in its promise--a promise which cannot be fulfilled without that sovereign
moral sense--without a sensitive national conscience. If it were a question
of the mere daily pleasure of living, the gratification of taste,
opportunity of access to the great intellectual and æsthetic results of
human genius, and whatever embellishes human life, no man could hesitate
for a moment between the fulness of foreign lands in these respects, and
the conspicuous poverty of our own. What have we done? We have subdued and
settled a vast domain. We have made every inland river turn a mill, and
wherever, on the dim rim of the globe, there is a harbor, we have lighted
it with an American sail. We have bound the Atlantic to the Mississippi, so
that we drift from the sea to the prairie upon a cloud of vapor; and we are
stretching one hand across the continent to fulfil the hope of Columbus in
a shorter way to Cathay, and with the other we are grasping under the sea
to clasp there the hand of the old continent, that so the throbbing of the
ocean may not toss us further apart, but be as the beating of one common
pulse of the world.
Yet these are the results common to all national enterprise, and different
with us only in degree, not in kind. These are but the tools with which to
shape a destiny. Commercial prosperity is only a curse, if it be not
subservient to moral and intellectual progress; and our prosperity will
conquer us, if we do not conquer our prosperity.
G. W. Curtis.
CCCI.
IDEAS THE LIFE OF A PEOPLE.
The leaders of our Revolution were men of whom the simple truth is the
ugliest praise. Of every condition in life, they were singularly sagacious,
sober and thoughtful. Lord Chatham spoke only the truth when he said to
Franklin, of the men who composed the first colonial Congress: "The
Congress is the most honorable assembly of statesmen since those of the
ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times." Given to grave
reflection, they were neither dreamers nor missionaries, and they were much
too earnest to be rhetoricians. It is a curious fact, that they were
generally men of so calm a temper that they lived to extreme age. With the
exception of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, they were most of them
profound scholars, and studied the history of mankind that they might know
men. They were so familiar with the lives and thoughts of the wisest and
best minds of the past that a classic aroma hangs about their writings and
their speech; and they were profoundly convinced of what statesmen always
know, and the adroitest mere politicians never perceive--that ideas are the
life of a people--that the conscience, not the pocket, is the real citadel
of a nation, and that when you have debauched and demoralized that
conscience by teaching that there are no natural rights, and that therefore
there is no moral right or wrong in political action, you have poisoned the
wells and rotted the crops in the ground. The three greatest living
statesmen of England knew this also--Edmund Burke knew it, and Charles
James Fox, and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. But they did not speak for
the King or parliament, or the English nation. Lord Gower spoke for them
when he said in Parliament: "Let the Americans talk about their natural and
divine rights! their rights as men and citizens! their rights from God and
nature! I am for enforcing these measures!" My lord was contemptuous, and
the King hired the Hessians, but the truth remained true. The Fathers saw
the scarlet soldiers swarming over the sea, but more steadily they saw that
national progress had been secure only in the degree that the political
system had conformed to natural Justice. They knew the coming wreck of
property and trade, but they knew more surely that Rome was never so rich
as when she was dying, and, on the other hand, the Netherlands, never so
powerful as when they were poorest. Farther away, they read the names of
Assyria, Greece, Egypt. They had art, opulence, splendor. Corn enough grew
in the valley of the Nile. The Syrian sword was as sharp as any. They were
merchant princes, and the clouds in the sky were rivalled by their sails
upon the sea. They were soldiers, and their frown frightened the world.
"Soul, take thine ease." those Empires said, languid with excess of luxury
and life. Yes: but you remember the King who had built his grandest palace,
and was to occupy it upon the morrow, but when the morrow came the palace
was a pile of ruins. "Woe is me!" cried the King, "who is guilty of this
crime?" "There is no crime," replied the sage at his side; "but the mortar
was made of sand and water only, and the builders forgot to put in the
lime." So fell the old empires, because the governors forgot to put justice
into their governments.
G. W. Curtis.
CCCII.
THE SAME CONCLUDED.
These things our fathers saw and pondered. I do not mean that when the
Writs of Assistance were issued, or the Stamp Act proposed, or Port Bill
passed, they did not oppose them upon technical and legal grounds.
Undoubtedly they did. But their character, and habits, and studies, were
such that, as the tyranny encroached, they rose naturally into the sphere
of fundamental truths, as into a purer and native air. In great crises, men
always revert to first principles, as in sailing out of sight of land the
mariner consults celestial laws. So the Fathers began at the beginning,
with God and human nature, and derived their government from truths which
they disdained to prove, asserting them to be self-evident. Thus the
Revolution was not the struggle of a class only, but of a people. It was
not merely the rebellion of subjects whose pockets were threatened, it was
the protest of men whose instincts had been outraged. As Mr. Webster was
fond of saying, it was fought on a preamble. A two-penny tax on tea or
paper was not the cause, it was only the occasion, of the Revolution. The
spirit which fought the desperate and disastrous battle on Long Island
yonder was not a spirit which could be quieted by the promise of sugar
gratis. The chance of success was slight--the penalty of failure was sure.
But they believed in God, they kissed wife and child, left them in His
hand, and kept their powder dry. Then to Valley Forge, the valley of the
shadow of death--with feet bleeding upon the sharp ground--with hunger,
thirst, and cold dogging their steps--with ghastly death waiting for them
in the snow, they bore that faith in ideas which brought their fathers over
a pitiless sea to a pitiless shore.
Ideas were their food; ideas were their coats and camp-fires. They knew
that their ranks were thin and raw, and the enemy trained and many. But
they knew, also, that the only difficulty with the proverb that God fights
upon the side of the strongest battalions is that it is not true. If you
load muskets with bullets only, the result is simply a question of numbers.
But one gun loaded with an idea is more fatal than the muskets of a whole
regiment. A bullet kills a tyrant, but an idea kills tyranny, What chance
have a thousand men fighting for a sixpence a day against a hundred
fighting for life and liberty, for home and native land? In such hands, the
weapons themselves feel and think. And so the family firelocks and rusty
swords, the horse-pistol and old scythes of our fathers thought terribly at
Lexington and Monmouth, at Saratoga and Eutaw Springs. The old Continental
muskets thought out the whole Revolution. The English and Hessian arms were
better and brighter than ours; but they were charged only with saltpetre.
Our guns were loaded and rammed home with ideas.
G. W. Curtis.
CCCIII.
EMANCIPATION THE WAR POLICY OF THE PRESIDENT.
At length the skies are cleared, and the oracles have spoken. The ultimate
achievement is already determined in the irreversible purpose of the loyal
States; and that purpose is, a restored republic from the Gulf to the
Lakes,--and a Republic of Freemen.
When the war first broke out, the free States became at once united for the
safety of the capital and for vengeance upon those who had dishonored the
common flag. Time passed on; the capital was supposed to be secure;
changing fortune visited our arms; the people of the North became divided;
some insisted upon an instant order of emancipation; others insisted upon
no emancipation at all. One there was, as it has seemed to me, who abided
the time of Providence and possessed his soul in patience; he was the
President. He waited, counselled, struggled for a restored Union, before
which and in comparison with which all other things should be subordinated.
Within seventeen months after the first gun--so short are the historic
stages in our time--he issued his proclamation of freedom with three months
of notice. It saved the heart of the North and of a portion of Europe.
In the mean time the loyal arms had rescued several States from the clutch
of revolt, and the inquiry everywhere arose, when, and how, and in what
manner, the policy of emancipation should be applied. Then again it was, in
the fulness of time, that the second Presidential proclamation came forth
for the restoration of the States upon the basis of the equality of all men
before God. Upon that he will stand, and upon that we shall stand, with no
faltering or retracing step, until from the waters of the Gulf to the woods
of the North, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific sea, this broad beat of
empire shall possess an invincible people with no clanking manacle to
fetter the creatures of God.
Accepting this, then, as the fixed policy of the States which are to
subjugate the rebellion, we may felicitate ourselves upon the part we are
permitted to bear in human events--that a measure, which in other countries
and in more peaceful ages would have required a quarter or a half a century
for its accomplishment, has become the announced edict of the loyal people
of the United States, within the space of thirty-four months. The
abolishment of the slave trade by the British Government, initiated by
Wilberforce, supported by Pitt and Fox, and Burke and Granville, was
accomplished only after seventeen years of parliamentary agitation.
When Mr. Fox, in 1806 submitted this, which proved to be the last motion he
ever made in Parliament, and lived to witness its success, nobly did he
declare: "That if, during the forty years he had sat in Parliament, he had
been so fortunate as to accomplish that object, and that only, he should
think he had done enough." If Mr. Fox might take to his heart that
gratulation over the first sanction extorted from the Legislature of Great
Britain for the abolition of the slave trade, may I not reclaim it with
redoubled force for the American Magistrate under whose decree four
millions of men will burst the bondage of ages, and mount enriched and
ennobled to the enfranchisements of immortality.
The literature of England is rich with the eloquence of eulogium upon the
statesman whose star was in the ascendant when freedom became the policy of
the Empire; but I choose to appropriate it to him upon this side of the
ocean, who has achieved the highest honor of mortal lot; who has won a
triumph which leaves every other triumph of humanity and justice out of
sight behind it, and for which, to the end of time, mankind will revere his
name and bless his memory.
A. H. Bullock.
CCCIV.
THE DUTY OF THE HOUR.
As to duty, that is clear from what I have already told you. We owe
allegiance to the Government of the Union, and its history to the breaking
out of the present foul rebellion, the memory of the men who gave it to us,
the untold blessings it has conferred upon us, the support it has given to
constitutional liberty everywhere, the gratitude we owe to Washington, whom
Providence, it has been said, left childless, that his country might call
him father, will all unite in making that allegiance a pleasure as well as
a duty. To be false to such a Government, to palter even with the treason
that seeks its downfall, to associate with the wicked men or the madmen who
are in arms against it, would be as vile a dishonor and as base a crime as
fallen man ever perpetrated.
Peace, in such a crisis--the cry of our opponents--how is it to be
attained? How, upon their plan, but by a gross violation of our clearest
obligations--or total disregard of an allegiance to which we are bound, not
only by the Constitution, but by the pledge our ancestors gave for us? The
force the Government is raising is not, as is falsely alleged by the
conspirators, to subjugate States or citizens. It is but to vindicate the
Constitution and the laws, and maintain the existence of the government. It
is but to suppress the "insurrection," force the citizen to return to his
duty, and restore him to the unequalled benefits of the Union. And when
this is done, as done it will be if there is justice in Heaven, the authors
of the present calamity will be consigned to the execrations of the
civilized world, and punished, perhaps, if that is possible, more severely
by the people whom, by arts and subterfuges, they have so deluded and
deceived.
R. Johnson.
CCCV.
THE FIRST GUN FIRED AT SUMTER.
As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated beforehand
by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice aforethought
should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into the trivial
effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was literally to launch
the first missile, figuratively, to "fire the Southern heart" and light
the flame of civil war, was given into the trembling hand of an old
white-headed man, the wretched incendiary whom history will handcuff in
eternal infamy with the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus. The first gun
that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote every loyal American full
in the face. As when the foul witch used to torture her miniature image,
the person it represented suffered all that she inflicted on his waxen
counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the smoking fortress was felt by
the sovereign nation of which that was the representative. Robbery could go
no farther, for every loyal man of the North was despoiled in that single
act as much as if a footpad had laid hands upon him to take from him his
father's staff and his mother's Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over
those battered walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the
past and hope for in the future,--the banner under which we became a
nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object
of love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds
of glory.
O. W. Holmes.
CCCVI.
OUR COUNTRY'S CALL.
We shall have success if we truly will success,--not other wise. It may be
long in coming,--Heaven only knows through what trials and humblings we may
have to pass before the full strength of the nation is duly arrayed and led
to victory, We must be patient, as our fathers were patient; even in our
worst calamities we must remember that defeat itself may be a gain where it
costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it costs ourselves.
But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is
disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not virtue
enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation of sovereigns, we
shall at least hold in undying honor those who vindicated the insulted
majesty of the Republic, and struck at her assailants so long as a
drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.
Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women of the
North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have
among you the scared and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood for your
temporal salvation. They bore your Nation's emblems bravely through the
fire and smoke of the battlefield; nay, their own bodies are starred with
bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as belonging
to their country until their dust becomes a portion of the soil which they
defended, In every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this
destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as children amidst the
clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds, with
strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them. By those wounds of living
heroes, by those graces of fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your children,
and the claims of your children's children yet unborn, in the name of
outraged honor, in the interest of violated sovereignty, for the life of an
imperilled nation, for the sake of men everywhere and of our common
humanity, for the glory of God and the advancement of His kingdom on earth,
your country calls upon you to stand by her through good report and through
evil report, in triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the great war
of Western civilization, Queen of the broad continent, arbitress in the
councils of earth's emancipated peoples; until the flag that fell from the
wall of Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme, over all her ancient
inheritance, every fortress, every capital, every ship, and this warring
land is once more a united nation.
O. W. Holmes.
CCCVII.
MANHOOD AND COUNTRY BEFORE WEALTH AND LUXURY.
Let us say it plainly it will not hurt our people to be taught that there
are other things to be cared for besides money making and money spending;
that the time has come when manhood must assert itself by brave deeds and
noble thoughts; when womanhood must assume its most sacred office, "to
warn, to comfort," and, if need be, "to command" those whose services
their country calls for. This Northern section of the land has become a
great variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities are the long-extended
counter. We have grown rich for what? To put gilt bands on coachmen's hats?
To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest silks which the toiling
artisans of France can send us? To look through plate-glass windows, and
pity the brown soldiers,--or sneer at the black ones? to reduce the speed
of trotting horses a second or two below its old minimum? to color
meerschaums? to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in diamonds? to dredge our
maiden's hair with gold-dust? to float through life, the passive
shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues to the beaches, and back again
from the beaches to the avenues? Was it for this that the broad domain of
the Western hemisphere was kept so long unvisited by civilization?--for
this, that Time, the father of empires, unbound the virgin zone of this
youngest of his daughters, and gave her, beautiful in the long veil of her
forests, to the rude embrace of the adventurous Colonists?
All this is what we see around us, now,--now, while we are actually
fighting this great battle, and supporting this great load of indebtedness.
Wait till the diamonds go back to the Jews of Amsterdam; till the
plate-glass window bears the fatal announcement, For Sale, or to Let; till
the voice of our Miriam is obeyed as she sings:--
"Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms!"
till the gold-dust is combed from golden locks, and hoarded to buy bread;
till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the platform of the
horse-car; till the music-grinders cease because none will pay them; till
there are no peaches in the windows at twenty-four dollars a dozen, and no
heaps of bananas and pine-apples selling at the street-corners; till the
ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and it is a felony to drink
champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper
wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the
Maelstrom;--but till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while
brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine
over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is
carrying us farther and farther, every hour, beyond the influence of the
great failing which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin which was
our fatal inheritance!
O. W. Holmes.
CCCVIII.
OUR COUNTRY'S GREATEST GLORY.
The true glory of a nation is in an intelligent, honest, industrious
Christian people. The civilization of a people depends on their individual
character; and a constitution which is not the outgrowth of this character
is not worth the parchment on which it is written. You look in vain in the
past for a single instance where the people have preserved their liberties
after their individual character was lost. It is not in the magnificence of
its palaces, not in the beautiful creations of art lavished on its public
edifices, not in costly libraries and galleries of pictures, not in the
number or wealth of its cities, that we find pledges of a nation's glory.
The ruler may gather around him the treasures of the world, amid a
brutalized people; the senate chamber may retain its faultless proportions
long after the voice of patriotism is hushed within its wails; the
monumental marble may commemorate a glory which has forever departed. Art
and letters may bring no lesson to a people whose heart is dead.
The true glory of a nation is in the living temple of a loyal, industrious,
and upright people. The busy click of machinery, the merry ring of the
anvil, the lowing of peaceful herds, and the song of the harvest-home, are
sweeter music than pæans of departed glory, or songs of triumph in war. The
vine-clad cottage of the hillside, the cabin of the woodsman, and the rural
home of the farmer are the true citadels of any country. There is a dignity
in honest toil which belongs not to the display of wealth or the luxury of
fashion. The man who drives the plough, or swings his axe in the forest, or
with cunning fingers plies the tools of his craft, is as truly the servant
of his country, as the statesman in the senate or the soldier in battle.
The safety of a nation depends not alone on the wisdom of its statesmen or
the bravery of its generals. The tongue of eloquence never saved a nation
tottering to its fall; the sword of a warrior never stayed its destruction.
There is a surer defence in every Christian home. I say Christian home, for
I allow of no glory to manhood which comes not from the cross. I know of no
rights wrung from tyranny, no truth rescued from darkness and bigotry,
which has not awaited on a Christian civilization.
Would you see the image of true glory, I would show you villages where the
crown and glory of the people was in Christian schools, where the voice of
prayer goes heaven-ward, where the people have that most priceless
gift--faith in God. With this as the basis, and leavened as it will be with
brotherly love, there will be no danger in grappling with any evils which
exist in our midst; we shall feel that we may work and bide our time, and
die knowing that God will bring victory.
Bishop Whipple.
CCCIX.
OUR NATIONAL ANNIVERSARY.
We celebrate to-day no idle tradition--the deeds of no fabulous race; for
we tread in the scarcely obliterated footsteps of an earnest and valiant
generation of men, who dared to stake life, and fortune, and sacred honor,
upon a declaration of rights, whose promulgation shook tyrants on their
thrones, gave hope to fainting freedom, and reformed the political ethics
of the world.
The greatest heroes of former days have sought renown in schemes of
conquest, based on the love of dominion or the thirst for war; and such had
been the worship of power in the minds of men, that adulation had ever
followed in the wake of victory. How daring then the trial of an issue
between a handful of oppressed and outlawed colonists, basing their cause,
under God, upon an appeal to the justice of mankind and their own few
valiant arms. And how immeasurably great was he, the fearless commander,
who, after the fortunes and triumphs of battle were over, scorned the
thought of a regal throne for a home in the hearts of his countryman.
Amidst the rejoicings of this day, let us mingle something of gratitude
with our joy--something of reverence with our gratitude--and something of
duty with our reverence.