and cities, and corporations of the realm, and those illustrious institutions of learning, of science, of art, and of skill, of which he was the highest ornament and the inspiring spirit, have bowed before the throne under this great calamity. It does not become the Parliament of the country to be silent. The expression of our feelings may be late, but even in that lateness some propriety may be observed if tonight we sanction the expression of the public sorrow, and ratify, as it were, the record of a nation's woe. It is with these feelings that I shall support the address in answer to the speech from the throne. [WENDELL PHILLIPS.] IN AMERICA. these obstacles, had he not been subject to occasional distrust and misrepresentation, it would only have proved that he was a man of ordinary mould and temper. Those who move must change, and those who change must necessarily disturb and alarm prejudices; and what he encountered was only a demonstration that he was a man superior to his age, and admirably adapted to carry out the work he had undertaken. Sir, there is one point, and one point only, on which I would presume for a moment to dwell; and it is not for the sake of you, sir, whom I am now addressing, or for the generation to which we belong, but it is that those who come after us may not misapprehend the nature of this illustrious man. Prince Albert was not a patron. He was not one of those who, by their smiles and by their THE ANTI-SLAVERY AGITATION gold, reward excellence or stimulate exertion. His contributions to the cause of progress and improvement were far more MEN blame us for the bitterness of powerful and far more precious. He gave our language and the personality of our to it his thought, his time, his toil: he attacks. It results from our position. gave to it his life. I see in this House The great mass of the people can never many gentlemen-on both sides and in be made to stay and argue a long quesdifferent parts of it-who occasionally tion. They must be made to feel it, entered with the Prince at those council through the hides of their idols. When boards where they conferred and decided you have launched your spear into the upon the great undertakings with which rhinoceros hide of a Webster or a Benton, he was connected; and I ask them, with- every Whig and Democrat feels it. It is out the fear of a denial, whether he was not on this principle that every reform must the leading spirit-whether his was not take for its text the mistakes of great men. the mind that foresaw the difficulty, and God gives us great scoundrels for texts his the resources that supplied the remedy to anti-slavery sermons. See to it, when ---whether his was not the courage to over- Nature has provided you a monster like come apparently insurmountable obstacles, Webster, that you exhibit him-himself and whether everyone who worked with a whole menagerie - throughout the him did not feel that he was the real country. It is not often, in the wide originator of those great plans of improve-world's history, that you see a man so ment which they contributed to carry out. lavishly gifted by nature, and called, in Sir, we have been asked to-night to con- the concurrence of events, to a position dole with the Crown in this great calamity. like that which he occupied on the 7th That is no easy office. To condole in of March, surrender his great power, and general is the office of those who, without quench the high hopes of his race. the pale of sorrow, feel for the sorrowing; man, since the age of Luther, has ever but in this instance the country is as heart-held in his hand so palpably, the destistricken as its Queen. Yet, in the mutual nies and character of a mighty people. sensibilities of a Sovereign and a people He stood like the Hebrew prophet bethere is something ennobling, something that elevates the spirit beyond the ordinary claim of earthly sorrow. The counties, No twixt the living and the dead. He had but to have upheld the cross of common truth and honesty, and the black dis scale, shall kick the beam. Worship- Now, honour of two hundred years would have been effaced for ever. He bowed his vassal head to the temptations of the flesh and of lucre. He gave himself up into the lap of the Delilah of slavery, for the mere promise of a nomination, and the greatest hour of the age was bartered away,-not for a mess of pottage, but for the promise of a mess of pottage,-a promise, thank God! which is to be broken. I say it is not often that Providence permits the eyes of twenty millions of thinking people to behold the fall of another Lucifer, from the very battlements of Heaven, down into that "lower deep of the lowest deep" of hell. On such a text, how effective should be the sermon ! Let us see to it, that in spite of the tenderness of American prejudice, in spite of the morbid charity that would have us rebuke the sin, but spare the sinner, in spite of this effeminate Christianity, that would let millions pine, lest one man's feelings be injured,-let us see to What I want to impress you with is it, friends, that we be "harsh as truth the great weight that is attached to and uncompromising as justice;" re- the opinion of everything that can call membering always, that every single man itself a man. Give me anything that set against this evil may be another walks erect, and can read, and he shall Moses, every single thought you launch count one in the millions of the Lord's may be the thunders of another Napo- sacramental host, which is yet to come leon from the steps of another St. Roche; up and trample all oppression in the dust. remembering that we live not in an age The weeds poured forth in nature's lavish of individual despotism, when a Charles luxuriance, give them but time, and their the Fifth could set up or put down the tiny roots shall rend asunder the foundaslave-trade, but surrounded by twenty tions of palaces, and crumble the Pyramillions, whose opinion is omnipotent,- mids to the earth. We may be weeds in that the hundred gathered in a New comparison with these marked men ; but England school-house may be the hun- in the lavish luxuriance of that nature dred who shall teach the rising men of the which has at least allowed us to be other half of the continent, and stereo-"thinking, reading men," I learn, Webtype Freedom on the banks of the Pacific; remembering and worshipping reverentially the great American idea of the omnipotence of "thinking men," of the "sentiment of justice," against which no throne is potent enough to stand, no Constitution sacred enough to endure. Remember this, when you go to an anti-slavery gathering in a school-house, and know that, weighed against its solemn purpose, its terrible resolution, its earnest thought, Webster himself, and all huxtering statesmen, in the opposite ster being my witness, that there is no throne potent enough to stand against us. It is morbid enthusiasm this that I have. Grant it. But they tell us that this heart of mine, which beats so unintermittedly in the bosom, if its force could be directed against a granite pillar, would wear it to dust in the course of a man's life. Your Capitol, Daniel Webster, is marble, but the pulse of every humane man is beating against it. God will give us time, and the pulses of men shall beat it down. Take the mines, take the Har F wich fishing-skiffs, take the Lowell mills, take all the coin and the cotton, still the day must be ours, thank God, for the hearts-the hearts are on our side! There is nothing stronger than human prejudice. A crazy sentimentalism like that of Peter the Hermit hurled half of Europe upon Asia, and changed the destinies of kingdoms. We may be crazy. Would to God he would make us all crazy enough to forget for one moment the cold deductions of intellect, and let these hearts of ours beat, beat, beat, under the promptings of a common humanity! They have put wickedness into the statute-book, and its destruction is just as certain as if they had put gunpowder under the Capitol. That is my faith. That it is which turns my eye from the ten thousand newspapers, from the forty thousand pulpits, from the millions of Whigs, from the millions of Democrats, from the might of sect, from the marble government, from the iron army, from the navy riding at anchor, from all that we are accustomed to deem great and potent,-turns it back to the simplest child or woman, to the first murmured protest that is heard against bad laws. I recognise in it the great future, the first rumblings of that volcano destined to overthrow these mighty preparations, and bury in the hot lava of its full excitement all this laughing prosperity which now rests so secure on its side. All hail, Public Opinion! To be sure, it is a dangerous thing under which to live. It rules to-day in the desire to obey all kinds of laws, and takes your life. It rules again in the love of liberty, and rescues Shadrach from Boston CourtHouse. It rules to-morrow in the manhood of him who loads the musket to shoot down-God be praised!-the manhunter, Gorsuch. It rules in Syracuse, and the slave escapes to Canada. It is our interest to educate this people in humanity, and in deep reverence for the rights of the lowest and humblest individual that makes up our numbers. Each man here, in fact, holds his property and his life dependent on the constant pre All sence of an agitation like this of antislavery. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty: power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten. The living sap of to-day outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand intrusted with power, becomes either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity. clouds, it is said, have sunshine behind them, and all evils have some good result; so slavery, by the necessity of its abolition, has saved the freedom of the white race from being melted in the luxury or buried beneath the gold of its own success. Never look, therefore, for an age when the people can be quiet and safe. At such times Despotism, like a shrouding mist, steals over the mirror of Freedom. The Dutch, a thousand years ago, built against the ocean their bulwarks of willow and mud. Do they trust to that? No. Each year the patient, industrious peasant gives so much time from the cultivation of his soil and the care of his children to stop the breaks and replace the willow which insects have eaten, that he may keep the land his fathers rescued from the water, and bid defiance to the waves that roar above his head, as if demanding back the broad fields man has stolen from their realm. Some men suppose that, in order to the people's governing themselves, it is only necessary, as Fisher Ames said, that the " Rights of Man be printed, and that every citizen have a copy." As the Epicureans, two thousand years ago, imagined God a being who arranged this marvellous machinery, set it going, and then sunk to sleep. Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated. The anti-slavery agitation is an important, nay, an essential part of the machinery of the state. It is not a disease nor a medi cine. No; it is the normal state,-the normal state of the nation. Never, to our latest posterity, can we afford to do without prophets, like Garrison, to stir up the monotony of wealth, and re-awake the people to the great ideas that are constantly fading out of their minds, -to trouble the waters, that there may be health in their flow. Every government is always growing corrupt. Every Secretary of State is, by the very necessity of his position, an apostate. I mean what I say. He is an enemy to the people, of necessity, because the moment he joins the government, he gravitates against that popular agitation which is the life of a republic. A republic is nothing but a constant overflow of lava. The principles of Jefferson are not up to the principles of to-day. It was well said of Webster, that he knows well the Hancock and Adams of 1776, but he does not know the Hancocks and Adamses of today. The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any. The people are to be waked to a new effort, just as the Church has to be regenerated in each age. The anti-slavery agitation is a necessity of each age, to keep ever on the alert this faithful vigilance, so constantly in danger of sleep. We must live like our Puritan fathers, who always went to church, and sat down to dinner, when the Indians were in their neighbourhood, with their musket-lock on the one side and a drawn sword on the other. If I had time.or voice to-night, I might proceed to a further development of this idea, and I trust I could make it clear, which I fear I have not yet done. To my conviction, it is Gospel truth, that, instead of the anti-slavery agitation being an evil, or even the unwelcome cure of a disease in this government, the youngest child that lives may lay his hand on the youngest child that his grey hairs shall see, and say: "The agitation was commenced when the Declaration of Independence was signed; it took its second tide when the Anti-slavery Declaration was signed in 1833,-a movement, not the cure, but the diet of a free people,— not the homoeopathic or the allopathic dose to which a sick land has recourse, but the daily cold water and the simple bread, the daily diet and absolute necessity, the manna of a people wandering in the wilderness." There is no Canaan in politics. As health lies in labour, and there is no royal road to it but through toil, so there is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust. "In distrust," said Demosthenes, "are the nerves of the mind." Let us see to it that these sentinel nerves are ever on the alert. If the Alps, piled in cold and still sublimity, be the emblem of Despotism, the ever-restless ocean is ours, which, girt within the eternal laws of gravitation, is pure only because never still.- Wendell Phillips's Speech at the Boston Anti-slavery Society, 1852. [ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES. 1809-1865.] LAST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. March 4th, 1865. FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN : At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then, a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered swered-that of neither has been anfrom this place, devoted altogether to swered fully. The Almighty has His saving the Union without war, insurgent own purposes. "Woe unto the world agents were in the city seeking to destroy because of offences! for it must needs be it without war-seeking to dissolve the that offences come; but woe to that man Union, and divide the effects, by negotia- by whom the offence cometh." If we tion. Both parties deprecated war; but shall suppose that American slavery is one of them would make war rather than one of those offences which, in the prolet the nation survive; and the other would vidence of God, must needs come, but accept war rather than let it perish. And which, having continued through His the war came. appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him! Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." One-eighth of the whole population were coloured slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localised in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be an With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations. |