f caste, her enforced but heartless religion, has hung a
more terrible avalanche over her head than ever leaped down the
heights of the Tyrol.

Such are examples of success or failure in attempts at
government, among the proudest and most prosperous nations of the
Old World, in modern and what are called enlightened times. If
seventy years be the life of a man, what should be the life of a
nation? Half the children born die under five years old. But
proportionably a greater mortality prevails among nations and
governments. Not one nation has ever yet attained an honorable
manhood. There is something rotten in the state of every Denmark.

Will you tell me Democracy, Republicanism, consecrated by
Christianity, is the remedy for all these ills? Let us look,
then, at the best example. Our own nation is not yet a hundred
years old, but it had behind it in the beginning, the chronicles
of forty or sixty centuries, written mostly in tears and blood.
At the end of an eight years' revolutionary war, our new
governmental columns were reared, not, like some pagan temples,
on human skulls, but on the imbruted bodies and extinguished
souls of five hundred thousand chattel slaves. We had our
Declaration of Independence, our war of Revolution, and a new
Constitution and code of laws. We had a Washington for our first
President, a John Jay for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and
a constellation of senators, statesmen, and sages who challenged
the respect and admiration of mankind. We closed that
dispensation with James Buchanan as Chief Magistrate, and Roger
B. Taney as Chief-Justice, with his diabolical Dred Scott
Decision, and with a war of Treason and Rebellion which deluged
the land in the blood of more than half a million of men. We had
multiplied our slaves to four millions, with new cruelties and
horrors added to the system, and at least ten generations of them
were lost in unknown graves. The new Republican President pledged
his official word and honor to the rebels already in arms, that,
would they but return to their allegiance, he would favor
amendments to the Constitution that should not only render slave
property more secure than ever before, but also make all its old
guarantees and safeguards, _Fugitive Slave law and all_, forever
"_i