"We shall learn to respect each other," as one of our conservative friends said long ago. It is a great mistake to try to prove our own countrymen cowards and degenerate from the old stock. It is worth the price of some hard fighting to show the contrary to the satisfaction of both parties. The Scotch and English called each other all possible hard names in the time of their international warfare; but the day has come for them, as it will surely come for us, when the rivals and enemies must stand side by side and shoulder to shoulder, each proud of the other's bravery.
* * * * *
For three-quarters of a century we have been melting our several destinies in one common crucible, to mould a new and mighty empire such as the world has never seen. Our partners cannot expect to be allowed to break the crucible or the mould, or to carry away the once separate portions now flowing in a single incandescent flood. We cannot sell and they cannot buy our past. Our nation has pledged itself to unity by the whole course of its united action. There is one debt alone that all the cotton-fields of the South could never pay: it is the price of our voluntary humiliation for the sake of keeping peace with the slaveholders. We may be robbed of our inalienable nationality, if treason is strong enough, but we are trustees of the life of three generations for the benefit of all that are yet to be. We cannot sell. We dare not break the entail of freedom and disinherit the first-born of half a continent.
When the Plebeians seceded to the Mons Sacer, some five hundred years before the Christian era, the Consul Menenius Agrippa brought them back by his well-known fable of the Belly and the Members. Perhaps it would be too much to expect to call back our seceders with a fable which they will hardly have the opportunity of reading in the present condition of the postal service, but the state of the case may be put with a certain degree of truth in this of
THE FRONT-TEETH AND THE GRINDERS.
Once on a time a mutiny arose among the teeth of a worthy man, in good health and blessed with a sound constitution, commonly known as Uncle Samuel. The cutting-teeth, or incisors, and the eye-teeth, or canines, though not nearly so many, all counted, nor so large, nor so strong as the grinders, and by no means so white, but, on the contrary, very much discolored, began to find fault with the grinders as not good enough company for them. The eye-teeth, being very sharp and fitted for seizing and tearing, and standing out taller than the rest, claimed to lead them. Presently, one of them complained that it ached very badly, and then another and another. Very soon the cutting-teeth, which pretended they were supplied by the same nerve, and were proud of it, began to ache also. They all agreed that it was the fault of the grinders.
About this time, Uncle Samuel, having used his old tooth-brush (which was never a good one, having no stiffness in the bristles) for four years, took a new one, recommended to him by a great number of people as a homely, but useful article. Thereupon all the front-teeth, one after another, declared that Uncle Samuel meant to scour them white, which was a thing they would never submit to, though the whole civilized world was calling on them to do so. So they all insisted on getting out of the sockets in which they had grown and stood for so many years. But the wisdom-teeth spoke up for the others and said,—
"Nay, there be but twelve of you front-teeth, and there be twenty of us grinders. We are the strongest, and a good deal nearest the muscles and the joint, but we cannot spare you. We have put up with your black stains, your jumping aches, and your snappish looks, and now we are not going to let you go, under the pretence that you are to be scrubbed white, if you stay. You don't work half so hard as we do, but you can bite the food well enough, which we can grind so much better than you. We belong to each other. You must stay."
Thereupon the front-teeth, first the canines or dog-teeth, next the incisors or cutting-teeth, proceeded to declare themselves out of their sockets, and no longer belonging to the jaws of Uncle Samuel.
Then Uncle Samuel arose in his wrath and shut his jaws tightly together, and swore that he would keep them shut till those aching and discolored teeth of his went to pieces in their sockets, if need were, rather than have them drawn, standing, as some of them did, at the very opening of his throat and stomach.