Various

“ In the full glow of civilization, with the accumulated experience of the toiling generations, with all the wealth of the fruitful past, we, 'the foremost in the files of time,' have been called to this business of nation making.
The men of our blood, they say, are given to boasting. America adds flashing nerve fire to the dull muscle of Europe. That is the fact. But the tendency to boasting is an honest inheritance. We can hardly boast louder than our fathers across the sea have taught us. The boasting of New York can scarcely drown the boasting of London. ”

“ So long as any State is in a belligerent and treasonable attitude, disclaiming and repudiating her obligations under the Constitution, she is obviously not entitled to the benefits of the system which she thus assails and defies. The State being sustained in rebellion by its whole people, it is vain to say the Government can only regard the people as individuals, for these are the State, and must be treated accordingly. But if, laying down her arms, or even after being conquered, a State returns to her allegiance, to reject her demands would be to admit that secession had been effectual. ”

“ The life of every great, strong man and woman, who has lived, thought, worked in the Nation, has it not entered into the Nation's life? Is not here yet, a part of the Nation's influence? Every great, distinct type of human nature grown in the Nation becomes forever a mould in which to cast men. Every great deed done, every strong thought uttered, every noble life lived, is committed to the stream of this national tradition. Every great victory won, every terrible defeat suffered, every grand word spoken, every noble song sung, is alive to the last. ”

“ The Nation's aims are wiser far and loftier far than the wisest and the loftiest of any one man, or any one generation.
We have faintly shadowed out here something of the meaning of The Nation. If we are right, we can pay no price that shall come near its value. For ourselves, for our children, for the ages coming, it is verily the Ark of the Covenant. We have seen that we are here to build it. Because God needed these United States, He kept a continent till the time was ripe, and then sent His workmen to the work. We are all, in our degree, builders on those walls. ”

“ They have no other thought than to inflict on us of the North the greatest amount of evil; the animus of deadly war. We, on the other hand, fight an unwilling fight, with a constant arrière pensée to the best interests of the people whom we oppose—not even as we might construe those interests, but, by a curious tenderness and refinement of delicacy, for those interests as they, from their point of view, conceive them to be. We forbear from striking the South in their most vital and defenceless point, while they forbear in nothing, and have no purpose of forbearance. ”

“ It is loyalty to slavery and to cotton. No other ideas exist, with any marked prominence, at the South. The Northern people have never understood the South, and their greatest danger in the present collision results from that ignorance. The difference between the two peoples is indeed so wide that it is not equalled by that which exists between any two nations of Europe—if we except, perhaps, the Western nations and the Turks. The single institution of slavery has, for the last sixty or seventy years, taken absolute possession of the Southern mind, and moulded it in all ways to its own will. ”

“ Everlasting distinctions must be taught by bolts, chains, and scaffolds, if there are those in the Nation who will learn them from no other teachers.'
It has been very easy to tamper with Law among ourselves, very easy to try experiments. And people get the notion that Law is a mere human affair, the act of a legislature, the will of a majority. It is all a mistake. A Nation's living laws are the slow growth of ages. They are its solemn convictions on wrongs and rights, written in its heart. The business of a wise legislator is to help all those convictions to expression in formal enactment. ”

“ It will be perceived that the question of right is here spoken of, and not the question of policy. No feeling of sympathy with a defeated people, not the thousand-fold natural ties that bind the North and the South, should blind our eyes to the main question of right. Any policy toward repentant rebels that is not magnanimous and honorably befitting our complete triumph, can never find favor with the American people, nor ought to; but the incalculably precious interests of the Nation will not admit of any uncertain precedents in regard to secession. ”

“ The Washingtons do live as types. Their deeds sweep on, like stately barks, borne proudly on the rolling waves of the Nation's life, with triumphal music on their snowy decks, the land's glory for evermore! Only the noble, only the good, the true in some shape, never the utterly false or vile, will this national tradition hold and keep, as an influence and a power for time. ”

“ God builds the Nation for a purpose. While it fulfils that purpose it shall stand. [Pg 606] The banded folly and scoundrelhood within and the gathered force of all enemies without shall never overthrow one pillar in its strong foundations or topple down one stone from its battlements while it works honestly toward its true end. Not till it turn traitor to its place and purposes, not till it madly plant itself in the way of the great wheels that roll the world back to light and justice, will He who built it hurl it to the earth again in crashing ruin, to build another order in its place. ”

“ No! thank Heaven for this virtue of patriotism! It lifts a man out of his lower nature, and makes his heart beat with the hearts of heroes. There are two or three things in the world men will die for. The Nation is one. They will die for the land where their fathers sleep. They will fling fortune, hope, peace, family bliss, life itself, all into the gulf, to save its hearths from shame, its roof trees from dishonor. ”

“ It is vastly better to take facts and try to comprehend and use them. And, as a fact, man is not naturally a brute beast. He never had to make a Social Compact. He has always found one made ready to his hand. Some established order, some national life has always stood ready to receive the new recruit to the ranks of humanity, put him in his place, and ask him no questions. He is made for society. Society is made for him. He is not isolated, but joined to his fellows by links stronger than iron, by bands no steel can sever. The nation stands waiting for him. ”

“ Any theory which would carry us to the absurd extreme of constituting a State of an inconsiderable number of men,—the paltry minority of a large population—would not be more objectionable to the good sense of the people, than irreconcilable with the fundamental principles of our complex government. Such a minority, however small, would be entitled to the protection and to the highest favor of the Government; and if they could be built up into a power sufficiently strong to maintain themselves in the State, then they would fairly be entitled to claim full recognition. ”

“ Admitting secession, our Constitution is, indeed, no stronger than 'a rope of sand.' We fight to maintain the Constitution as an Ordinance of Sovereignty (as it has been forcibly styled) over the whole Nation. We must so maintain it, or surrender our national existence. This being so, we cannot admit any such right as secession; for that would be to sanction the revolutionary [Pg 688] doctrine that a body of men, usurping a State Government, and calling themselves the State, can absolve their fellow citizens from their allegiance to the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. ”

“ Nay, all enactments which accord with these deep decisions of the National Conscience, which help them to better expression and clearer acknowledgment, are the real Laws of the Land. All that oppose these decisions, though passed by triumphant majorities, with loud jubilation, and fastened on the Nation as its sense of right, are mere rubbish, sure to be swept away as the waves of the National life roll on.
We, by no means, hold that even the best nation, in its most living laws, always declares perfect truth and perfect right. ”

“ We cannot guard too jealously the clear trumpet-tongued preacher of everlasting right, sounding out a great Nation's convictions of obligation and duty. Hedge its sanctity with a ring wall of fire. Reverence the voice of the land for right and order. We have exploded forever, let us trust, the notion of 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong.' We must cling, therefore, with tenfold tenacity to the right divine of Law, the Sacred Majesty of the Nation's settled Order. ”

“ Why is the South susceptible to this intense degree of offence at the ordinary contingency of defeat in a political encounter? Why, again, does the persistent discussion or agitation of any subject tend so specially to inflame the Southern mind beyond all the ordinary limits of moderation—to the denial of the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and finally of the right of national existence itself to the North—except in conformity with preconceived opinions and theories of its own? ”

“ Both of these great industrial peoples, with whom war had fallen among the traditions of the past, had to begin new struggles by learning anew the theory and practice of war. The Northern people rose, after the assault on Fort Sumter demonstrated to them that the South was in earnest, with the unanimity and power as of a single man, but bewildered and uncertain which way to turn, or how to grapple with the strange and unaccountable monster of rebellion which had suddenly precipitated himself among them. The whole habits of the nation had to undergo a violent and rapid change. ”

“ Let it be remembered that the State derives none of its rights from the Nation. How, then, can it be said to forfeit its rights to the Nation? The State is a separate and distinct organism, deriving its rights directly from the people within its territorial limit. They established it, and to them alone it is responsible. In the same manner, the people of the whole country, without regard to the territorial limits of States, established the Nation. ”

“ We are Americans because we have been made so by the national influence. Rome, in old time, moulded men after a certain type, and, with infinite small diversities, made them all Romans. Greece took them, and, on another model, made them Greeks. England has the artistic power, and kneads the clay of childhood into the grown up creature the world knows as an Englishman. France has the same power, and manufactures the Frenchman.
Now this moulding power, which every nation has, and the greatest nations the most markedly of all, comes mostly from what we call the National Tradition. ”

“ The patient blood blazes into lava, fire, the big muscles strain over the black cannon, the brawny arm guides the fire-belching tower of iron on the sea, and, when these people do fight, they fight, like the Titans when they warred with Jove, with a roar that shakes the spheres. They go at that as they do at everything. They fight to clear this confusion up, to settle it once for all, so it will stay settled, that they may go to their work again in peace. Fond of a clean job, they insist on making a clean job of their fighting, if they have to fight at all. ”

“ And the nation that, as a rule, takes 'mamma's darling' into its arms, and in twenty or thirty years makes him the best specimen of a man, is the most perfect nation and best fulfils a nation's purpose.
For the business of Education, which so many consider the schoolmaster's speciality, is a larger business than they think. The Family exists to do it, the Church exists to do it. It is the real business of the State. The great Universe itself, with all its vastness, its powers and its mysteries, was created for this. ”

“ Why were they of the South standing ready, as to their mental posture, for any or every rash and unadvised step? Why, again, are the Southern people uneducated and ignorant, as the predominant fact respecting a majority of their population? Why is the state of popular information in that whole region of a nominally free country, such as to make it an easy thing to impose upon their credulity and instruct them into a full belief in the most absurd and monstrous fabrications, or falsifications of the truth? ”

“ The two civilizations, North and South, are wholly unlike. Without the slavery of four millions of men, to be kept in subjection by a conspiracy to that effect, on the part of the whole free population—the lack of fidelity to which conspiracy is the only treason known in those regions—the existence of a people like the inhabitants of the Southern States would be a riddle incapable of solution. Slavery itself, is a remnant of barbarism overlapping the period of civilization ”

“ For the Confederate treason is more than treason against the United States: it is a crime against humanity, and a conspiracy in the interest of despotism, denying the royalty of man.
But, to return to our argument, a distinction is carefully to be noted between the consequences of rebellion to the individuals who engage in it and to the State which it assumes to control. It needs no argument to show that rebellion against the supreme power of a State does not necessarily affect the permanence of that power. If the rebellion fails, the rightful authority resumes its functions. ”

“ Does not the very meanest feel himself higher, more worthy, more self-respecting, because he is one of a strong, great, free people, with a grand inheritance of heroism from the past, and grand possibilities for the future? Who will quarrel with the Frenchman, the Englishman, or the Japanese, for holding his land the fairest land, his nation the noblest nation the sun shines on? ”

“ Everything is tolerated which does not interfere with it; nothing whatsoever is tolerated which does. No system of despotism was ever established on earth so thorough, so efficient, so all-seeing, so watchful, so permeating, so unscrupulous, and so determined.
The inherent, vital principle of slavery is irresponsible, despotic rule. The child is born into the exercise of that right; his whole mental constitution is imbued with its exercise. ”