[44] balance, and that is, that our free North is utterly unendurable to the slaveholding South; that we have at last so far advanced in our love of liberty and sympathy for the oppressed, as a people, that it is not possible any longer for the “traffickers in slaves and souls of men ” to walk in union with us. I call that a very cheering fact. Yes, the Union is divided; but better division than that we should be under the lash of Southern overseers! Better civil war, if it must come, than for us to crouch in the dust, and allow ourselves to be driven to the wall by a miserable and merciless slave oligarchy! This war has come because of the increasing love of liberty here at the North; and although, as a people, we do not yet come up to the high standard of duty in striking directly at the slave system for its extirpation as the root and source of all our woe—nevertheless, the sentiment of the North is deepening daily in the right direction.
I hold that it is not wise for us to be too microscopic in endeavoring to find disagreeable and annoying things, still less to assume that everything is waxing worse and worse, and that there is little or no hope. No! broaden your views; take a more philosophical grasp of the great question; and see that, criticise and condemn as you may and should in certain directions, the fountains of the great deep are broken up—see that this is fundamentally a struggle between all the elements of freedom on the one hand, and all the elements of despotism on the other, with whatever of alloy in the mixture.
I repeat, the war furnishes ground for high encouragement. “Why,” some may exclaim, “we thought you were a peace man!” Yes, verily, I am, and none the less so because of these declarations. Would the cause of peace be the gainer by the substitution of the power of the rebel traitors over the nation for the supremacy of the democratic idea? Would the cause of peace be promoted by the North basely yielding up all her rights and allowing her free institutions to be overthrown? Certainly not. Then, as a peace man, I rejoice that the issue is at last made up, and that the struggle is going on, because I see in it the sign of ultimate redemption. . . .
I do not know that some margin of allowance may not be made even for the Administration. I would rather be overmagnanimous than wanting in justice. Supposing Mr. Lincoln could answer to-night, and we should say to him: “Sir, with the power in your hands, slavery being the cause of the rebellion beyond all controversy, why don't you put the trump of jubilee to your lips, and proclaim universal freedom?” —possibly
