But they will not fall. Every act of justice becomes a new pillar of the Universe, or it may be a new link of that

"Golden everlasting chain

Whose strong embrace holds heaven and earth and main."

THE WAR FOR THE UNION.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

Boston, December, 1861.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-It would be impossible for me fitly to thank you for this welcome; you will allow me, therefore, not to attempt it, but to avail myself of your patience to speak to you, as I have been invited to do, upon the war.

I know, ladies and gentlemen, that actions-deeds, not words-are the fitting duty of the hour. Yet, still, cannon think in this day of ours, and it is only by putting thought behind arms that we render them worthy, in any degree, of the civilization of the nineteenth century. Besides, the government has two-thirds of a million of soldiers, and it has ships sufficient for its purpose. The only question seems to be, what the government is to do with these forces in what path, and how far it shall tread. You and I come here to-night, not to criticise, not to find fault with the Cabinet. We come here to recognize the fact, that in moments like these the statesmanship of the Cabinet is but a pine shingle upon the rapids of Niagara, borne which way the great popular heart and the national purpose direct. It is in vain now, with these scenes about us, in this crisis, to endeavor to create public opinion; too late now to educate twenty millions of people. Our object now is to concentrate and to manifest, to make evident and to make intense, the matured purpose of the nation. We are to show the world, if it be indeed so, that democratic institutions are strong enough for such an hour as this. Very terrible as is the conspiracy, momentous as is the peril, democracy welcomes the struggle, confident that she stands like no delicately-poised throne in the Old World, but, like the pyramid, on its broadest base, able to be patient with national evils-generously patient with the long forbearance of three generations—and strong enough when, after that they reveal themselves in their own inevitable and hideous proportions, to pronounce and execute the unanimous verdict-death!

Now, gentlemen, it is in such a spirit, with such a purpose, that I came before you to-night to sustain this war. Whence came this war? You and I need not curiously investigate. While Mr. Everett on one side, and M. Sumner on the other, agree, you and I may take for granted the opinion of two such opposite statesmen-the result of the

common sense of this side of the water and the other-that slavery is the root of this war. I know some men have loved to trace it to disappointed ambition, to the success of the republican party, convincing three hundred thousand nobles at the South, who have hitherto furnished us the most of the presidents, generals, judges, and ambassadors we needed, that they would have leave to stay at home, and that twenty millions of northeners would take their share in public affairs. I do not think that cause equal to the result. Other men before Jefferson Davis and Governor Wise have been disappointed of the presidency. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Stephen A. Douglas were more than once disappointed, and yet who believes that either of these great men could have armed the North to avenge his wrongs? Why, then, should these pigmies of the South be able to do what the giants I have named could never achieve? Simply because there is a radical difference between the two sections, and that difference is slavery. A party victory may have been the occasion of this outbreak. So a teachest was the occasion of the revolution, and it went to the bottom of Boston harbor on the night of the 16th of December, 1773; but that tea-chest was not the cause of the revolution, neither is Jefferson Davis the cause of the rebellion. If you will look upon the map, and notice that every slave state has joined or tried to join the rebellion, and no free state has done so, I think you will not doubt substantially the origin of this convulsion.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know me-those of you who know me at all-simply as an abolitionist. I am proud and glad that you should have known me as such. In the twenty-five years that are gone-~I say it with no wish to offend any man before me-but in the quarter of a century that has passed, I could find no place where an American could stand with decent self-respect, except in constant, uncontrollable, and loud protest against the sin of his native land. But, ladies and gentlemen, do not imagine that I come here to-night to speak simply and exclusively as an abolitionist. My interest in this war, simply and exclusively as an abolitionist, is about as much gone as yours in a novel where the hero has won the lady, and the marriage has been comfortably celebrated in the last chapter. I know the dan、 ger of a political prophecy-a kaleidoscope of which not even a Yankee can guess the next combination-but for all that, I venture to offer my opinion, that on this continent the system of domestic slavery 'has received its death-blow. Let me tell you why I think so. Leaving out of view the war with England, which I do not expect, there are but three paths out of this war. One is, the North conquers; the other is, the South conquers; the third is, a compromise. Now, if the North conquers, or there be a compromise, one or the other of two things must come-either the old Constitution or a new one. I believe that, so far as the slavery clauses of the Constitution of '89 are concerned, it is dead. It seems to me impossible that the thrifty and pains.

taking North after keeping six hundred thousand men idle for two or three years, at a cost of two million dollars a day; after that flag lowered at Sumter; after Baker, and Lyon, and Ellsworth, and Winthrop, and Putnam, and Wesselhoeft have given their lives to quell the rebellion; after our Massachusetts boys, hurrying through ploughed field and workshop to save the capital, have been foully murdered on the pavements of Baltimore-I cannot believe in a North so lost, so. craven as to put back slavery where it stood on the 4th of March last. But if there be reconstruction without those slave clauses, then in a little while, longer or shorter, slavery dies-indeed, on other basis but the basis of '89, she has nothing else to do but to die. On the contrary, if the South-no, I cannot say conquers-my lips will not form the word-but if she balks us of victory; the only way she can do it is to write Emancipation on her banner, and thus bribe the friends of liberty in Europe to allow its aristocrats and traders to divide the majestic Republic whose growth and trade they fear and envy. Either way, the slave goes free. Unless England flings her fleets along the coast, the South can never spring into separate existence, except from the basis of negro freedom; and I for one cannot yet believe that the North will consent again to share his chains. Exclusively as an abolitionist, therefore, I have little more interest in this war than the frontiersman's wife l:ad, in his struggle with the bear, when she didn't care which whipped. But before I leave the abolitionists let me say one word. Some men say we are the cause of this war. Gentlemen, you do us too much honor! If it be so, we have reason to be proud of it; for in my heart, as an American, I believe this year the most glorious of the Republic since '76. The North, craven and contented until now, like Mammon, saw nothing even in heaven but the golden pavernent; to-day she throws off her chains. We have a North, as Daniel Webster said. This is no epoch for nations to blush at. England might blush in 1620, when Englishmen trembled at a fool's frown, and were silent when James forbade them to think; but not in 1649, when an outraged people cut off his son's head. Massachusetts might have blushed a year or two ago, when an insolent Virginian, standing on Bunker Hill, insulted the Commonwealth, and then dragged her citizens to Washington to tell what they knew about John Brown; but she has no reason to blush to-day, when she holds that same impudent Senator an acknowledged felon in her prison-fort. In my view, the bloodiest war ever waged is infinitely better than the happiest slavery which ever fattened man into obedience. And yet I love peace. But it is real peace; not peace such as we have had, not peace that meant lynch-law in the Carolinas and mob-law in New York; not peace that meant chains around Boston court-house, a gag on the lips of statesmen, and the slave sobbing himself to sleep in curses. No more such peace for me; no peace that is not born of justice, and does not recognize the rights of every race and every man.

Some men say they would view this war as white men. I condescend to no such narrowness. I view it as an American citizen, proud to be the citizen of an empire that knows neither black nor white, neither Saxon nor Indian, but holds an equal sceptre over all. If I am to love my country, is must be lovable; if I am to honor it, it must be worthy of respect. What is the function God gives us-what is the breadth of responsibility he lays upon us? An empire, the home of every race, every creed, every tongue, to whose citizens is committed, if not the only, then the grandest system of pure self-government. Toqueville tells us that all nations and all ages tend with inevitable certainty to this result; but he points out, as history does, this land as the normal school of the nations, set by God to try the experiment of popular education and popular government, to remove the obstacles, point out the dangers, find the best way, encourage the timid and hasten the world's progress. Let us see to it, that with such a crisis and such a past, neither the ignorance nor the heedlessness, nor the cowardice of Americans forfeit this high honor, won for us by the toils of two generations, given to us by the blessings of Providence. It is as a citizen of the leading state of this Western continent, vast in territory, and yet its territory nothing when compared with the grandeur of its past and the majesty of its future,-it is as such a citizen that I wish, for one, to find out my duty, express as an individual my opinion, and aid thereby the Cabinet in doing its duty under such responsibility. It does not lie in one man to ruin us, nor in one man to save us, nor in a dozen. It lies in the twenty millions, in the thirty millions, of thirty-four states.

Now how do we stand? In a war,-not only that, but a terrific war,-not a war sprung from the caprice of a woman, the spite of a priest, the flickering ambition of a prince, as wars usually have; but a war inevitable; in one sense, nobody's fault; the inevitable result of past training, the conflict of ideas, millions of people grappling each other's throats, every soldier in each camp certain that he is fighting for an idea which holds the salvation of the world,-every drop of his blood in earnest. Such a war finds no parallel nearer than that of the Catholic and the Huguenot of France, or that of Aristocrat and ♦ Republicans in 1790, or of Cromwell and the Irish, when victory meant extermination. Such is our war. I look upon it as the commencement of the great struggle between the disguised aristocracy and the democracy of America. You are to say to-day whether it shall last ten years or seventy, as it usually has done. It resembles closely

that struggle between aristocrat and democrat which began in France in 1789, and continues still. While it lasts, it will have the same cffect on the nation as that war between blind loyalty, represented by the Stuart family, and the free spirit of the English Constitution, which lasted from 1660 to 1760, and kept England a second-rate power almost all that century.

Such is the era on which you are entering. I will not speak of war in itself, I have no time; I will not say with Napoleon, that it is the practice of barbarians; I will not say that it is good. It is better than the past. A thing may be better, and yet not good. This war

is better than the past, but there is not an element of good in it. I mean, there is nothing in it which we might not have gotten better, fuller, and more perfectly in other ways. And yet it is better than the craven past, infinitely better than a peace which had pride for, its father and subserviency for its mother. Neither will I speak of! the cost of war, although you know we shall never get out of this onet without a debt of at least two or three thousand millions of dollars. For if the prevalent theory proves correct, and the country comes together again on anything like the old basis, we pay Jeff Davis's debts as well as our own. Neither will I remind you that debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine government and corrupt the people. The great debt of England has kept her back in civil progress at least a hundred years. Neither will I remind you that, when we go out of this war, we go out with an immense disbanded army, an intense military spirit embodied in two thirds of a million of soldiers, the fruitful, the inevitable source of fresh debts and new wars. I pass by all that; yet lying within those causes are things enough to make the most sanguine friends of free institutions tremble for our future. I pass those by. But let me remind you of another tendency of the time. You know, for instance, that the writ of habeas corpus, by which government is bound to render a reason to the judiciary before it lays its hands upon a citizen. has been called the high-water mark of English liberty. Jefferson in his calm moments, dreaded the power to suspend it in any emergency whatever, and wished to have it in “eternal and unremitting force." The present Napoleon, in his treatise on the English Constitution, calls it the gem of English institutions. Lieber says that the habeas corpus, free meetings like this, and a free press, are the three elements which distinguish liberty from despotism. All that Saxon blood has gained in the battles and toils of two hundred years are these three things. But to-day, Mr. Chairman, every one of them-habeas corpus, the right of free meeting, and a free press-is annihilated in every square mile of the Republic. We live to-day, every one of us, under martial law. The Secretary of State puts into his bastile, with a warrant as irresponsible as that of Louis, any man whom he pleases. And you know that neither press nor lips may venture to arraign the government without being silenced. At this moment one thousand men, at least, are “bastiled” by an authority as despotic as that of Louis, -three times as many as Eldon and George III. seized when they trembled for his throne. Mark me, I am not complaining. I do not say it is not necessary. It is necessary to do anything to save the ship It is necessary to throw everything overboard in order that we may