d
plant in all that fair domain the standard of the higher law, of
universal suffrage and universal equality; and forthwith all through the
North, Republican _Wide-Awakes_ muster their forces for this great
political crusade. I am drawing no fancy picture. What I say is but a
legitimate comment upon the language of Mr. Seward in his Chicago
speech, already referred to, and in other speeches he has made during
his recent pilgrimage through the North-west. Mr. Seward is the
self-constituted exponent of the _higher law_ in its application to
political parties and measures, and to Constitutions and systems of
government, but in his pursuit of one idea, he seems to forget that the
sacred volume to which we all look as the source of our best and truest
knowledge of the will and purposes of Providence concerning man, if it
clearly reveals to us any thing, clearly reveals this fact, which all
human history confirms: that man is not a perfect being; that this earth
is not a perfect state; that disorder, and imperfection, and inequality,
and change must ever pervade it, and mark all human institutions. This
earth and its mortal life is but the threshhold--the vestibule of human
destiny--that reaches far into the eternal ages. Believe, as he may, in
human equality or in the perfectibility of humanity, no such theory has
ever yet been realized, nor will it ever be realized in this
probationary state of man. Philosophy may teach--political constitutions
may declare, and political parties may attempt to enforce as a practical
truth, that all men are equal. No such theory will ever find a perfect
realization in any system of human government.

In his speech at Chicago, before referred to, Mr. Seward vauntingly
asserts, as the idea or creed of the Republican party, as if to that
party alone were committed the oracles of freedom--"That civilization is
to be maintained and carried on upon this continent by Federal States,
based upon the principles of free soil, free labor, free speech, equal
rights and universal suffrage." I pause but a moment here to note the
pregnant meaning of this authoritative declaration of the representative
man of the Northern sectional party. It means no less than that there
shall be no Federal States on this continent where free soil, free
labor, free speech, equal rights and universal suffrage shall not
prevail. In other words it means that domestic servitude as now known in
the Southern States of the American