Various

“ In reality, we have never yet given republicanism a fair trial upon this continent. With that dreadful curse and crime of slavery tearing at its heart and brain, how was it possible for equality and self-government to be anything else but a delusion and a mockery? This cleared out of our pathway, and we have enough virtue, intelligence, and wealth of physical resources in the land to realize the prophecy and the hope of all noble thinkers and believes on the planet, and place America first and foremost among the nations—the richest, the wisest, the best, and the bravest. ”

“ There will be no likeness, in any mirror of the past, to the American civilization that is to be. New manners, customs, thinkings, literature, art, and life, will mark our progress and attest the mission of the nation. We are fast outgrowing the ideas and influences of that brave company of Puritans out of whose loins our beginning proceeded; and already each man goes alone, insular, self-reliant, and self-sustained. We owe the Puritans a large debt, but it is altogether a pretty fiction to call them the founders of American civilization. ”

“ There is no luck nor chance in human events, but all things follow each other in the legitimate sequences of law. The American republic is no bastard, but a true son and heir of the ages; and sprang forth in all its bravery and promise from the mammoth loins of the very despotism which disowns and denounces it.
We have a full and perfect faith in the mission of this republic, which breaks open a new seal in the apocalypse of government, and unfolds a new phase in the destiny of mankind. Feudalism has had a sufficient trial, and, on the whole, has done its work well. ”

“ Over all the blessed land, asleep beneath the shadow of the Almighty hand, let the peace of God rest in benediction! 'Give peace in our time, O Lord!'
And yet the final clause to, every human prayer must be 'Thy will be done!' There are things better far than peace. There are things more loathely and more terrible than, the horror of battle and 'garments rolled in blood.' Peace is blessed, but if you have peace with hell, how about the blessedness? A covenant with evil is not the sort of agreement that will bring comfort. A truce with Satan is not the thing that it will do to trust. ”

“ The Man. O God! have mercy upon our unfortunate child, whom in Thine anger Thou hast doomed to madness and to an early death! Have pity on the innocent creature Thou hast Thyself called into being! Rob him not of reason! Ruin not the living temple Thou hast built—the shrine of the soul! Oh look down upon my agony, and deliver not this young angel up to hell! Me Thou hast at least armed with strength to endure the dizzying throng of thoughts, passions, longings, yearnings—but him! Thou hast given him a frame fragile as the frailest web of the spider, and every great thought rends and frays it. ”

“ That sort of patriotism that lives as well in peace time as in war time; that makes the heart throb as sympathetically in behalf of country every day in the year as on the Fourth of July; that leads us to conform our habits of life and thought to the spirit of our institution and policy; that makes us as jealous of the honor, the consistent greatness of our country when all men speak well of her, as when her foes are bent upon her destruction. This habit of mind is what I mean, rather than any transient emotion of heart; an enlightened and habitual spirit of patriotism. ”

“ No, there is nothing left for me now, of the things I used to know, except the little wren, whose song broke my heart this morning; and there is nothing here for me to care for, except that young grave in Georgetown, whose white cross bears but the initials and the date. I must now try to make myself a new life elsewhere, and to-morrow I go forth, shaking off the dust that soils my garments; hoping for the promise of the rainbow in this storm—and sure of the strength that will not fail me. O world! be better than thy wont to thy poor, weary child! O earth! ”

“ To-day we stand a self-centred nation. We have seen so much of English consistency, of English nobleness, we have so learned to prize English honor and English generosity, that there is not a living American, North or South, who values English opinion, on any point of national right, duty, or manliness, above the idle whistling of the wind. Who considers it of the slightest consequence now what England may think on any matter American? Who has the curiosity to ask after an English opinion? [Pg 367]
This much the war has done for us. We are at last a nation. ”

“ Who knows what indelible constitution may be, is, fixed upon the individual organism, for better, for worse, by the authors of its life, that, if evil, no training, no education, no work of grace, not even omnipotence, can expunge or alter? This motherhood of woman, in its awful sanctity and mystery, in its bearings upon the immortality of personal identity, is a fearful dignity. Therein consists the first and chief claim of Woman to honor and reverence. She who has been a mother has measured the profoundest as well as the most exalted experience of which humanity is susceptible. ”

“ If there is one truth that has been unmistakably developed by the war, it is the controlling moral power and sanction which a free government derives from woman. And this has been shown not only in the influence for good which the loyal women of the North have contributed for the aid of the Government, but with equal power in the influence for evil which the Southern women have exerted for its destruction. I suppose it is true that this war for slavery has received its strongest, fiercest continuing impulses from the women of the South. ”

“ Life sits upon the sepulchre, and sings over buried Death through all nature and all time. War, too, has its compensations.
For years, amid the world's rages, we had peace. The only war we had, at all events, was one of our own seeking, and a mere playing at war. Many of us thought it would be so always. We believed we had discovered a method of settling all the world's difficulties without blows. The peace people had their jubilee. They talked about the advance of intelligence, and the softening power of civilization. They placed war among the forgotten horrors of a dead barbarism. ”

“ Circumstances, that inflexible arbiter of human life, as it often seems, may strangely turn into wide and unaccustomed channels the love, the devotion, the energy, the self-sacrifice, that, in their pure, strong action, make woman's best development, and so the world, the needy people of the world, humanity at large, may receive the immediate benediction of it. Let no woman who, alone it may be, goes steadfastly on her way of duty and self-abnegation, think she has lived in vain because the special lot of woman has been denied her. ”

“ We are too young, as yet, to have become such a nation, with its distinctive and separate features, each clearly marked and self-illustrating; but not too young to understand the necessity of working out our own special plan of civilization. As the American nation did not follow the course of all others, by mounting from almost impalpable beginnings up through successive stages to an assured position of national influence and greatness; so need we not imitate them in waiting for gray hairs to see ourselves possessed of a distinct national character. ”

“ This is not the age nor ours the people to shun the fair discussion of any question, much less one which commends itself as of practical importance. This American people has proved, by the calm and patient consideration it has accorded to the advocates of woman's rights, that it has reached that lofty point in the progress of society at which woman is regarded as a positive quantity in the problem which society is working out, and it marks an era in the history of the sex, prophetic of the full enjoyment of all the rights which are hers by nature, or may be hers by favor. ”

“ We have found a conscience of our own. We have been forced to stand on our own national sense of right and wrong. We are independent morally as well as politically, in opinion as well as in government. We shall never turn our eyes again across the sea to ask what any there may say or think of us. We have found that perhaps we do not understand them. We have certainly found that they do not understand us. We have taken the stand which every great people is obliged to take soon or late. We are sufficient for ourselves. ”

“ Unselfish courage is noble, but always with the highest courage there lives a great pity and tenderness. The brave man is always soft hearted. The most courageous people are the tenderest people. The highest manhood dwells with the highest womanhood.
So the heart of the nation has been touched and softened, while its muscles have been steeled. While it has grasped the sword, it has grasped it weeping in infinite pity. It has recognized the truth of human brotherhood as it never did before. All ranks have been drawn together in mutual sympathy. ”

“ That the voluntary charity of Americans would count by millions yearly, would flow out in a steady, deep, increasing tide, that giving would be the rule, free, glad giving, and refusing the marked exception, the world would not have believed it, we would not have believed it ourselves. Is this nothing?
We will think more of each other also for all this. We will love and honor each other better. Under the awful pressure of the Hand that lies upon us so heavily, we are brought into closer knowledge and closer sympathy. The blows of battle are welding us into one. ”

“ We are a grown-up nation from this time forth. We answer for ourselves to humanity and the future. We decide all causes at our own judgment seat.
And there is another good, perhaps larger than this, which we have won, a good which contains and justifies this moral, national independence: We have been baptized at last into the family of great nations, by that red baptism which, from the first, has been the required initiation into that august brotherhood.
It seems to be the invariable law, of earthly life at least, that humanity can advance only by the road of suffering. ”

“ Courage, forethought, endurance, self-sacrifice, magnaminity, and a noble sense of honor, are a few of the virtues which we have cropped from the bloody harvest of the battle field.
It is true that wicked men are among us—for when did a company, godly or otherwise, engage in any work, and Satan did not also fling his wallet over his shoulder and set out with them for evil purposes of his own?—but after all, these are but a small minority, and their efforts to ruin the republic and bring defeat and dishonor upon the Federal arms, have not yet proved to be of a very formidable nature. ”

“ I glory in the anticipation of the time when the ardent, impulsive, demonstrative South shall even lead the colder North in the manifestation of a genuine patriotism, worthy of the land and nation that calls it forth. We shall then have gained a country, indeed, instead of being, as heretofore, several sections of a country.
The consistent moulding of society in the spirit of our political ideas is essential to securing us the respect of the world, and to vindicating the principles, themselves, on which having built, they are our sole claim to such honor and respect. ”

“ There is an American art—an American literature—an American society, as well as an American Government, to be shaped out of the abundant material we possess, and compacted into the enduring edifice of national renown. For what is national character, but ideas crystallized in institutions? Until we have done this—given permanency to our special ideas in our institutions—we are a nation in embryo; our manhood exists only in prophecy. ”

“ The nation's muscle was softening, its heart was hardening. If we were to become a great nation, we [Pg 368] needed more than commerce, more than plenty, more than rapid riches, more than a comfortable, indulgent life. If we were to be one of the world's great peoples, a people to dig deep and build strong, a people whose name and fame the world was to accept as a part of itself, we must look to pay the price inflexibly demanded at every people's hand, and count it out in sweat drops, tear drops, blood drops, to the last unit. ”

“ We are driven and drawn together by the sore need that is upon us, and as Americans are forgetting all else. The civil war is making us a people—the American People. We are no longer 'the loose sweepings of all lands,' as they called us. We are one, now, brethren all in the sacrament of a great sorrow.
And is this nothing?
And these goods and gains are permanent. They do not belong to this generation only, or to this time exclusively. After all, the nation is mainly an educator. These things remain, as parts of its moral influence in moulding and training. And here is their infinite value. ”

“ This, then, is the fourth step in the attainment of the true ideal of character for American women—the effort to renew society in the actual simplicity of our republican institutions. Women, American women, should hold dear as anything in life the preservation and purity of those blessed institutions, guaranteeing to them as they do all their eminent privileges, and founded as they are on that emancipating genius of Christianity, which, through every age, has pointed a finger of hope, love, encouragement to woman as a chief instrument in the world's promised elevation and enfranchisement. ”

“ War is a great evil. We may confess that, at the start. The Peace Society has the argument its own way. The bloody field, the mangled dying, hoof-trampled into the reeking sod, the groans, and cries, and curses, the wrath, and hate, and madness, the horror and the hell of a great battle, are things no rhetoric can ever make lovely.
The poet may weave his wreath of victory for the conqueror; the historian, with all the pomp of splendid imagery, may describe the heroism of the day of slaughter ”

“ Nay, rather, am I not to seize the first sufficient weapon that comes to hand, unloose the dogs upon him, and drive him to his lair again, or, better, bring his head in triumph home?
It is true, there are wars where this parable will not apply. There are capricious wars, wars undertaken for no fit cause, wars with scarce a principle on either side. Such have often been king's wars, begun in folly, conducted in vanity, ended in shame, wars for the ambition of some crowned scoundrel, who rides a patient people till he drives them mad. And even such wars have their uses. They are not wholly evil. ”

“ I begin, then, by dividing our whole conscious human life into two comprehensive departments, expressed by the generic terms, thought—feeling; reflection—spontaneity; knowledge—emotion; perception—reception; reason or intellect—affection or heart. The intelligent being unites these conditions—he is supreme in but one. Man reasons—woman feels; man analyzes—woman generalizes; man reaches his conclusions by induction—woman seizes hers by intuition. There is just the difference, in kind, between a man's mind and a woman's that there is between that of a man of genius and a man of talent. ”