I can also honor and admire another principle, not less sacred and glorious, - that of independence. May the progressive virtue of our age re-unite those whom discord has divided, and reconcile ideas which are in the hearts and aspirations of all generous souls.

In this struggle, which in magnitude exceeds all we have seen or heard of in Europe, the vanquished of to-day are worthy of the great race from which they sprang. Lee and Grant are two giants, whom history will keep inseparable. But the hour of peace is perchance about to strike. Lincoln desired it as the crown of his labors, the glorious result of so many sacrifices. After force, let there be forbearance; after the brave fury of battles, the fraternal embrace of citizens.

These were the motives which governed him, these the last virtuous desires he entertained; and it is at this moment (perchance a rare one), when a great soul is so potent for good, when a single mind is worth whole legions, as a pacificator, that the hand of an assassin is raised in treachery, and cuts the thread of plans and purposes so lofty and so noble.

If the American nation were not a people tried in the experiences and strifes of government, could any one perchance calculate the fatal consequences of this sudden blow? Who knows if the conflagration of civil war would not have spread to the remotest confines of these Federal States, in all the pomp of its horrors? Happily, it will not be so. While public opinion and the journals condemn the deed severely and justly, and their horror is excited against the fatal crime, sentiments which are those of all civilized Europe, they give honorable heed to ideas of peace and forbearance, as though the great man who advocated these ideas had not disappeared from the arena of the world. And I use the term advisedly, "great man," for he is truly great who rises to the loftiest heights from profound obscurity, relying solely on his

own merits, - as did Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln. For these arose to power and greatness, not through any favor or grace of a chance-cradle, or genealogy, but through the prestige of their own deeds, through the nobility which begins and ends with themselves, the sole offspring of their own works. He is more to be envied who makes himself great and famous through his genius and deeds, than he who is born with hereditary titles.

Lincoln was of this privileged class: he belonged to this aristocracy. In infancy, his energetic soul was nourished by poverty. In youth, he learned through toil the love of liberty, and respect for the rights of man. Even to the age of twentytwo, educated in adversity, his hands made callous by honorable labor, he rested from the fatigues of the field, spelling out, in the pages of the Bible, in the lessons of the gospel, in the fugitive leaves of the daily journal,-which the Aurora opens, and the night disperses, - the first rudiments of instruction, which his solitary meditations ripened. Little by little, light was infused into that spirit, the wings put forth and grew strong with which he flew. The chrysalis felt one day the ray of the sun, which called it to life, broke its involucrum, and it launched forth fearlessly from the darkness of its humble cloister into the luminous spaces of its destiny. The farmer, day-laborer, shepherd, like Cincinnatus, left the ploughshare in the half-broken furrow, and, legislator of his own State, and afterwards of the Great Republic, saw himself proclaimed in the tribunal the popular chief of many millions of people, the maintainer of the holy principle inaugurated by Wilberforce. What strife, what scenes of agitation, what a series of herculean labors and incalculable sacrifices, were not involved and represented in the glory of their results, during these four years of war and government! Armies in the field, such as, since the remotest periods, there has been no example! Huge battles, which saw the sun rise and set, twice or thrice, without

victory inclining to the one or the other side: marches, in which thousands of victims, whole legions, piled with the dead each fragment of the conquered earth: assaults which, in audacity and slaughter, reduce to insignificance the exploits of Attila and the Huns!

What stupendous obsequies for the scourge of slavery! What a lesson, terrible and salutary, from a great people, still rich and vigorous with youth, to the timid vacillations of old Europe, before a destiny contested by principles so sacred!

These were the monuments, the million marks, of his career. If the sword was in his hands the instrument, and liberty the inspiration and strength, of his efforts, he was not unfaithful to them. Above the thorns in his path, through the tears and blood of so many holocausts, he was able at last to see the promised land. It was not vouchsafed to him to plant therein, in expiation, the auspicious olive-tree of concord. When he was about to

re-unite the broken bond of the Union; when he was about to infuse anew the life-giving spirit of free institutions into the body of the country, its scattered and bloody members rejoined and re-cemented; when the standard of the Republic, the funereal clamors silenced, and the agonies of pride and defeat consoled, was about to be again raised, covering with its glorious folds all the children of the same common soil, purified from the indelible stain of slavery, — the athlete reels, and falls in the arena, showing that he, too, was but a mortal.

I deem this sketch sufficient. The Chamber, through inclination, through a sense of duty, through its institution, not only conservative, but as the faithful guardian of traditions and principles, will not be, surely will not desire to be, backward in joining in the manifestations which the elective House has just voted, co-operating with the enlightened cabinets and parliaments of Europe. Silence in the presence of such outrages belongs only

to senates dumb and disinherited of all high sentiments and aspirations.

Voting this motion, the Chamber of Peers associates itself in the grief of all civilized nations. The crime which shortened the days of President Lincoln, martyr to the great principles in which our age most glories, is almost, is in essence, a regicide; and a monarchical country cannot refrain from detesting and condemning it.

The descendants of those who first revealed to the Europe of the sixteenth century the new way, which, through the barriers of stormy and unknown seas, opened the gates of the kingdom of the Aurora, will not be the last to bend over the gravestone of a great magistrate, who was likewise the guide of his people through fearful tempests, and who succeeded in conducting them triumphantly to the overthrow of the last vestige of the citadel of slavery. To each epoch and its people, its task and its meed of glory; to each illustrious hero, his crown of laurel, or his civic crown.

Translated for the Christian Register, Boston, August 12, 1865.

LETTER FROM DR. MERLE D'AUBIGNE:

66

AUTHOR OF THE HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION."

THE

HE New-York Evening "Post" reports that Mr. Henry A. Smythe, President of the Central National Bank of that city, has received from George G. Fogg, American Minister to Switzerland, a letter of condolence addressed to Mr. Fogg by the author of the "History of the Reformation." Mr. Fogg says, "Of the many letters sent to me from the most eminent men in letters and science, I have thought that you, and other of our friends in America, would be interested in one from the great historian of the Reformation."

GENEVA, April 27, 1865.

MONSIEUR LE MINISTRE,- At the moment when our hearts were excited at the great deliverance which God has accorded for your people; at the moment when we were rendering thanksgiving to him, for putting an end in your noble country to the two greatest evils with which humanity can be afflicted, — war and slavery, a terrible news comes to change our joy into deepest mourning. The blow which has struck Mr. Lincoln strikes all the friends of justice, order, liberty, and religion. He has been the instrument of God for the accomplishment of one of the greatest acts, perhaps the very greatest, which will illustrate our