od, and truly loves America and the human
race, has ever yet dared to think, much less to say, of the Constitution
of the United States, as William Lloyd Garrison has said, "_It is a
covenant with death and an agreement with hell._"

The United States embrace a territory not touching either extreme of
torrid heat or artic cold, but within those extremes--various in soil,
in climate, in productions--a land we may say in the oriental style of
Scripture language, "flowing with milk and honey," "a land of corn, and
wine and oil," fitted by Providence for the home of races of differing
constitutions, habits, capacities and pursuits; and practically we know,
that within our borders we have alike the European, the Asiatic, the
aboriginal American and the African races, with all their strongly
marked constitutional peculiarities; but our system of State and Federal
Government can give to each race the measure of power and protection due
to each.

The admirer of natural scenery, who from some commanding point of view,
surveys an expanse of mountain and valley, and plain and lake and river,
clothed in the summer sunlight, does not pause and check his pleasing
and elevated emotions, to note with cynical eye, each stagnant pool, or
noxious weed, or unsightly decaying tree that may lie within the limits
of the noble vision. He rather admires the harmony and beauty of the
whole, though he may know that there are within the scene before him
imperfect, unbeautiful and unwholesome things. Such is the feeling of
the patriot of well-balanced mind, when he contemplates the Union and
the Constitution as they are. While he knows the imperfection of all
work of human hands, he accepts and admires in the political work of our
fathers, the grandeur and symmetry of the whole, and will not condemn or
destroy it because it is not in all its parts a perfect work.

But such is not the feeling of every American mind. There are men
assuming to be philosophical and practical statesmen--men who rank with
a great political party as their representative men, who in all their
views and studies of the American Union, see only or chief of all, "_the
mean and miserable rivulet of black African slavery, stealing along
turbid and muddy, as it is drawn from its stagnant sources in the Slave
States_." I quote the language of William H. Seward, in his speech at
Chicago on Oct. 2d, 1860.

This Republican statesman, familiar with the pages of history, which
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