And now what is the peculiar virtue and glory of this nation? Why, that its national existence is based upon a recognition of the absolute rights and duties of humanity. Theoretically this is our basis; practically there is a commixture; much of this cosmopolitan faith is mingled with much of confined self-regard. But the theoretical fact is the one here in point: since the question now is not of the national _un_faith or infidelity, but of the national faith. And beyond a question, the real faith of the nation, so far as it has one, is represented by its formal declaration, made sacred by the shedding of blood. Our belief really is not in the special right or privilege of Americans, but in the prerogative of man. This prerogative we may have succeeded well or ill in stating and interpreting; the fact, that our appeal is to this, alone concerns us here.
Now this national attitude, so far as history informs me, is unprecedented. The true-born son of Albion, save as an exceptional culture enlarges his soul, believes religiously that God is an Englishman, and that the interests of England precede those of the universe. When, therefore, he sees anything done which depletes the pocket of England, it affects him with a sense of infidelity in those to whom this loss is due. England professes to have a national religion; she has, and in a deeper sense than is commonly meant.
We will not disparage England overmuch; she has done good service in history. We will not boast of ourselves; the actual politics of this country have been, in no small part, base and infidel to a degree that is simply sickening. Nevertheless, it remains true that the fundamental idea of the State here represents a new phase of human history. Every European nationality had taken shape and character while yet our globe was not known to be a globe, while before the eyes of all lookers land and sea faded away into darkness and mystery; and it was not possible that common human sympathy should take into its arms a world of which it could not conceive. But a national spirit was here generated when the ocean had been crossed, when the earth had been rounded, when, too, Newton had, as it were, circumnavigated the solar system,—when, therefore, there could be, and must be, a new recognition of humanity. Our country, again, was peopled from the minorities of Europe, from those whom the spirit of the new time had touched, and taken away their content with old institutions,—a population restless, uncertain, yeasty, chaotic, it might be, full of the rawness of new conditions, mean and magnanimous by turns, as such people are wont, but all leavened more or less with a sentiment new in history,—all leavened with a kind of whole-world feeling, a sense of the oneness of humanity, and, as derived from this, a sense of absolute rights of man, of prerogatives belonging to human nature as such.
The truth of all this has been brought under suspicion by the flatulent oratory of our Fourth-of-Julys; but truth it remains. Our nation did enunciate a grand idea never equally felt by any other. Our nation has said, and said with the sword in its right hand, "Every man born into this world has the right from God to make the most and best of his existence, and society is established only to further and guard this sacred right." We thus established a new scale of justice; we raised a demand for the individual which had not been so made before. Freedom and order were made one; both were identified with justice, simple, broad, equal, universal justice. The American idea, then, what is it? The identification of politics with justice, this it is. With justice, and this, too, not on a scale of conventional usage, but on the scale of natural right. That, as I read, is the American idea,—making politics moral by their unity with natural justice, justice world-old and world-wide.
This conception—obscurely seen and felt, and mixed with the inevitable amount of folly and self-seeking, yet, after, all, this conception—our nation dared to stand up and announce, and to consecrate it by the shedding of blood, calling God and all good men to witness. The deed was grand; the hearts of men everywhere were more or less its accomplices; all the tides of history ran in its favor; kings, forgetting themselves into virtue and generosity, lent it good wishes or even good arms; it was successful; and on its primary success waited such prosperities as the world has seldom seen.
But, because the deed was noble, great costs must needs attend it, attend it long. And first of all the cost of applying our principle within our own borders. For, when a place had been obtained for us among nations, we looked down, and, lo! at our feet the African—in chains. A benighted and submissive race, down-trodden and despised from of old, a race of outcasts, of Pariahs, covered with the shame of servitude, and held by the claim of that terrible talisman, the word property,—here it crouched at our feet, lifting its hands, imploring. Yes, America, here is your task now; never flinch nor hesitate, never begin to question now; thrust your right hand deep into your heart's treasury, bring forth its costliest, purest justice, and lay its immeasurable bounty into this sable palm, bind its blessing on this degraded brow. Ah, but America did falter and question. "How can I?" it said. "This is a Negro, a Negro! Besides, he is PROPERTY!" And so America looked up, determined to ignore the kneeling form. With pious blasphemy it said, "He is here providentially; God in His own good time will dispose of him"; as if God's hour for a good effect were not the earliest hour at which courage and labor can bring it about, not the latest to which indolence and infidelity can postpone it. Then it looked away across oceans to other continents, and began again the chant, "Man is man; natural right is sacred forever; and of politics the sole basis is universal justice." Joyfully it sang for a while, but soon there began to come up the clank of chains mingling with its chant, and the groans of oppressed men and violated women, and prayers to Heaven for another justice than this; and then the words of its chant grew bitter in the mouth of our nation, and a sickness came in its heart, and an evil blush mounted and stood on its brow; and at length a devil spoke in its bosom and said, "The negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect"; and ere the words were fairly uttered, their meaning, as was indeed inevitable, changed to this,—"A Northern 'mudsill' has no rights that a Southern gentleman is bound to respect"; and soon guns were heard booming about Sumter, and a new chapter in our history and in the world's history began.
Our nation refused allegiance to its own principles, refused to pay the lawful costs of its virtue and nobility; therefore it is sued in the courts of destiny, and the case is this day on trial.
The case is plain, the logic clear. Natural right is sacred, or it is not. If it is, the negro is lawfully free; if it is not, you may be lawfully a slave. Just how all this stands in the Constitution of the United States I do not presume to say. Other heads, whose business it is, must attend to that. Every man to his vocation. I speak from the stand-point of philosophy, not of politics; I attend to the logic of history, the logic of destiny, according to which, of course, final judgment will be rendered. It is not exactly to be supposed that the statute of any nation makes grass green, or establishes the relationship between cause and effect. The laws of the world are considerably older than our calendar, and therefore date yet more considerably beyond the year 1789. And by the laws of the world, by the eternal relationship between cause and effect, it stands enacted beyond repeal, and graven upon somewhat more durable than marble or brass, that the destiny of this nation for more than one century to come hinges upon its justice to that outcast race,—outcast, but not henceforth to be cast out by us, save to the utter casting down of ourselves. Once it might have been otherwise; now we have made it so. Justice to the African is salvation to the white man upon this continent. Oh, my America, you must not, cannot, shall not be blind to this fact! America, deeper in my love and higher in my esteem than ever before, newly illustrated in worth, newly proven to be capable still, in some directions, of exceeding magnanimity, open your eyes that your feet may have guidance, now when there is such need! Open your eyes to see, that, if you deliberately deny justice and human recognition to one innocent soul in all your borders, you stab at your own existence; for, in violating the unity of humanity, you break the principle that makes you a nation and alive. Give justice to black and white, recognize man as man; or the constituting idea, the vital faith, the crystallizing principle of the nation perishes, and the whole disintegrates, falls into dust.
I invite the attention of conservative men to the fact that in this due paying of costs lies the true conservation. I invite them to observe, that, as every living body has a principle which makes it alive, makes it a unit, harmonizing the action of its members,—as every crystal has a unitary law, which commands the arrangement of its particles, the number and arrangement of its faces and angles,—so it is with every orderly or living state. To this also there is a central, clarifying, unifying faith. Without this you may collect hordes into the brief, brutal empire of a Chingis Khan or Tamerlane; but you can have no firm, free, orderly, inspiring national life.
Whenever and wherever in history this central condition of national existence has been destroyed, there a nation has fallen into chaos, into imbecility, losing all power to produce genius, to generate able souls, to sustain the trust of men in each other, or to support any of the conditions of social health and order. Even advances in the right line of progress have to be made slowly, gradually, lest the shock of newness be too great, and break off a people from the traditions in which its faith is embodied; but a mere recoil, a mere denial and destruction of its centralizing principle, is the last and utmost calamity which can befall any nation.