human passions; and, as he selects his victim by the caprice of bad powers, it seems that his success is the triumph of unmitigated evil. But that dagger may point in the dark to principles that men have imperfectly comprehended, and bring out clearer still the latent meaning of ideas and events, as night reveals the upper deep of stars and space. The President, for himself, indeed, is not unfortunate in his death; though we cannot in imagination look on that dear heart, drooping and heavy under the blow of the assassin, without a shock to our sensibilities. If we contemplate him in that event which comes alike to all, we must indeed feel that his was a singular felicity, by which he was enabled to win a place as preserver of States, and benefactor of mankind, not less than to make himself secure in the hearts of his countrymen. We should indeed have wished that he might have lived to see the Republic once more united and happy; and at length, returning as an American citizen to the place from whence the people called him, he might have passed the mellow autumn days in the ripening glory of the people's love. But since, in the inscrutable providence of God, he was to be taken from our sight on swift chariot of fire and blood, let us lift up our minds to him as he sits among the immortals, victorious over the pains of death, and powers of hell; and from that throne, exceeding high and lifted up, let him still sway the empire of our loyal hearts. Concerning our country, let us be as strong men, who beneath their tears can hide the thunders of an unconquered will, and the consecrated powers of justice and truth. We have new cause of gratitude in the principles of our Government, that they are not an arbitrary enactment, but live in the people's love. Let us gird on our armor, and, following the lead of our immortal President, "if God wills that the war continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen in two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago," so let us say, that "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." Steamer Bulletin, San Francisco, Cal., April 22, 1865. 35 SPEECH OF REV. JOSEPH P. THOMPSON, D.D.: AT THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB, UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK, APRIL 15, 1865. I HAD thought that we had already derived from this war all the lessons that it was designed to teach, whether by its discipline of suffering and sacrifice, or its fruits of triumph and rejoicing, lessons of humiliation, lessons of patience, lessons of endurance, lessons of courage, lessons of faith, of hope, of beneficence, and lessons of ever-growing confidence in our Government and in Almighty God. But it seems that that voice and holy Providence which has guided us at every step of the war had yet other lessons for the nation, the necessity and the fitness of which we recognize to-day. First, amid the rejoicings of victory, and the feelings of magnanimity and forbearance called forth by the humiliation of the enemy, there was needed one final revelation of the atrocity of this treason, at which the nation and the civilized world should stand aghast. From first to last this conspiracy has been one stupendous crime, without plea of ignorance or of provocation, and without a shadow of justifying motive; but it was left for its expiring hours to unveil to us the horrible depths of its atrocity. For, whatever the motive or impulse of the assassins, they represent the spirit of the conspiracy. Vanquished in the field, its pretence of a government overthrown, its military power broken, its political leaders fugitive, its finances scattered to the winds, it comes with stealthy tread into the scenes of socia festivity, and from behind drives the bullet of the assassin through the head of the mildest, gentlest of men, as he sits beside his wife in a circle of friends; and then, with an infamy yet more horrible, it invades the sacred chamber of sickness, the awful sanctity of impending death, and there butchers a feeble, maimed old man, upon his bed. It is the monster crime of history. Yet it was needful that this conspiracy should thus reveal itself for the final, righteous condemnation of the civilized world. Henceforth all nations will know with what we have have been dealing in these four weary and terrible years. The nation needed another lesson of unity, which could be learned only through a great sympathetic sorrow. We bow to-day before the majesty of sorrow, and feel that we are one. We have felt the spontaneous thrill of patriotism, when the vast area in front of this building was thronged with citizens outraged at the fall of Sumter. We have felt the sympathetic throb of common dangers, and have been pressed together by our perils and our fears. And we have felt also the thrill of exultation, and the community of joy. But nothing so fuses and welds human souls together as participation in some great sorrow. Henceforth our souls are one. Even the tone of opposition journals has been melted to-day into the pathos of this mighty grief. Henceforth this nation is fused into one, in the crucible of calamity, and is cemented by the blood of its Head. A third lesson impressed upon us to-day is the imperishable vitality of Government, and the grandeur of our Constitution under all emergencies. We have seen it tested in conflict with foreign powers; we have seen it tested by the fearful strain of civil war, and by the scarce less anxious trial of a presidential election in the midst of war, and it has stood. And And now, under this severest shock, empire into chaos, a shock that might shatter it still stands. a kingdom or an That mysterious, invisible, impalpable entity, we call the State, that intangible something, that we call Government, stands forth to-day in awful reality. The sovereignty of the people lifts its next representative into the just-vacant chair. The State moves on, without pause at the nation's grief,without concussion from the blow that struck down the nation's Head. The bullet and knife of the assassin did not touch its vitality. The life of the Constitution was not endangered. The State moves calmly, steadily onward, with no jar in any of its functions. It seems to me that the statue of Liberty which crowns the dome of the Capitol,- that worthy and typical memorial of Abraham Lincoln's administration, looking calmly down upon the august presence of death, beckoned to the State beyond, saying, "Let the dead bury their dead: follow thou me." And the State moved on, and will move on, in the line of freedom and of justice, unshaken for ever. Such are the direct teachings of this providence. The time, the men, the manner, all conspired to make these lessons most impressive. The time: just when the power of the conspiracy was broken; just when Abraham Lincoln's policy and fame had rounded into fulness; just when there was no furthur hope from organized resistance to the Government, came this wanton cruelty of revenge. The men: the two men in all this nation whose personal tone and spirit were least obnoxious to the rebels, whose forbearance and mildness were stretched to the utmost limits of our charity, these are the men thus butchered for sustaining Government and law. The manner: had the President fallen by the bullet of a marksman when he was at the front, or by the dagger of an assassin at Richmond, our grief at his loss |