Civil liberty is again triumphant, but at what a sacrifice of human life!
What a deluge of blood has been poured over nature's fields, where the
contending armies have struggled together! A half a million of lives have
been yielded up in this the nation's sacrifice.
"The tree of Liberty," said Barere, "is best watered with the blood of
tyrants;" but how few among this immense host of victims were the
originators of the sedition! The merciless schemers of bloody and cruel
wars rarely expose their precious lives to the chances of combat.
During the existence of the slave system, and the long period of its
progress, what has it produced to enrich the heritage of the human mind?
Where are the holy and pure traditions, the bright recollections?
Neither wisdom nor philosophy has appeared, nor those arts which serve to
form the "happy genius of nations." There are countries where the march of
ideas is accelerated only by the force of selfish passions; and
philanthropy, that true index of civilization, only appears when it is
required by mercantilism or political ambition. The aims and influences of
commercial and political life can debase and destroy the noblest impulses.
"It is a grand and beautiful spectacle," exclaims the eloquent Rousseau,
"to see man issue forth out of nothingness, as it were, by his own proper
efforts, to dissipate, by the light of his reason, the shadows in which
nature had enveloped him, to elevate himself even above himself, to glance
with his spirit even into the celestial regions, to pass, with the stride
of a giant, even as the sun, through the vast expanse of the universe, and
what is still greater and more difficult, to enter one's self, and study
there man, and to understand his nature, his duties, and his end."