Our treatment of the subject would be partial, if we did not emphasize the advantage of a right use, of this introductory prerogative. What more delightful to remember than that we brought together those who were each other's counterparts? What more beautiful than to have put the deserving in the way of the philanthropic, and illustrated the old law, that, grateful as it is to have our wants supplied, a lofty soul always finds it more blessed to give than to receive, and a boon infinitely greater to exercise beneficent affection than even to be its object? It ill becomes us who write on this theme to put down one unfair or churlish period. We too well remember our own experience in circumstances wherein our only merit was to be innocent recipients of abundant tokens of good-will; and perhaps the familiar instance may have pardon for its recital, in illustration of the mercy which the letter-bearer may not seldom find. An epistle from a mutual acquaintance was our opportunity of intercourse with a venerable bachelor residing in the city of Antwerp. It was so urged upon us, that the least we could do was to present it, expecting only a few minutes' agreeable conversation. Shall we ever forget the instant welcome that beamed from his benignant face, or how he honored the draft upon him by immediately calling upon all the members of our travelling-party? how literally, against all our expostulations, he gave himself up to us, attending us to picture-galleries and zoological gardens, insisting on disbursing the entrance-fee for us all, with our unavoidable allowance at the moment, and, on our exaction of a just reckoning with him at last, declining to name the sum, on the unanswerable plea of an old man's poor and failing memory! "Does the old man still live?" Surely he does the better life in heaven, if his gray locks on earth are under the sod, and it is too late for these poor lines to reach his eyes, for our sole repayment. Without note, but only chance introduction, a similar case of disinterested bounty in Liverpool from one of goodness undiscriminating as the Divine, which gives the sun and rain to all, stood in strange contrast with the reception of a Manchester manufacturer, almost whose only manifestation in reply to the document we tendered was a sort of growl that we could see mills in Lowell like those under his own control. Perhaps, from his shrewd old head, as he kept his seat at his desk, like a sharp-shooter on the watch and wary for the foe, he only covered us with the surly weapon of his tongue in the equitable way for which we have here been contending ourselves! Certainly we were quite satisfied, if the Englishman was.
But printed lies, as well as written, are largely sympathetic. We are bitter against the press; and surely it needs a greater Luther for its reformer. But its follies are ours; its corruptions belong to its patrons. The editor of a paper edits the mind of those that take it. He cannot help being in a sort of close communion. Perhaps he mainly borrows the very indignation, not so very pure and independent, with which he reproves some ingenuous satirist of what may appear indecent in our fashions of amusement, or unbecoming in the relations of the sexes or the habits of the young. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau." He is two and more, as we all are, while he is one, and must not be blamed on his own score alone. The London "Times," already mentioned, is called the Thunderer; but, like the man behind the scenes at the theatre with his machinery, it thunders as it is told. How sympathetic are the countless brood of falsehoods respecting our country in foreign publications is evident from the cases, too few, of periodicals which, with the same means of information, rise to a noble accuracy and justice. While the more virulent, like the "Saturday Review," servile to its peculiar customers, make a show of holding out against the ever more manifest truth, others, among which is even the "Times" itself, learn the prudence of an altered style. When the wind is about to change, an uncertain fluttering and swinging to and fro may be observed in the vanes. So do many organs prove what pure indicators they are, as they shake in the breeze of public opinion. "Stop my paper" is a cry whose real meaning is for the constituency which the paper represents.
It is a more shameful illustration of the same weakness, when the pens of literary men, not dependent on local support, are subsidized by the prejudice or sold to the pride and wealth of the society in which they live. "I believe in testifying," once said a great man; and we have, among the philosophic and learned, noble witnesses for the equity of our national case. But what a spectacle of degraded functions, when poets, historians, and religious thinkers bow the knee to an aristocracy so vilely proud to stretch forth its hand of fellowship to a slaveholding brotherhood beyond the sea! We need not denounce them. The ideas they pretend to stand for hold them in scorn. The imagination whose pictures they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there was a grand old republican in the realm of letters, John Milton by name, whose shade must be terrible to their thoughts. Let them beware of making of themselves a public shame. The great revenge of years will turn into a mere trick of literature the prose and verse of all not inspired by devotion to humanity, zeal for the cause of the oppressed, and a hearty love of truth, while every covering of lies shall be torn away. They who have despised our free institutions, and prophesied our downfall, and gloated by anticipation over the destruction of our country, to get the lease of a hundred years more to their own lordship of Church and State, and have put their faith in the oppressive Rebels trying to build an empire on the ruins of the Ten Commandments, are as blind to discern the laws of human nature as they are awkward to raise the horoscope of events. This Western Continent, under God, may it please the despots, is not going to barbarism and desolation. That good missionary of freedom as well as religion, whom New England sent to California in the person of Thomas Starr King, writes us that Mount Shasta is ascertained to be higher than Mont Blanc. Some other elevations than of the surface of the globe, in this hemisphere, the Transatlantics may yet behold.
The pulpit is but a sympathetic deceiver, when it violates the truth it is set to defend. All its lies are echoes of the avarice and inhumanity sitting in the pews; and when, in the rough old figure, it is a dumb dog that will not bark at the robber or warn us of danger, the real mutes, whom its silence but copies, are those demure men below who seem to listen to its instructions.
We are astonished to find a liar in the lightning of heaven over the telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military movements and fortified posts and the numbers of dead and wounded on either side. Kinglake calls the telegraph a device by which a clerk dictates to a nation. Who but the nation, or some part of it, dictates to the clerk? He does not control, but records, the sentiment of the community in all his invented facts; and when we hear the click or read the strange dots, we want some trustworthy voucher or responsible human auditor even of these electric accounts.
But, creatures of sympathy, needy dependants on approbation, as we are, shall we surrender to all or any of these lies? No,—there is a sympathy of truth, to whose higher court and supreme verdict we must appeal. Before it let us stand ourselves, perpetual witnesses of the very truth of God in our breast. Said the lion-hearted Andrew Jackson, "When I decide on my course, I do not ask what people will think, but look into my own heart for guidance, believing that all brave men will agree with me."
"As the minister began on the subject of Slavery, I left the church," said a respectable citizen to a modest woman, of whose consent with him he felt sure.
"And did the minister go on?" she gently inquired.
"Yes, he went on," the mistaken citizen replied.
So, in this land, let us go on in the way of justice and truth we have at last begun. Let us have no more sympathetic, however once legal, lies for oppression and wrong. We shall be as good as a thousand years old, when we are through our struggle. For the respect of Europe let us have no anxiety. It will come cordially or by constraint, upon the victory of the right and the reinstating of our manhood by the divine law, to the discouragement of all iniquity at home or abroad. Our success will be a signal for all the tyrannies, in which the proud and strong have been falsely banded together to crush the ignorant and lowly, to come down. The domineering political and ecclesiastical usurpers of exclusive privilege will no longer give and take reciprocal support against the rising of mankind than the Roman augurs could at last keep one another in countenance. Let us go on, through dark omens as well as bright, and suffer ourselves to have no doubting day. Let us show that something besides a monarchy in this world can stand. On disbelievers and obstructers let us have companion. They cannot live contented, and it is not quite safe for them to die. The path of our progress opens clear. Let us not admit the idea of failure. To think of failing is to fail. As it was with the sick before their Saviour of old, only our faith can make us whole.