its of precedent into
the divine air of moral greatness. Like most men, he was reluctant to
be the bearer of that message of God with which his name will be linked
in the grateful memory of mankind. If he won an immortality of fame by
consenting to ally himself with the eternal justice, and to reinforce
his armies by the inspiration of their own nobler instincts, an equal
choice of renown is offered to his successor in applying the same
loyalty to conscience in the establishment of peace. We could not live
together half slave and half free; shall we succeed better in trying a
second left-handed marriage between democracy and another form of
aristocracy, less gross, but not less uncongenial? They who before
misled the country into a policy false and deadly to the very truth
which was its life and strength, by the fear of abolitionism, are
making ready to misrule it again by the meaner prejudice of color. We
can have no permanent peace with the South but by Americanizing it, by
compelling it, if need be, to accept the idea, and with it the safety
of democracy. At present we seem on the brink of contracting to protect
from insurrection States in which a majority of the population, many of
them now trained to arms, and all of them conscious of a claim upon us
to make their freedom strong enough to protect them, are to be left at
the mercy of laws which they have had no share in enacting.

The gravity of this consideration alone should make us pause. The more
thought we bestow upon the matter, the more thoroughly are we persuaded
that the only way to get rid of the negro is to do him justice.
Democracy is safe because it is just, and safe only when it is just to
all. Here is no question of white or black, but simply of man. We have
hitherto been strong in proportion as we dared be true to the sublime
thought of our own Declaration of Independence, which for the first
time proposed to embody Christianity in human laws, and announced the
discovery that the security of the state is based on the moral
instincts and the manhood of its members. In the very midnight of the
war, when we were compassed round with despondency and the fear of man,
that peerless utterance of human policy rang like a trumpet announcing
heavenly succor, and lifted us out of the darkness of our doubts into
that courage which comes of the fear of God. Now, if ever, may a
statesman depend upon the people sustaining him in doing what is simply
right, for they