d of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every
child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the
best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, the one of the two
claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves and
divided between them, is the true mother of this blessed Union; that the
contest in which we are engaged is one of principles overlaid by
circumstances; that the longer we fight, and the more we study the
movements of events and ideas, the more clearly we find the moral nature
of the cause at issue emerging in the field and in the study; that all
honest persons with average natural sensibility, with respectable
understanding, educated in the school of northern teaching, will have
eventually to range themselves in the armed or unarmed host which fights
or pleads for freedom, as against every form of tyranny; if not in the
front rank now, then in the rear rank by and by;--assuming these
propositions, as many, perhaps most of us, are ready to do, and believing
that the more they are debated before the public the more they will gain
converts, we owe it to the timid and the doubting to keep the great
questions of the time in unceasing and untiring agitation. They must be
discussed, in all ways consistent with the public welfare, by different
classes of thinkers; by priests and laymen; by statesmen and simple
voters; by moralists and lawyers; by men of science and uneducated
hand-laborers; by men of facts and figures, and by men of theories and
aspirations; in the abstract and in the concrete; discussed and
rediscussed every month, every week, every day, and almost every hour, as
the telegraph tells us of some new upheaval or subsidence of the rocky
base of our political order.

Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen the convictions of
the great body of loyal citizens. They may do nothing toward changing
the views of those, if such there be, as some profess to believe, who
follow politics as a trade. They may have no hold upon that class of
persons who are defective in moral sensibility, just as other persons are
wanting in an ear for music. But for the honest, vacillating minds, the
tender consciences supported by the tremulous knees of an infirm
intelligence, the timid compromisers who are always trying to curve the
straight lines and round the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual
debate of these living questions is the one offered means o