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CCCI.

IDEAS THE LIFE OF A PEOPLE.

THE leaders of our Revolution were men of whom the simple

truth is the highest 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 visionaries, 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. is me!" cried the King," who is guilty of this crime?" 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.

"Woe

"There

G. W. Curtis.

THES

CCCII.

THE SAME CONCLUDED.

HESE 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.

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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 stepswith 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.

СССІП.

EMANCIPATION THE WAR POLICY OF THE PRESIDENT.

AT T 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 timehe 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.

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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 Grenville, 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.

AS

CCCIV.

THE DUTY OF THE HOUR.

S 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.

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