a nation upon itself, causing it to
rend and destroy its own body politic, so recently rejoicing in
unexampled prosperity and happiness. Some gigantic power, wielding
strength enough to produce the tremendous results already visible, must
be somewhere hidden at the source of these grand phenomena. In the
physical world, a small quantity of water or a few kegs of powder,
flashing into steam or gas by the application of heat, may be used to
overthrow the most stupendous material fabrics which the labor and
genius of men have ever been able to erect. What fatal means of
destruction, and what traitorous hand have been employed to drill and
charge the solid columns, or to mine the deep foundations of that
beautiful and majestic structure of liberty, which our fathers reared
for us with so much labor and sacrifice?

There is only one force adequate to the destructive work--the force of
false and mischievous ideas. Ideas have in them the elements of all
power. They alone move the moral and social world. Penetrating every
crevice of the social structure, they have the force of attraction and
repulsion; they consolidate and strengthen, or, like frost and heat,
they rend and crumble the hardest material, either slowly or suddenly,
as circumstances and conditions may permit or require. They have in them
all the terrible might, with all the explosive and dangerous quickness,
which belong to the most destructive of physical forces. When, in any
community, ideas are harmonious, they have an organizing power wholly
independent of their soundness or of their ultimate stability; but when
discordant and conflicting, they produce disorganization, ruin, and
chaos.

Unfortunately for our country, opposite and hostile ideas have been
growing up among us from the beginning of our national existence--nay,
from the very hour when the first cargo of slaves was landed on our
shores in the earliest days of our colonial history. Conflicting systems
have naturally grown out of these hostile ideas, which have thus
embodied themselves in the visible forms appropriate to their respective
natures. The colonial authorities protested against the policy of
importing slaves, which the mother country persisted in maintaining,
until powerful interests were gathered around it, and opinions were thus
nurtured to support and defend the fatal error. Slaveholding communities
arose out of this sinister beginning; they flourished and became
powerful States; and t