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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
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