What should you think of a minister of the church who got his deacons together, and made a creed, and said, "There is no higher law; no law of God. You, laymen, must take our word for your guidance, and do just as we bid you, and violate the plainest commands of conscience?" What would be atheism in a minister of the church,—is that patriotism in a minister of the state? A bad law is a most powerful instrument to demoralize and debauch the people. If it is a law of their own making, it is all the worse. There is no real and manly welfare for a man, without a sense of religious obligation to God; none in a family, none in a church, none in a state. We want righteousness in the people, in their establishments, in their officers. I adjure you to reverence a government that is right, statutes that are right, officers that are right; but to disobey every thing that is wrong. I entreat you by your love for your country, by the memory of your fathers, by your reverence for Jesus Christ, yea, by the deep and holy love of God which Jesus taught, and you now feel.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] See note on Function of the Jury, above, p. 165.
[35] In these times of political corruption, when a postmaster in a country village is turned out of office for voting for a representative to Congress who exposed the wickedness of a prominent member of the cabinet, it is pleasant to read such letters as those of Washington to Benjamin Lincoln, March 11, 1789, and to Bushrod Washington, July 27, 1789, in Sparks's Writings of Washington, vol. ix. p. 477, et seq., and x. p. 73, et seq.
[36] In the Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan gives a case which it is probable was fictitious only in the names of the parties. Faithful was indicted before Lord Hategood for a capital offence. Mr. Envy testified. Then the judge asked him, Hast thou any more to say? Envy replied: "My Lord, I could say much more, only I would not be tedious to the court. Yet, if need be, when the other gentlemen have given in their evidence, rather than any thing should be wanting that will dispatch him, I will enlarge my testimony against him."