The Liberator

The Justice of God in our National Calamities.

REMARKS OF PARKER PILLSBURY,
In the Convention at Albany, N. Y., Feb. 7th and 8th.

Reported by Henry M. Parkhurst.

This meeting, I think, is the most important this body ever held. I do not know that another like it will ever be held. Probably not. Before another winter comes round, events will doubtless have transpired essentially changing the character of this anniversary. I think the last Fourth of July was the last we shall ever celebrate in that form; and I hope this is the last meeting of this kind we shall hold. But, in order that it may be the last, one or two things must transpire: either the subjugation of the North to the Slave Power, which is not impossible; or else the recognition of the rights of all men, of so sublime a character that there shall be no need, certainly, of calling meetings for the purpose of abolishing slavery.

I do not wish to see this government prolonged another day in its present form. On the contrary, I have been for twenty years attempting to overthrow the present dynasty. I do not quite agree with some of my friends, that a change has taken place which releases me from my former course of action. If I do not misjudge the Constitution, whatever may have been its real character, it was never so much an engine of cruelty and of crime as it is at the present hour. It seems to me the present Administration is, on the one hand, the weakest, and on the other the wickedest, we have ever had. Mr. Buchanan's administration is under infinite obligations to it for casting its wickedness and imbecility so far into the shade.

I agree with all my friends in one particular, however we may differ in others: that the Government has the constitutional power to perform an act of humanity and justice which would release us from all further necessity for this kind of anniversary. But having the power, and it may not be too much to say the undisputed power, it seems to me that it becomes even more wicked than the South, in failing to do it.

Slavery is the sin and crime of the country. The present war is a just and most fearful retribution for that crime. The North is not willing yet to repent of its sin, or to admit that this war is a retribution. And when you ask the North to let the people go, it answers, almost in the language, quite in the spirit of the ancient tyrant, "Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice, and let the people go?" I have no hope of any salvation to the North until it is first convicted of its own guilt in its terrible complicity with the great sin and crime of slavery.

I am far from being satisfied that the South is the more guilty party of the two. All the superiority that is claimed, on the part of the North, operates, in my judgment, just so far against the North in the scale of moral responsibility. Have we the power? Then why, in God's name, is not slavery swept away? Have we more light and knowledge, then why do we not act up to that light and knowledge, and repent; and arrest the most daring crime ever committed under the bright sun of heaven? Have we the majority, the wealth, the cultivation, everything that pertains to national greatness? Then is our guilt exactly proportioned to our superiority. I can attribute, therefore, only to Pharaohism or perverseness the longer continuance of slavery. It seems to me that one Edward Everett, one Southside Adams, one Dr. Lord, outweighs in guilt and moral responsibility a thousand ordinary slave-owners in the Carolinas or in Louisiana. Yet all that I can see in the North is the spirit of Pharisaism, saying to the South, "I am holier than thou."

Slavery is said to be the cause of the war. What is the cause of slavery? I remember my first lesson in theological investigation was to prove the existence of a God; and I found the argument summed up in this: that everything must have a cause. That cause is God. Here is the universe; it must have a cause. But I told the Professor I was not satisfied with the argument, for it seemed to me an infidel would ask me if God could any more exist without a cause than a universe, and I should not know how to answer him. He drew his face down, and replied, "Ah, but God is an uncaused being." I said that another man might say, "Ah, but the universe is an uncaused universe."

So slavery must have had a cause as well as the war. I look for that cause not in the South alone, but in the more highly cultivated North; and the North I hold responsible accordingly.

I cannot join in the congratulations I so often hear as to the hopefulness of the signs of the times. I do not want to see hopefulness. I am not rejoiced at tidings of victory to the Northern army. I would far rather see defeat. Not that I want to see our troops massacred, or to see them imprisoned; nay, Heaven and humanity forbid! but upon the same ground that a physician, wisely administering medicine, accepts the agonies and contortions of his patient, which are always produced by administering heroic treatment.

I rejoice in defeat and disaster rather than in victory, because I do not believe the North is in any condition to improve any great success which may attend its arms. I think the Abolitionists fail sufficiently to recognize one great fact; and that is, the persistent, determined, heaven-provoking impenitence of the North. The hatred of the colored race, the hatred of the Abolitionists, the willingness to continue the slave system, the intense desire to get back to our prosperous peddling with Great Britain and other nations, and with one another; all these are to my mind indications that we are in no condition to hear of success; that the God who judges righteously must hold us responsible for the cries and groans of the slave to-day, even beyond the immediate perpetrators of the crime of slavery upon the soil of the South. Whatever man may decree, the God of justice reigns and will reign, and we cannot compromise away any of the penalties due to violated law.

Holding these opinions, I do not desire success to the Northern army. I do not wish to see Abraham Lincoln triumph over the South in the way he has himself marked out. Mr. Seward assures us, and it is "published by authority," that "the condition of no human being is to be changed, whether the revolution succeeds, or whether it fails." I say, then, let us have war; let us have all its disasters and all its defeats, if the condition of the slave is not to be changed. If that is treason, I must let the Government make the most of it, and send me to Fort Warren; and if they do not treat me worse than they treat the traitors, spies and rebels there, and are as prompt to release me upon the application of my friends, my condition will not be very greatly to be deplored. (Laughter.)

It is said by some philosophers to be more natural to laugh than to weep. Certainly, it is more pleasant. But it is of no use to overlook the true condition of the country and let us not undertake, in the old Hebrew language, to "heal the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly." God is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. In the history of the Jews at the time of their captivity, I find a marvellous analogy to the history of our country to-day. I find a Seward and a Lincoln; boasting churches and false prophets; and Garrisons, too, and Cheevers, among the historic men of that day. The popular men of that period are pretty much mixed up with the mould and waste of the past, and there is little of them left. But there were prophets who were true to their time, whose writings have come down to us; and I take my stand by the side of those old Hebrews, Isaiah and Jeremiah, and I would call for justice, as Isaiah complained that none did then call for justice.

Jeff. Davis is not to-day the foe most to be feared. It is the Jehovah of Hosts against whom this Government is contending, and it is determined to carry on the battle against that terrible foe! If Gen. Fremont will not act with it, Gen. Fremont must be disgraced and removed: while the basest, most truculent spirits of slavery are exalted to posts of honor and power.

Our work as Abolitionists is plain work. I do not see that it is changed. It is not numbers that we want in order to succeed. Christianity was never more triumphant than when it was incorporated in one person, and He nailed to the cross. The virtue of the victim set the cross on fire, and it became a beacon-light to illumine the generations. And if the Anti-Slavery cause to-day were incorporated in the person of but one individual, and he doomed to the fate of John Brown, its glorious triumph would be no less assured.

I hope we shall not mistake our calling. Government is mistaken, but we should not be. Congress is evidently blind as moles and bats, but we should not be. The Church and the ministry of our land are as blind as the Government, but we should not be: else, if the blind undertake to lead the blind, of course we shall fall into the ditch together. Until this Government makes atonement for the injustice done the slave and his race, the injustice done to Fremont, the injustice done to the Anti-Slavery cause, I shall hold it the enemy of liberty, and of course the enemy of God. For one, I am not disposed to be identified with it. Rather let me die the death of the righteous.

I said the Church is as blind as the rest. The pulpit to-day knows nothing of the demands of the law of God. George B. Cheever seems almost alone to remain. At any rate, I know of no other pulpit-occupant worthy to stand by his side. Somebody asked me the other day, "Won't they soon be arraigning Dr. Cheever before the Consociations?" I said, perhaps they might; but it seemed to me quite time that the Consociations were arraigned before Dr. Cheever.

We have all sinned, North and South. The Church might have known it, must have known it; but the Church does not call the Government to repentance. It has been giving the country a religion of so monstrous a character, that to-day it is in the field butchering the same brethren with whom it was last year in Christian fellowship and communion. It is all the same to the Northern pulpit and the Northern Church, whether they break the sacramental roll with their Southern brethren, or dash out their brains with the butt end of their muskets. The Church and the clergy pray for good luck on both occasions alike, and in both armies alike.

Last year, we were endeavoring to sever the connection between the North and South. Last January, upon the first Sunday of the year, the whole Church of the land met, as is its wont, at the sacramental table, in full fellowship, North and South, claiming kindred under one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. The Abolitionists protested against it, demanding of the North that it separate itself from the cup of devils; that it come out from such a synagogue of Satan, and wash its garments clean of the blood of the slave. The North would not hearken. The North despised us and our warning, trampled upon our testimony, and rushed to the sacramental feast; the South joining in the solemn sacramental supper. But God saw it; heard our testimony, too, I trust. And he said, or seemed to say, "Yet a little while longer, and I will arise, and make bare my own arm." In six months, or a little more, from that day, on a summer Sunday, in the following July, the Almighty did arise in the majesty of his might, and seizing the Church of the North as in his right hand, and the Church of the South in his left hand, at Manassas Junction he dashed them together, and gave them their last sacrament in each other's blood.

And yet, to-day, the Church of the North does not seem to know that in that hour she was abandoned of God. But we know it. If we know the works and ways of God, we know that a Church, any Church, that can thus eat the communion bread upon one Sabbath, and go to butchering each other with bayonets and bomb-shells on the next, must be an abomination in His sight. Yet that is the Church of this land; and the Government of the country is what might be expected from such a religion. The law and the government of God are set at naught, nay, defied.

It seems to me that it is for us most emphatically, in this hour, to distinguish between him who knows and endeavors to keep the law of God, and him who sets it at defiance. I come here for the purpose of vindicating what seem to me to be the doctrines of the Most High. I have no faith, no hope, in any victory, in any success, until the North is first made conscious of its sin. When it is, repentance, reform, atonement, justice done, will be the first fruits of that knowledge. When that comes, when we shall learn to recognize the difference between human constitutions and unions and the demands of God's law, then there will be hope. Until that time, I look for nothing, I can hope for nothing, but defeat. It is certainly better that the penalty due to crime be executed, no matter what becomes of the criminal; better for him—better for all. Bitter, fearful, direful as the consequences of sin may be, it is better that those consequences be visited upon us, and that the North, the State and the Church, should come into the knowledge and acknowledgment of these high and holy doctrines and demands. Then, and not before, shall I feel that the time has come for us to take or to preach hope and encouragement.

I wish to correct the misapprehension of the clerical gentleman who followed me. [Alluding to a review of a previous speech.] He said I had assailed the Church of Christ. His Church of Christ, it may be. I do not know that it is his prerogative to decide for me what constitutes the Church of Christ. I see certain men eating the communion bread and drinking the sacramental wine. Six months afterwards, I see those same men, with rifle, cannon and columbiad endeavoring to destroy as many of each other as they possibly can. If that is the Church of Christ, then I plead guilty to the charge of my friend. I spoke of Dr. Cheever as a worthy preacher of the gospel of truth. I did not say how many more were worthy; but I only knew Dr. Cheever. Outside of the popular Church, I know several others: my friend, Beriah Green, before me, for one; and I could name a few in my native State, Massachusetts. But the general statement will defy all criticism, that what is regarded as the American Church and the American pulpit is to-day in deadly hostility, North against South. We, the Abolitionists, never asked the Church of the North to mob or harm the Church of the South. The Abolitionists never mobbed anybody, or countenanced the mobbing of anybody. I never heard of such a thing as a mobocratic Abolitionist. We simply asked her to come out from a fellowship and sacramental communion with the traffickers in slaves, in the bodies and souls of men: with brethren who bought and sold the image of God in the market, whose sacramental vessels were bought with the blood of the slave-mother's child, and filled with wine purchased with the proceeds of her unpaid toil. The Northern Church would not heed us. She reviled and persecuted us. She hated us. She did not even seek to reclaim and save us, as she did ordinary sinners, but branded us as outcasts from the grace of God. The Church of the South she held as bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh, spirit of her spirit. We asked the North to separate from her. She would not do it. By-and-bye, God himself seemed to take the matter into his own hands. He said, I have sent you my servants, the prophets, and ye would not hear them. Behold, I work a work among you, at the very name of which the ears that hear shall tingle. And, as I said, the Church of the North is lifted and dashed against the Church of the South, and they are bathing their deadly bayonets in each other's blood. To call that the Church of Christ is a scandal to that sacred name. It is a blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. The man, to me, is a monster who can do it, in the light of the present hour. Is that a Church of Christ that has defied the demands of God for thirty years, until He has made it its own executioner? He himself has scattered it; scattered it, so to speak, in ghastly corpses on the ground; and the verdict of the moral universe on them is, and shall be forever: "Death by the visitation of God!"

It is time for us to speak the truth I think, with our excellent friend President Green, it is for us not to take counsel of flesh and blood. These are holy, sublime, righteous principles; let them be affirmed. Why is it that such multitudes are down in the mist, the murky darkness to which Mr. Pryne referred? Why, but for the reason that hypocritical priests and despicable politicians have had the training of them from generation to generation? The multitude sit in the region and shadow of death! Why is it thus? I turn again to my old oracles, the prophets, and the answer is the same: "Like people, like priest;" "I bade thee feed my people with the bread of knowledge, and behold ye have filled them with lies and deceit!" I tell you, Mr. Chairman, when the Church and the ministry understand the Bible as well as babes and sucklings understand it, until poisoned with their teachings, the world will be the better for it.

A year ago, I endeavored to warn the people against what we now see. The Republican party was then flushed with victory, and still more with prospective emoluments, and place, and prerogative, when its candidate should occupy the chair of the Chief Magistracy of the nation. I told them that their victory was not yet complete. They had, indeed, elected their Presidential candidate: but their ballots were only a paper currency, and before the Administration could proceed, or be recognized over the country, that paper currency must be redeemed by a specie payment of solid leaden and iron bullets. They laughed at such warnings, and mobbed me all winter for uttering them. From Boston to the Mississippi river, I passed through one succession of mob violence. The only two instances that came to my knowledge, through that long and dreary winter, of the protection of Anti-Slavery meetings from mobs, were by the aid of a Democratic Mayor of this city at our last annual meeting, and of a Democratic magistrate in the State of Iowa. From the beginning of the winter campaign until the inauguration of President Lincoln, (if that event can in any sort of propriety be said to have yet transpired,) was a succession of mobs of Republican manufacture or of Republican maintenance. Mob law reigned until Abraham Lincoln was compelled to flee upon the under-ground railroad from Harrisburg to Washington, to escape its violence: and the mob has ruled him and his administration from that hour to this. Jeff. Davis has more power, to-day, in New York and New England, than Abraham Lincoln and all his Cabinet, and all his army. He has more power by far than he could have had, if he had been regularly elected and regularly installed in the Presidential chair. He has but to speak, and it is done. He has but to command, and the very army stands fast. They tell of the clay mud of the Virginia roads. I tell you that a deeper and more impenetrable mud than that prevents the advance of our armies upon the seceded banditti of the South.

You have convicted I know not how many men of being spies and traitors. You have even had Mason and Slidell in custody. You have convicted seventeen men, in this State, of the most high-handed piracy. Yet those men are just as safe from harm, in the bosom of Abraham Lincoln's administration, as if they were safe smuggled in the bosom of the patriarch Abraham in the kingdom of heaven. You dare not hurt a hair of their heads. At this very moment you have 700,000 men in arms; and yet the South laughs at your pretensions. Her ragged ruffians are, perhaps, scarcely one to your five; and yet, in the hands of Jeff. Davis, they are, to this hour, omnipotent to control the destinies of this nation.

John Brown, and his twenty white men, and two or three black men, at Harper's Ferry, were more a terror to all the South, than Gen. McClellan and his myriads of men. (Applause.) And why? Because the South knew full well that he had a purpose—an almighty, a divine purpose—and your government has not; that, though Abraham Lincoln is nominally President of the United States, she herself holds the sceptre of almost supreme dominion. What gave John Brown such omnipotence, and such omnipresence, too, all through the South? Simply this, that every tyrant had a John Brown in his own bosom, against whom he could not fight. It is conscience that makes cowards of us all. We are arrayed against the Almighty, and therefore it is that we cannot prevail.

One of the resolutions of Mr. Garrison affirms that the government has now the constitutional power to do a righteous action. Some of our friends believed that it had the power before. Gerrit Smith has always believed that the government had the power to abolish slavery under the Constitution. I have not so believed. But now the government has undeniably the power; and it lacks the other more important thing—the disposition. We are a nation of atheists, governed by a President and Cabinet of downright practical atheists. The National Assembly of France, in the days of Robespierre, it is said, voted God from his throne. But we have done worse than they: for they enshrined Reason as God instead, at any rate, and, in obedience to it, began their new government by striking every fetter from every slave throughout the French dominions. The Abolitionists of this country have been branded for the last thirty years as atheists; but I fear we are the only men who believe in the Divine existence or the Divine government.

Are not the President and his Cabinet, to-day, at the head of this nation, defying the God of heaven? Moses [turning to Mr. Garrison] demands that he let the people go; and in the true spirit of his illustrious predecessor of four thousand years ago, the President answers, Who is the Lord, that I should obey Him?

We were told, yesterday, that the mass of the people could not comprehend our friend, President Green, when he was simply carrying principles and laws which everybody recognizes in material things up into the region of conscience and the higher law. Men are loyal to the laws of the material universe as soon and as far as they know them. The agriculturist, the mechanic, the engineer, the navigator, every one who employs the great forces of nature, respects the laws and keeps them. Whosoever shall keep the whole law of the steam-engine, and yet offend in one point, soon finds that he is guilty of all, in the explosion that scatters his engine and the fragments of his own mutilated body in every direction.

Our friend Green was endeavoring to lead men up into the region of conscience and the moral laws of the universe; and was insisting upon the same loyalty and obedience there. The great difficulty with our Government officers is, that they are unwilling to believe in a God whose laws are the same, whether they pertain to a grain of shifting sand on a distant shore, or the whirling of the celestial orbs in infinite space, or throb in the breasts of cherubim and seraphim before the eternal throne. If we could but know and feel that the law of God is one and the same, whether it pertains to matter or to mind, to the material world or the region of universal conscience and moral being, that wisdom, that grace controlling our actions would be our present and everlasting salvation.

But the people perish for lack of knowledge. Forty thousand pulpits have not yet taught them the first lessons in the government of God. We prefer to be wrestling with the dragon of secession in the South. John Brown, like a mighty angel, came down as from heaven, and if the powers would have permitted, would have bound that dragon for a thousand millennial years and forever! You seized that first, grandest hero of the nineteenth century, and hung him upon a cross; the sublimest as well as saddest spectacle since the scene upon Calvary, that veiled the very heavens in sackcloth and darkness. John Brown taught us the way; but the people would not learn. He came, the very God made flesh, and pointed the road, but the people and the Government would not walk therein. He was, almost literally, the way and the truth, and he would have been the life, but the nation was not worthy. I sometimes think that, on that fearful morning, the 2d of December, 1859, as he bowed his head and gave up the ghost, that the recording angel wrote in the ledgers of heaven, of this nation: "It is finished." From that hour to this, disaster and distress have followed us, and we are wildly, madly pursuing the same career which has destroyed so many nations in the past. I almost hear, to-day, coming up from the abyss of the dark eternities below, the voices of Nineveh and Babylon, of all those long-since buried empires, fallen beneath their own crimes, cruelties and oppressions, screaming in our ears the lamentation of the Hebrew minstrel, "Oh Lucifer, son of the morning, how art thou, too, fallen, and become like unto us!"

Mr. Garrison says, "The war is upon us; and it is because there is a God." When he made that remark, I thought that should be my text, if I should speak to-night. The Abolitionists have always believed it. Other people in the country have not been so ready to believe. They have professed belief, but they have not really believed. There is always, in every country—and in all past time I think it is true— a class of men, greater or smaller in number, as the case may happen to be, who believe interiorly, with the whole heart and soul, in the Divine existence and government. They preach in accordance with that belief. They act in accordance with that belief. They endeavor to illustrate that important article of their faith, in all they say and do. Thirty years ago, the Anti-Slavery enterprise demanded the liberation of the slaves, in the name of humanity, and in accordance with the law of the ever-living God. That was the whole gospel of Anti-Slavery, and until this hour it has been the whole gospel of Anti-Slavery. Men have not believed that there was a God who hearkened to the cry of the oppressed. Now He is vindicating His own character and government; visiting our nation with the severest judgments, and endeavoring by this, His last manifestation, the very last with which He ever addresses or approaches any people, to rescue and save this guilty nation from deserved destruction. The remaining work of the Abolitionists is to assert that great truth. We have no other truth to proclaim. Argument has ceased with us. God is here now in righteous judgments; and it is for us to declare this, and to vindicate them. If the people will hearken, well; if not, then the consequences must inevitably be visited upon themselves.

Yesterday, President Green, in some remarks, vindicated the demands of the higher law in the highest and divinest sense of those demands. I was glad of his, to me, most instructive, nay, more, most sublime utterance of the sublimest truths in the whole gospel of God. The trouble with the North is, that it does not recognize the hand of God in this visitation. You want to hear of glorious victories; crushing out the rebellion; the stars and stripes; rebel Southerners seized, imprisoned, and hung, or whatever you think they deserve. The South deserves all this. But does the South deserve it at our hands? Who are we of the North, that we should attempt to execute the judgments of the Most High on our Southern fellow-sinners? Might we not say to day, in the language of one of England's proudest poets? -

"Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land
On each I judge thy foe."

Once there was a man travelling up and down, preaching righteousness to the people. He was in the midst of men who fancied they were righteous while they despised others; and they brought into his presence a sinner, taken in a crime, and informed him what their law demanded,—namely, that such should be stoned. His ruling was, "Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone." What did he mean by that? Simply this, I suppose: if you judge others, and visit judgments upon others, be sure you do it with clean hands.

Now, this war is upon us. It is upon us because there is a God, as Mr. Garrison well said. But if we properly and duly consider this one fact, that slavery is the cause of the war, we shall see that there is also a cause of slavery. And what is that cause? Who instituted it and planted it in the Constitution of the country? Who has protected it by solemn guarantees, from that hour to the present? Who has enacted and executed Fugitive Slave laws, from 1793 down to 1850? Who has repealed the Missouri Compromise in behalf of slavery? Who has purchased Louisiana and Florida, and conquered Texas at its bidding? Who has elected the Presidents? Who has appointed the Judges of the Supreme Court? Who has executed the Fugitive Slave law for the last ten months? Who has interpreted the Bible? Who has found justification for slave-breeders and slave-traders in both the Old Testament and the New; in patriarchal example, in prophetic approval, in diviner sanction still, by the silence of Christ; and, as a climax of the argument, the sending back by the apostle Paul of a fugitive slave to his master? Who has done all this?—because, it seems to me, the answer to these questions is the answer to the other question, Who are the cause of slavery? So that, when I examine the subject in the light of the highest truth I can discover or comprehend, I have to go back to the North, and lay the guilt of this monstrous system at the door of the Northern people, Northern Churches, and Northern pulpits. Verily, ye are the men.

Suppose there were fifty persons somewhere in your vicinity, instituting and carrying on, from year to year, a system of high-handed robbery and burglary; carrying on their plundering operations in every part of New York and New England, extending their depredations to Canada and the West, or whatever plunder might be found. And suppose, some morning, twenty-five of them should awake, and find that the other twenty-five, in the course of the night, had stolen the horses, saddles, bridles, powder, pistols, and all the furniture of the whole establishment, and had made off to parts unknown. Suppose that they should say, "We must get hold of the fleetest horses we can steal from the nearest stables, and ride at the top of their speed, until we overtake those brethren of ours, and we must, if possible, win them back, and if not, drive them back into the confederation." They go out and overtake them, and say, "Come back, come back; we always thought that there was honor among thieves, if nowhere else. You have stolen the property and made off with it, and set up on your own account. Were we not doing a prosperous and glorious business? Were we not making ourselves rich and powerful? And with our money have we not always been benevolent and philanthropic? Nay, more, were we not spreading the gospel, converting the heathen, and rapidly millennializing the world? Were we not endowing orphan and insane asylums, founding theological seminaries, building churches and hospitals for the poor, and filling the whole world with the grandeur and glory of our achievements? And here you have upset it all, by stealing our horses, and bridles, and saddles, and powder, and pistols, and gone off and set up on your own account. Did not our fathers set us up in business? Did not they steal 500,000 horses to begin with? Have not we multiplied seven or eight fold in capital? Were we not paying enormous dividends upon our stock in trade? And now, like fools, and knaves, and villains, almost, you have broken everything all up! Here are, all flat, and nothing can be done. The hopes of the world, the millennial prospects and desires and anticipations of the whole Church of Christendom are blasted and disappointed. Repent of your folly, and canter back in the quickest possible time; and let us join hands again, and proceed as before with our business."

Some of you look up to me as though you understood my illustration. I think myself it goes pretty nearly on all fours, and I will not carry it any farther. This is, to be sure, a somewhat lively view of what, after all, I regard as the most sublime spectacle of iniquity the history of mankind ever exhibited. We framed our Government in injustice. We built up our temple on crime and cruelty. Perhaps our fathers thought they were doing well. There is this defence, at least, to be made for them. They had just escaped from the power of the British Government, and almost all Europe was combined against them to crush the upspringing spirit of freedom in the western hemisphere. To make a Union, even though slavery were an element, seemed to them necessary, at least for a time: though expecting that all the States would ultimately, as your State of New York and some others have done, at the earliest possible period, sweep that system of abominations away forever. That is their best defence; and perhaps it is defence enough; for I do not believe that New York or New England had any members in the Convention that framed the Constitution of the United States, who loved slavery for its own sake, or who intended that slavery should be perpetual in the country. No, my friends, let us take a brighter and better view of the subject, and believe that in their distress, in their extremity, they built up the best government they could. But let us remember that they laid their foundations upon the hearts, and the hopes, the bodies and the spirits of immortal beings.

Missionaries come home and tell us of a heathen pagoda in the East, of seventy proud columns, every column resting upon a human skull, the skull of a victim offered at its base when the fabric was reared. Our fathers laid their foundations, not upon seventy but upon half a million crushed immortal spirits, and half a million bodies framed by the hand of God. There was the terrible injustice and oppression. And all the time, we are assured that our Government was based upon compromises, and must consequently be carried on by compromises. Compromise is a beautiful word in the right place. I have seen it when it looked well, even in the newspaper. But when applied to American politics, I see no beauty or comeliness in it. Compromise is good in its place. I saw a gardener pulling up beautiful flowers, and throwing them away. I asked him why he did so. "Why," said he, "they are weeds." "But," said I, "those are beautiful flowers." "Yes," said he, "but everything is a weed, out of its place." Compromise out of its place is always a weed, may be poisonous, deadly, to whatever government it may chance to belong.

Two men may try to adjust a dispute by compromise, in settling the boundaries of their land. One may say to the other, "Set this stake here, and that one there, and we shall have a better line of division: it will make your wood-lot better there, and it will bring water into my pasture here, and we shall both be benefitted; and that will adjust our trouble." "Very well," says the other; "I am glad you thought of it; for it will benefit us and our children after us." Thus they compromise the matter, and settle it. But suppose the second man says, "No; I have another compromise to propose. There is a poor fellow with land next to ours, and if we take off a strip of that and annex it, it will give you water in your pasture, and give me a good wood-lot. So let us stretch our boundary line two rods over into his land. He is a poor fellow and has no friends, no money, no nothing, and cannot help himself; everybody hates him, and we shall both be benefitted by that, and get just what we both need." What kind of a compromise is that? Is there any beauty or comeliness in the word there? Is it not rather a blasphemy against the holy spirit of truth and justice, thus to trample upon the rights of the helpless poor?

Now, what did your fathers do? They seized half a million immortal beings, poor, friendless, hated, despised, down-trodden, and they compromised them and their children after them forever, not for their benefit, but for the benefit of the nation that thus despised and oppressed them. There is where our difficulty is. O there is a God in heaven, who remembers, who can never forget, the cries of the suffering, friendless poor! There is our grand difficulty at this hour, and I know no hope for us while we are thus fighting, not against Jeff. Davis, but against the God of heaven and earth. How can we prosper? I do not care if you multiply your soldiers tenfold more, and take half your ministers and make chaplains of them to pray in concert for victory; it will avail nothing. There is but one triumph; and that is the triumph of justice—the triumph of truth.

What was one of the divinest and yet saddest lamentations of the ancient Hebrew poet? If I were a minister, I think I would take those words for my text for a whole summerfull of Sundays—“None calleth for justice.” Sometimes I have a good mind to go back into the pulpit, just to let the people know that one truth, that there is a God who loves justice; for the pulpits seem to know nothing of Him. Why is it that the people, to-day, grope in darkness, seeing no light? Why is it that we are, to-day, held in the iron grasp, so to speak, of the Slave Power at the South? Our friend, Mr. Garrison, asked us, “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?” No; you have tried it. But if you hold on to your line of connection, the Leviathan will draw you in, instead, and drown you forever. (Applause.)

My only ground of discouragement is, not that the people are not all right at heart; because I do not believe in the doctrine of total depravity. I know the pulpits have preached it a good while, judging mankind, I suppose, by themselves. But I do not believe in that doctrine. All I want is to get at the young, unsophisticated mind and soul of the people, and pour into that soul the divine truths of the eternal God; and I will be accountable for any slavery that will survive after that. It is because none calleth for justice that we are to-day struggling with a power too mean and despicable for our steel; too dastardly a foe for us to fight, only that we also are in the same condemnation and degradation.

What is the South? I do not believe in the mighty armies of Beauregard, with which the newspapers terrify the old ladies in pantaloons, up and down New England and New York. How was it that Munson Heights were taken? We were told what a mighty army invested that field; but by some strange circumstance, when we managed to pluck up courage enough to march there, behold there was no army, and had not been for twenty-four hours, nor a single gun except those made of logs of wood painted to resemble cannon. Half the armies of the South are myths.

Give me one John Brown, with ten thousand such men as he led to Harper's Ferry, and I will plant the stars and stripes in every city in all the South. (Applause.) It is all a lie—this talk about the power and pluck of the South. I do not believe in it. Our difficulty is that we dare not take the South at her word. While she strikes for slavery, we dare not parry her thrust, and strike for freedom. When we do that, there is no doubt upon which side victory will smile.

How is it now? We have been told how many men the South had, what immense armies, arsenals, what military resources, what prowess, what courage, and all that. We have something. We are told that we have 700,000 men in arms, or in preparation for war. We voted $500,000,000 last July in Congress, and have expended most of it. Our national debt at the end of January was $400,000,000. Our army is in the field. Thirty or forty thousand of them have been slain in battle, or died by disease or accident. Ten months have passed away; and what is the record? That, with all our men and money, the States of Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky, though more than half loyal, as we are told, to the national flag—that those three States are not yet conquered. Has it ever occurred to you to ask the reason why? I have no difficulty in finding the answer; and it seems to me to be this: that we are not striking at the foe. We are rather defending the foe. John C. Fremont sought to strike the foe; but John C. Fremont is no longer in command. John Brown taught us the way; but we crucified John Brown, as the old Hebrew nation, eighteen hundred years ago, crucified their leader and Lord. We are here, to-day, shivering, shaking before that mean, miserable foe, when, had we but the courage to strike its vital, vulnerable point, victory would inevitably be ours.

You remember the old fable of the ancient Greek. When he was born, it was told to his mother that if she would baptize him immediately in the Styx, he would become invulnerable. So they hurried him away and bathed him in the Styx; but the nurse held him by the heel, and that was not wet with the water. He grew up the mightiest warrior in Greece; but in an evil hour an arrow was aimed at the vulnerable spot, that unbaptized heel, and Achilles fell to rise no more.

The South has a vulnerable spot; but we have no archer who dares to aim his arrow there. And so we are conquered; we are baffled, and balked of victory. Richmond sleeps quietly to-day with no army of importance to protect it. But Abraham Lincoln, I am afraid, has bad dreams; and I am told that William H. Seward has sometimes very bad dreams, with 200,000 armed men waiting at his call.

Mr. Chairman, we forget that there is a God; that there is such a thing as justice towards the slave. Instead of washing our hands of the iniquity, instead of proclaiming liberty to the captive, we are trembling before the tyrant. You have plenty of brave men. There is no lack there. There is no want of patriotism upon the part of the people. Our only want is—the man for the hour. We need but a Garibaldi, a Mazzini, a Kossuth, and victory would soon perch upon our banners. But, alas! we have none. Inasmuch as there is a God, inasmuch as righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne, why is it that our forty thousand pulpits have not furnished the men to warn the people, in the name of the God of justice, of the calamity that has now come upon us?

There seems now to be no special difference between the Church and the pulpit. The Church for twenty years has disregarded the claims of God. And the religion of the country, like the Government, is founded in compromise. Eternal, immutable principle has no place in it. Slavery not only interprets the Constitution, but it explains and expounds the Bible. What the law makes property is property, in Church as well as State. The law of God, the demands of nature, the claims of justice are all set aside, at its behest. So it is ruled in the State, taught in the School, and held in the Church. The Church gives us a "Dr. Southside Adams," to teach us that "while the Constitution is in force, all appeal to any higher law is fanaticism." The School and the Church gave us a Daniel Webster, who, in his memorable seventh of March speech, which spoke the Fugitive Slave Law into life and being, said with sneer and scorn and scoff, "It is of no use for us to reënact the laws of God." As if woe and destruction were not the inevitable doom of any people who dare enact any other than the laws of God! At the door of our forty thousand pulpits the responsibility of all this blindness and infatuation must be laid. The priests have not taught the people knowledge.

And the religion inculcated at home we send also abroad. The Foreign Missionary Board has so far millennialized the Cherokee and Choctaw Indian tribes, that it has now transferred them to the Home Mission Society, to be aided as they need it, like the feeble Churches of Ohio and other parts of the great West. They were pronounced Christian, as nations, and so not included longer in the field of foreign or heathen operation. And the American Board triumphantly handed them up into Christendom as among the first trophies of its faithfulness and success. But the Indian had learned what he knew not before, that he could hold property in his fellow-man. And this very day I read in the newspaper how many thousands of warriors those very tribes are furnishing the Southern army, to carry on a fratricidal, parricidal war in support of slavery's bloody throne! returning with spear and scalping knife to butcher the very saints, society and Church, from whence came their civilization, their baptisms, and their sacraments!

Such is our religion at home. So is it also "made easy for the heathen."

Under such delusions the North lives, moves and fights to-day. It hates the slave; it hates all his race for their color and condition; it hates no less their friends who have, for more than thirty years, been contending earnestly for their equal rights under all laws, human and divine. Can we prosper? Never, while God holds his throne and power. To-day His arm is made bare for justice. To-day the judgment is set for this nation, and the books are opened. The South deserves a whelming destruction, but not from us. For wrongs done to humanity, to the slave in his generations, the North is no less guilty than the South—and the North is not yet repenting; is not convicted of its sin. To shoot down its Southern fellow-sinners is no atonement to the slave or to his race. Let him that is without sin fire the first columbiad, is a judgment that should strip our officers of their uniform, and clothe them in the sackcloth of repentance. It should send our Government, army and people, Church, pulpit and all, down into the dust of humiliation, penitence and prayer.

Once a divine man went in to dine at a lordly table. And in recognition of the high quality of his guest, the proprietor stood up and said, "Behold the half of my goods I give to feed the poor, and if I have taken anything from any man unjustly, I restore him fourfold." Immediately, from sanctified lips, came the heavenly applaud, "This day is salvation come to this house."

And all the gospel was there. Let us learn to do justice, and to restore, at least, so far as we may, one-fold, if no more, as justice, not as a "military necessity," to those we have robbed and peeled so long. Never, never before, while God and Nature live and reign, can we expect or hope for success and salvation.