ll force itself upon our
attention, and insist upon being definitively settled, before we can
enter upon that ulterior triumphant national development which is
reserved, in the decrees of destiny, for us as a people. This problem,
seemingly so difficult, will be found unexpectedly easy of solution, so
soon as the thinking and practical mind of the people is seriously
called to its consideration. It is worthy of observation, that periods
of great pecuniary depression are favorable to the progress of ideas. It
is written in the Providence of God that the American people must,
within the few years to come, solve the whole problem of justice to the
laboring man; must, indeed, accept its office as the Champion and the
Illustrator, in a practical way, of Universal Justice, in all the
relations of life. Are we prepared to enter on this career,
intelligently, lovingly, and with voluntary alacrity, from affection to
the True and the Good; or must we be again scourged into the
consideration of great questions lying immediately in our way, by the
providential inflictions of disaster and distress?

We can now see easily enough, that had we been ready and desirous, as a
people, to do justice to the black man, we should have escaped the
horrors of a great war. We may predict, with the assurance of a
religious faith, backed, we might almost affirm, by the certainty of a
scientific demonstration, that if we are already sufficiently prepared
to be simply just, we shall be saved from the serious infliction of more
national suffering; and that if, on the contrary, this preparation of
the heart and the head has not been wrought in us by what we have
already endured, we shall be called directly and continuously to the
suffering of more and perhaps greater inflictions. 'Whom the Lord loveth
he chasteneth,' but not blindly nor uselessly, and not, therefore, after
the right frame of mind has been wrought in the subject of the
punishment. The law is precisely the same, whether we speak
theologically or from the profoundest philosophical principles; and it
may almost be said that the American people have only to choose whether
they will immediately enter, with the close of the war, upon a higher
career of prosperity, or whether they will endure an additional term of
tuition in the school of adversity. These words may seem mystical,
unaccompanied with further illustration and elaboration of the ideas,
but it is not the place here to pursue them.