[91]
must finally settle on the cause itself?
The titled ecclesiastic and the ambitious statesman should have their warning on this point.
They should know that public opinion is steadily turning to the light of truth.
The fountains are breaking up around us, and the great deep will soon be in motion.
A stern, uncompromising, and solemn spirit of inquiry is abroad.
It cannot be arrested, and its result may be easily foreseen.
It will not long be popular to talk of the legality of soul-murder, the constitutionality of man-robbery.
One word in relation to our duty to our Southern brethren.
If we detest their system of slavery in our hearts, let us not play the hypocrite with our lips.
Let us not pay so poor a compliment to their understandings as to suppose that we can deceive them into a compliance with our views of justice by ambiguous sophistry, and overcome their sinful practices and established prejudices by miserable stratagem.
Let us not first do violence to our consciences by admitting their moral right to property in man, and then go to work like so many vagabond pedlers to cheat them out of it. They have a right to complain of such treatment.
It is mean, and wicked, and dishonorable.
Let us rather treat our Southern friends as intelligent and high-minded men, who, whatever may be their faults, despise unmanly artifice, and loathe cant, and abhor hypocrisy.
Connected with them, not by political ties alone, but by common sacrifices and mutual benefits, let us seek to expostulate with them earnestly and openly, to gain at least their confidence in our sincerity, to appeal to their consciences,
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Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1888-89.
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