I do not often speak to public questions;—they are odious and hurtful,
and it seems like meddling or leaving your work. I have my own spirits
in prison;—spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man visits if I do not.
And then I see what havoc it makes with any good mind, a dissipated
philanthropy. The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons
is, not to know their own task, or to take their ideas from others.
From this want of manly rest in their own and rash acceptance of
other people’s watchwords come the imbecility and fatigue of their
conversation. For they cannot affirm these from any original experience,
and of course not with the natural movement and total strength of their
nature and talent, but only from their memory, only from their cramped
position of standing for their teacher. They say what they would have you
believe, but what they do not quite know.[135]
My own habitual view is to the well-being of students or scholars. And
it is only when the public event affects them, that it very seriously
touches me. And what I have to say is to them. For every man speaks
mainly to a class whom he works with and more or less fully represents.
It is to these I am beforehand related and engaged, in this audience
or out of it—to them and not to others. And yet, when I say the class
of scholars or students,—that is a class which comprises in some sort
all mankind, comprises every man in the best hours of his life; and in
these days not only virtually but actually. For who are the readers and
thinkers of 1854? Owing to the silent revolution which the newspaper has
wrought, this class has come in this country to take in all classes.
Look into the morning trains which, from every suburb, carry the
business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, work-yards
and warehouses. With them enters the car—the newsboy, that humble priest
of politics, finance, philosophy, and religion. He unfolds his magical
sheets,—twopence a head his bread of knowledge costs—and instantly the
entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as
one man to their second breakfast. There is, no doubt, chaff enough in
what he brings; but there is fact, thought, and wisdom in the crude mass,
from all regions of the world.
I have lived all my life without suffering any known inconvenience from
American Slavery. I never saw it; I never heard the whip;[136] I never
felt the check on my free speech and action, until, the other day, when
Mr. Webster, by his personal influence, brought the Fugitive Slave Law
on the country. I say Mr. Webster, for though the Bill was not his, it
is yet notorious that he was the life and soul of it, that he gave it
all he had: it cost him his life, and under the shadow of his great name
inferior men sheltered themselves, threw their ballots for it and made
the law. I say inferior men. There were all sorts of what are called
brilliant men, accomplished men, men of high station, a President of
the United States, Senators, men of eloquent speech, but men without
self-respect, without character, and it was strange to see that office,
age, fame, talent, even a repute for honesty, all count for nothing.
They had no opinions, they had no memory for what they had been saying
like the Lord’s Prayer all their lifetime: they were only looking to
what their great Captain did: if he jumped, they jumped, if he stood on
his head, they did. In ordinary, the supposed sense of their district
and State is their guide, and that holds them to the part of liberty
and justice. But it is always a little difficult to decipher what this
public sense is; and when a great man comes who knots up into himself the
opinions and wishes of the people, it is so much easier to follow him as
an exponent of this. He too is responsible; they will not be. It will
always suffice to say,—“I followed him.”
I saw plainly that the great show their legitimate power in nothing more
than in their power to misguide us. I saw that a great man, deservedly
admired for his powers and their general right direction, was able,—fault
of the total want of stamina in public men,—when he failed, to break them
all with him, to carry parties with him.
In what I have to say of Mr. Webster I do not confound him with vulgar
politicians before or since. There is always base ambition enough, men
who calculate on the immense ignorance of the masses; that is their
quarry and farm: they use the constituencies at home only for their
shoes. And, of course, they can drive out from the contest any honorable
man. The low can best win the low, and all men like to be made much
of. There are those too who have power and inspiration only to do ill.
Their talent or their faculty deserts them when they undertake anything
right. Mr. Webster had a natural ascendancy of aspect and carriage
which distinguished him over all his contemporaries. His countenance,
his figure, and his manners were all in so grand a style, that he was,
without effort, as superior to his most eminent rivals as they were to
the humblest; so that his arrival in any place was an event which drew
crowds of people, who went to satisfy their eyes, and could not see him
enough. I think they looked at him as the representative of the American
Continent. He was there in his Adamitic capacity, as if he alone of all
men did not disappoint the eye and the ear, but was a fit figure in the
landscape.[137]
I remember his appearance at Bunker’s Hill. There was the Monument, and
here was Webster. He knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric
signified nothing: he was only to say plain and equal things,—grand
things if he had them, and, if he had them not, only to abstain from
saying unfit things,—and the whole occasion was answered by his presence.
It was a place for behavior more than for speech, and Mr. Webster walked
through his part with entire success. His excellent organization, the
perfection of his elocution and all that thereto belongs,—voice, accent,
intonation, attitude, manner,—we shall not soon find again. Then he was
so thoroughly simple and wise in his rhetoric; he saw through his matter,
hugged his fact so close, went to the principle or essential, and never
indulged in a weak flourish, though he knew perfectly well how to make
such exordiums, episodes and perorations as might give perspective to
his harangues without in the least embarrassing his march or confounding
his transitions. In his statement things lay in daylight; we saw them
in order as they were. Though he knew very well how to present his own
personal claims, yet in his argument he was intellectual,—stated his fact
pure of all personality, so that his splendid wrath, when his eyes became
lamps, was the wrath of the fact and the cause he stood for.
His power, like that of all great masters, was not in excellent parts,
but was total. He had a great and everywhere equal propriety. He worked
with that closeness of adhesion to the matter in hand which a joiner or a
chemist uses, and the same quiet and sure feeling of right to his place
that an oak or a mountain have to theirs. After all his talents have been
described, there remains that perfect propriety which animated all the
details of the action or speech with the character of the whole, so that
his beauties of detail are endless. He seemed born for the bar, born for
the senate, and took very naturally a leading part in large private and
in public affairs; for his head distributed things in their right places,
and what he saw so well he compelled other people to see also. Great is
the privilege of eloquence. What gratitude does every man feel to him who
speaks well for the right,—who translates truth into language entirely
plain and clear!
The history of this country has given a disastrous importance to the
defects of this great man’s mind. Whether evil influences and the
corruption of politics, or whether original infirmity, it was the
misfortune of his country that with this large understanding he had not
what is better than intellect, and the source of its health. It is a
law of our nature that great thoughts come from the heart. If his moral
sensibility had been proportioned to the force of his understanding, what
limits could have been set to his genius and beneficent power? But he
wanted that deep source of inspiration. Hence a sterility of thought, the
want of generalization in his speeches, and the curious fact that, with
a general ability which impresses all the world, there is not a single
general remark, not an observation on life and manners, not an aphorism
that can pass into literature from his writings.
Four years ago to-night, on one of those high critical moments in history
when great issues are determined, when the powers of right and wrong
are mustered for conflict, and it lies with one man to give a casting
vote,—Mr. Webster, most unexpectedly, threw his whole weight on the side
of Slavery, and caused by his personal and official authority the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Bill.
It is remarked of the Americans that they value dexterity too much, and
honor too little; that they think they praise a man more by saying that
he is “smart” than by saying that he is right. Whether the defect be
national or not, it is the defect and calamity of Mr. Webster; and it is
so far true of his countrymen, namely, that the appeal is sure to be made
to his physical and mental ability when his character is assailed. His
speeches on the seventh of March, and at Albany, at Buffalo, at Syracuse
and Boston are cited in justification. And Mr. Webster’s literary editor
believes that it was his wish to rest his fame on the speech of the
seventh of March. Now, though I have my own opinions on this seventh of
March discourse and those others, and think them very transparent and
very open to criticism,—yet the secondary merits of a speech, namely, its
logic, its illustrations, its points, etc., are not here in question.
Nobody doubts that Daniel Webster could make a good speech. Nobody doubts
that there were good and plausible things to be said on the part of
the South. But this is not a question of ingenuity, not a question of
syllogisms, but of sides. _How came he there?_[138]
There are always texts and thoughts and arguments. But it is the genius
and temper of the man which decides whether he will stand for right or
for might. Who doubts the power of any fluent debater to defend either of
our political parties, or any client in our courts? There was the same
law in England for Jeffries and Talbot and Yorke to read slavery out of,
and for Lord Mansfield to read freedom. And in this country one sees that
there is always margin enough in the statute for a liberal judge to read
one way and a servile judge another.
But the question which History will ask is broader. In the final hour,
when he was forced by the peremptory necessity of the closing armies
to take a side,—did he take the part of great principles, the side of
humanity and justice, or the side of abuse and oppression and chaos?
Mr. Webster decided for Slavery, and that, when the aspect of the
institution was no longer doubtful, no longer feeble and apologetic and
proposing soon to end itself, but when it was strong, aggressive, and
threatening an illimitable increase. He listened to State reasons and
hopes, and left, with much complacency we are told, the testament of
his speech to the astonished State of Massachusetts, _vera pro gratis_;
a ghastly result of all those years of experience in affairs, this,
that there was nothing better for the foremost American man to tell his
countrymen than that Slavery was now at that strength that they must beat
down their conscience and become kidnappers for it.
This was like the doleful speech falsely ascribed to the patriot
Brutus: “Virtue, I have followed thee through life, and I find thee
but a shadow.”[139] Here was a question of an immoral law; a question
agitated for ages, and settled always in the same way by every great
jurist, that an immoral law cannot be valid. Cicero, Grotius, Coke,
Blackstone, Burlamaqui, Vattel, Burke, Jefferson, do all affirm this, and
I cite them, not that they can give evidence to what is indisputable,
but because, though lawyers and practical statesmen, the habit of their
profession did not hide from them that this truth was the foundation of
States.
Here was the question, Are you for man and for the good of man; or are
you for the hurt and harm of man? It was the question whether man shall
be treated as leather? whether the Negro shall be, as the Indians were in
Spanish America, a piece of money? Whether this system, which is a kind
of mill or factory for converting men into monkeys, shall be upheld and
enlarged? And Mr. Webster and the country went for the application to
these poor men of quadruped law.
People were expecting a totally different course from Mr. Webster. If
any man had in that hour possessed the weight with the country which he
had acquired, he could have brought the whole country to its senses. But
not a moment’s pause was allowed. Angry parties went from bad to worse,
and the decision of Webster was accompanied with everything offensive
to freedom and good morals. There was something like an attempt to
debauch the moral sentiment of the clergy and of the youth. Burke said
he “would pardon something to the spirit of liberty.” But by Mr. Webster
the opposition to the law was sharply called treason, and prosecuted
so. He told the people at Boston “they must conquer their prejudices;”
that “agitation of the subject of Slavery must be suppressed.” He did as
immoral men usually do, made very low bows to the Christian Church, and
went through all the Sunday decorums; but when allusion was made to the
question of duty and the sanctions of morality, he very frankly said, at
Albany, “Some higher law, something existing somewhere between here and
the third heaven,—I do not know where.” And if the reporters say true,
this wretched atheism found some laughter in the company.
I said I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave
Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa
or the Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become,
or was fast becoming, a dead letter, and, by the genius and laws of
Massachusetts, inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me
to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as
judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times,
that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was become aggressive and
dangerous.
The way in which the country was dragged to consent to this, and the
disastrous defection (on the miserable cry of Union) of the men of
letters, of the colleges, of educated men, nay, of some preachers of
religion,—was the darkest passage in the history. It showed that our
prosperity had hurt us, and that we could not be shocked by crime. It
showed that the old religion and the sense of the right had faded and
gone out; that while we reckoned ourselves a highly cultivated nation,
our bellies had run away with our brains, and the principles of culture
and progress did not exist.
For I suppose that liberty is an accurate index, in men and nations, of
general progress. The theory of personal liberty must always appeal to
the most refined communities and to the men of the rarest perception and
of delicate moral sense. For there are rights which rest on the finest
sense of justice, and, with every degree of civility, it will be more
truly felt and defined. A barbarous tribe of good stock will, by means
of their best heads, secure substantial liberty. But where there is
any weakness in a race, and it becomes in a degree matter of concession
and protection from their stronger neighbors, the incompatibility and
offensiveness of the wrong will of course be most evident to the most
cultivated. For it is,—is it not?—the essence of courtesy, of politeness,
of religion, of love, to prefer another, to postpone oneself, to protect
another from oneself. That is the distinction of the gentleman, to defend
the weak and redress the injured, as it is of the savage and the brutal
to usurp and use others.
In Massachusetts, as we all know, there has always existed a predominant
conservative spirit. We have more money and value of every kind than
other people, and wish to keep them. The plea on which freedom was
resisted was Union. I went to certain serious men, who had a little more
reason than the rest, and inquired why they took this part? They answered
that they had no confidence in their strength to resist the Democratic
party; that they saw plainly that all was going to the utmost verge of
licence; each was vying with his neighbor to lead the party, by proposing
the worst measure, and they threw themselves on the extreme conservatism,
as a drag on the wheel: that they knew Cuba would be had, and Mexico
would be had, and they stood stiffly on conservatism, and as near to
monarchy as they could, only to moderate the velocity with which the car
was running down the precipice. In short, their theory was despair; the
Whig wisdom was only reprieve, a waiting to be last devoured. They side
with Carolina, or with Arkansas, only to make a show of Whig strength,
wherewith to resist a little longer this general ruin.
I have a respect for conservatism. I know how deeply founded it is in
our nature, and how idle are all attempts to shake ourselves free from
it. We are all conservatives, half Whig, half Democrat, in our essences:
and might as well try to jump out of our skins as to escape from our
Whiggery. There are two forces in Nature, by whose antagonism we exist;
the power of Fate, Fortune, the laws of the world, the order of things,
or however else we choose to phrase it, the material necessities, on the
one hand,—and Will or Duty or Freedom on the other.
May and Must, and the sense of right and duty, on the one hand, and the
material necessities on the other: May and Must. In vulgar politics the
Whig goes for what has been, for the old necessities,—the Musts. The
reformer goes for the Better, for the ideal good, for the Mays. But
each of these parties must of necessity take in, in some measure, the
principles of the other. Each wishes to cover the whole ground; to hold
fast _and_ to advance. Only, one lays the emphasis on keeping, and the
other on advancing. I too think the _musts_ are a safe company to follow,
and even agreeable. But if we are Whigs, let us be Whigs of nature and
science, and so for all the necessities. Let us know that, over and above
all the _musts_ of poverty and appetite, is the instinct of man to rise,
and the instinct to love and help his brother.
Now, Gentlemen, I think we have in this hour instruction again in the
simplest lesson. Events roll, millions of men are engaged, and the result
is the enforcing of some of those first commandments which we heard in
the nursery. We never get beyond our first lesson, for, really, the world
exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty, which begins
with liberty from fear.
The events of this month are teaching one thing plain and clear, the
worthlessness of good tools to bad workmen; that official papers are of
no use; resolutions of public meetings, platforms of conventions, no, nor
laws, nor constitutions, any more. These are all declaratory of the will
of the moment, and are passed with more levity and on grounds far less
honorable than ordinary business transactions of the street.
You relied on the constitution. It has not the word _slave_ in it; and
very good argument has shown that it would not warrant the crimes that
are done under it; that, with provisions so vague for an object not
named, and which could not be availed of to claim a barrel of sugar
or a barrel of corn, the robbing of a man and of all his posterity is
effected. You relied on the Supreme Court. The law was right, excellent
law for the lambs. But what if unhappily the judges were chosen from the
wolves, and give to all the law a wolfish interpretation? You relied
on the Missouri Compromise. That is ridden over. You relied on State
sovereignty in the Free States to protect their citizens. They are driven
with contempt out of the courts and out of the territory of the Slave
States,—if they are so happy as to get out with their lives,[140]—and
now you relied on these dismal guaranties infamously made in 1850;
and, before the body of Webster is yet crumbled, it is found that they
have crumbled. This eternal monument of his fame and of the Union is
rotten in four years. They are no guaranty to the free states. They are
a guaranty to the slave states that, as they have hitherto met with no
repulse, they shall meet with none.
I fear there is no reliance to be put on any kind or form of covenant,
no, not on sacred forms, none on churches, none on bibles. For one would
have said that a Christian would not keep slaves;—but the Christians
keep slaves. Of course they will not dare to read the Bible? Won’t they?
They quote the Bible, quote Paul,[141] quote Christ, to justify slavery.
If slavery is good, then is lying, theft, arson, homicide, each and all
good, and to be maintained by Union societies.
These things show that no forms, neither constitutions, nor laws, nor
covenants, nor churches, nor bibles, are of any use in themselves. The
Devil nestles comfortably into them all. There is no help but in the
head and heart and hamstrings of a man. Covenants are of no use without
honest men to keep them; laws of none but with loyal citizens to obey
them. To interpret Christ it needs Christ in the heart. The teachings
of the Spirit can be apprehended only by the same spirit that gave them
forth. To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all
foolish trust in others. You must be citadels and warriors yourselves,
declarations of Independence, the charter, the battle and the victory.
Cromwell said, “We can only resist the superior training of the King’s
soldiers, by enlisting godly men.” And no man has a right to hope that
the laws of New York will defend him from the contamination of slaves
another day until he has made up his mind that he will not owe his
protection to the laws of New York, but to his own sense and spirit. Then
he protects New York. He only who is able to stand alone is qualified
for society. And that I understand to be the end for which a soul exists
in this world,—to be himself the counterbalance of all falsehood and
all wrong. “The army of unright is encamped from pole to pole, but the
road of victory is known to the just.” Everything may be taken away; he
may be poor, he may be houseless, yet he will know out of his arms to
make a pillow, and out of his breast a bolster. Why have the minority no
influence? Because they have not a real minority of one.[142]
I conceive that thus to detach a man and make him feel that he is to
owe all to himself, is the way to make him strong and rich; and here
the optimist must find, if anywhere, the benefit of Slavery. We have
many teachers; we are in this world for culture, to be instructed in
realities, in the laws of moral and intelligent nature; and our education
is not conducted by toys and luxuries, but by austere and rugged masters,
by poverty, solitude, passions, War, Slavery; to know that Paradise is
under the shadow of swords;[143] that divine sentiments which are always
soliciting us are breathed into us from on high, and are an offset to
a Universe of suffering and crime; that self-reliance, the height and
perfection of man, is reliance on God.[144] The insight of the religious
sentiment will disclose to him unexpected aids in the nature of things.
The Persian Saadi said, “Beware of hurting the orphan. When the orphan
sets a-crying, the throne of the Almighty is rocked from side to side.”
Whenever a man has come to this mind, that there is no Church for him but
his believing prayer; no Constitution but his dealing well and justly
with his neighbor; no liberty but his invincible will to do right,—then
certain aids and allies will promptly appear: for the constitution of
the Universe is on his side. It is of no use to vote down gravitation of
morals. What is useful will last, whilst that which is hurtful to the
world will sink beneath all the opposing forces which it must exasperate.
The terror which the Marseillaise struck into oppression, it thunders
again to-day,—
“Tout est soldat pour vous combattre.”
Everything turns soldier to fight you down. The end for which man was
made is not crime in any form, and a man cannot steal without incurring
the penalties of the thief, though all the legislatures vote that it
is virtuous, and though there be a general conspiracy among scholars
and official persons to hold him up, and to say, “_Nothing is good but
stealing._” A man who commits a crime defeats the end of his existence.
He was created for benefit, and he exists for harm; and as well-doing
makes power and wisdom, ill-doing takes them away. A man who steals
another man’s labor steals away his own faculties; his integrity,
his humanity is flowing away from him. The habit of oppression cuts
out the moral eyes, and, though the intellect goes on simulating the
moral as before, its sanity is gradually destroyed. It takes away the
presentiments.
I suppose in general this is allowed, that if you have a nice question
of right and wrong, you would not go with it to Louis Napoleon, or to
a political hack, or to a slave-driver. The habit of mind of traders
in power would not be esteemed favorable to delicate moral perception.
American slavery affords no exception to this rule. No excess of good
nature or of tenderness in individuals has been able to give a new
character to the system, to tear down the whipping-house. The plea in the
mouth of a slave-holder that the negro is an inferior race sounds very
oddly in my ear. “The masters of slaves seem generally anxious to prove
that they are not of a race superior in any noble quality to the meanest
of their bondmen.” And indeed when the Southerner points to the anatomy
of the negro, and talks of chimpanzee,—I recall Montesquieu’s remark, “It
will not do to say that negroes are men, lest it should turn out that
whites are not.”
Slavery is disheartening; but Nature is not so helpless but it can
rid itself at last of every wrong.[145] But the spasms of Nature are
centuries and ages, and will tax the faith of short-lived men. Slowly,
slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely. The proverbs of the nations
affirm these delays, but affirm the arrival. They say, “God may consent,
but not forever.” The delay of the Divine Justice—this was the meaning
and soul of the Greek Tragedy; this the soul of their religion. “There
has come, too, one to whom lurking warfare is dear, Retribution, with a
soul full of wiles; a violator of hospitality; guileful without the guilt
of guile; limping, late in her arrival.” They said of the happiness of
the unjust, that “at its close it begets itself an offspring and does
not die childless, and instead of good fortune, there sprouts forth for
posterity ever-ravening calamity:”—
“For evil word shall evil word be said,
For murder-stroke a murder-stroke be paid.
Who smites must smart.”
These delays, you see them now in the temper of the times. The national
spirit in this country is so drowsy, preoccupied with interest, deaf to
principle. The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and strong and selfish. They
believe only in Anglo-Saxons. In 1825 Greece found America deaf, Poland
found America deaf, Italy and Hungary found her deaf. England maintains
trade, not liberty; stands against Greece; against Hungary; against
Schleswig-Holstein; against the French Republic whilst it was a republic.
To faint hearts the times offer no invitation, and torpor exists here
throughout the active classes on the subject of domestic slavery and its
appalling aggressions. Yes, that is the stern edict of Providence, that
liberty shall be no hasty fruit, but that event on event, population on
population, age on age, shall cast itself into the opposite scale, and
not until liberty has slowly accumulated weight enough to countervail
and preponderate against all this, can the sufficient recoil come. All
the great cities, all the refined circles, all the statesmen, Guizot,
Palmerston, Webster, Calhoun, are sure to be found befriending liberty
with their words, and crushing it with their votes. Liberty is never
cheap. It is made difficult, because freedom is the accomplishment and
perfectness of man. He is a finished man;[146] earning and bestowing
good; equal to the world; at home in Nature and dignifying that; the sun
does not see anything nobler, and has nothing to teach him. Therefore
mountains of difficulty must be surmounted, stern trials met, wiles of
seduction, dangers, healed by a quarantine of calamities to measure his
strength before he dare say, I am free.
Whilst the inconsistency of slavery with the principles on which the
world is built guarantees its downfall, I own that the patience it
requires is almost too sublime for mortals, and seems to demand of us
more than mere hoping. And when one sees how fast the rot spreads,—it is
growing serious,—I think we demand of superior men that they be superior
in this,—that the mind and the virtue shall give their verdict in their
day, and accelerate so far the progress of civilization. Possession
is sure to throw its stupid strength for existing power, and appetite
and ambition will go for that. Let the aid of virtue, intelligence and
education be cast where they rightfully belong. They are organically
ours. Let them be loyal to their own. I wish to see the instructed class
here know their own flag, and not fire on their comrades. We should not
forgive the clergy for taking on every issue the immoral side; nor the
Bench, if it put itself on the side of the culprit; nor the Government,
if it sustain the mob against the laws.[147]
It is a potent support and ally to a brave man standing single, or
with a few, for the right, and out-voted and ostracized, to know that
better men in other parts of the country appreciate the service and will
rightly report him to his own and the next age. Without this assurance,
he will sooner sink. He may well say, ‘If my countrymen do not care to
be defended, I too will decline the controversy, from which I only reap
invectives and hatred.’ Yet the lovers of liberty may with reason tax the
coldness and indifferentism of scholars and literary men. They are lovers
of liberty in Greece and Rome and in the English Commonwealth, but they
are lukewarm lovers of the liberty of America in 1854. The universities
are not, as in Hobbes’s time, “the core of rebellion,” no, but the seat
of inertness. They have forgotten their allegiance to the Muse, and grown
worldly and political. I listened, lately, on one of those occasions
when the university chooses one of its distinguished sons returning from
the political arena, believing that senators and statesmen would be glad
to throw off the harness and to dip again in the Castalian pools. But
if audiences forget themselves, statesmen do not. The low bows to all
the crockery gods of the day were duly made:—only in one part of the
discourse the orator allowed to transpire, rather against his will, a
little sober sense.[148] It was this: ‘I am, as you see, a man virtuously
inclined, and only corrupted by my profession of politics. I should
prefer the right side. You, gentlemen of these literary and scientific
schools, and the important class you represent, have the power to make
your verdict clear and prevailing. Had you done so, you would have found
me its glad organ and champion. Abstractly, I should have preferred that
side. But you have not done it. You have not spoken out. You have failed
to arm me. I can only deal with masses as I find them. Abstractions are
not for me. I go then for such parties and opinions as have provided me
with a working apparatus. I give you my word, not without regret, that I
was first for you; and though I am now to deny and condemn you, you see
it is not my will but the party necessity.’ Having made this manifesto
and professed his adoration for liberty in the time of his grandfathers,
he proceeded with his work of denouncing freedom and freemen at the
present day, much in the tone and spirit in which Lord Bacon prosecuted
his benefactor Essex. He denounced every name and aspect under which
liberty and progress dare show themselves in this age and country,
but with a lingering conscience which qualified each sentence with a
recommendation to mercy.
But I put it to every noble and generous spirit, to every poetic,
every heroic, every religious heart, that not so is our learning, our
education, our poetry, our worship to be declared. Liberty is aggressive,
Liberty is the Crusade of all brave and conscientious men, the Epic
Poetry, the new religion, the chivalry of all gentlemen. This is the
oppressed Lady whom true knights on their oath and honor must rescue and
save.
Now at last we are disenchanted and shall have no more false hopes. I
respect the Anti-Slavery Society. It is the Cassandra that has foretold
all that has befallen, fact for fact, years ago; foretold all, and no
man laid it to heart. It seemed, as the Turks say, “Fate makes that a
man should not believe his own eyes.” But the Fugitive Law did much to
unglue the eyes of men, and now the Nebraska Bill leaves us staring. The
Anti-Slavery Society will add many members this year. The Whig Party will
join it; the Democrats will join it. The population of the free states
will join it. I doubt not, at last, the slave states will join it. But
be that sooner or later, and whoever comes or stays away, I hope we have
reached the end of our unbelief, have come to a belief that there is a
divine Providence in the world, which will not save us but through our
own coöperation.