santly as before.
When we think of such a man as Henry Clay, his long life, his mighty
influence cast always into the scale against the slave, of that
irresistible fascination with which he moulded every one to his will;
when we remember that, his conscience acknowledging the justice of our
cause, and his heart open on every other side to the gentlest impulses,
he could sacrifice so remorselessly his convictions and the welfare of
millions to his low ambition; when we think how the slave trembled at
the sound of his voice, and that, from a multitude of breaking hearts
there went up nothing but gratitude to God when it pleased him to call
that great sinner from this world, we cannot find it in our hearts, we
could not shape our lips to ask any man to do him honor. No amount of
eloquence, no sheen of official position, no loud grief of partisan
friends, would ever lead us to ask monuments or walk in fine processions
for pirates; and the sectarian zeal or selfish ambition which gives up,
deliberately and in full knowledge of the facts, three million of human
beings to hopeless ignorance, daily robbery, systematic prostitution,
and murder, which the law is neither able nor undertakes to prevent
or avenge, is more monstrous, in our eyes, than the love of gold which
takes a score of lives with merciful quickness on the high seas. Haynau
on the Danube is no more hateful to us than Haynau on the Potomac. Why
give mobs to one and monuments to the other?

If these things be necessary to courtesy, I cannot claim that we are
courteous. We seek only to be honest men, and speak the same of the dead
as of the living. If the grave that hides their bodies could swallow
also the evil they have done and the example they leave, we might enjoy
at least the luxury of forgetting them. But the evil that men do lives
after them, and example acquires tenfold authority when it speaks from
the grave. History, also, is to be written. How shall a feeble minority,
without weight or influence in the country, with no jury of millions to
appeal to--denounced, vilified, and contemned,--how shall we make way
against the overwhelming weight of some colossal reputation, if we do
not turn from the idolatrous present, and appeal to the human race?
saying to your idols of to-day: "Here we are defeated; but we will write
our judgment with the iron pen of a century to come, and it shall never
be forgotten, if we can help it, that you were false in your generation