who resisted the
tyranny of kings. Political and religious liberty are the two sides of
the democrat idea, and have always marched hand in hand together. They
culminated in England during the Commonwealth, and became thenceforth
the base and dome of popular government.

The republic of America was born of this idea, and is the last great
birth of Protestantism, big already with the destinies of mankind. Here,
upon this mighty platform, these destinies, as we believe, have to be
wrought out by their final issues, and close the drama of human
development. All things are possible for America under the beneficent
institutions and laws of the republic, now that the hideous skeleton of
black slavery is to pollute the soil no more nor make brother war
against brother any more on account of it; and at no distant period the
awful conflict which at present shakes the earth with the thunder of its
clashing and embattled hosts, shall give lasting place to the
interchanges of commerce and the peaceful enterprises of civil life.

It was impossible that American society could hold together with this
accursed African vulture eating at its heart. Nor could the aristocratic
idea of the South, which slavery had interwoven through every fibre of
the people, through all the forms of its social condition, and into all
its State laws and institutions, exist side by side with the democratic
idea of the North, without an inevitable conflict sooner or later. The
present war is but a renewal of the old battles which make up the sum of
history, between liberty and despotism, civilization and barbarism. No
one can doubt in whose hands will be the victory; and happy will the
result be for future generations.

Hitherto we have exhibited to the world the amazing spectacle of a
republic which, proclaiming the freedom and equality of every one of its
subjects, holds four millions of men in a terrible and appalling
bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great
name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not,
ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the
world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous
iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people
of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and
rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire and
wrath.

Slavery has been an unmitigated curse to Ame