mainly out of the rivalry of the two leading powers. There is no country in the world in which the sentiment of national brotherhood is stronger. In Italy, on the breaking up of the Roman Empire, society might be said to be resolved into its original elements,-into hostile atoms, whose only movement was that of mutual repulsion. Ruthless barbarians had destroyed the old organizations, and covered the land with a merciless feudalism. As the new civilization grew up, under the wing of the Church, the noble families and the walled towns fell madly into conflict with each other; the secular feud of Pope and Emperor scourged the land; province against province, city against city, street against street, waged remorseless war with each other from father to son, till Dante was able to fill his imaginary hell with the real demons of Italian history. So ferocious had the factions become, that the great poet-exile himself, the glory of his native city and of his native language, was, by a decree of the municipality, condemned to be burned alive if found in the city of Florence. But these deadly feuds and hatreds yielded to political influences, as the hostile cities were grouped into states under stable governments; the lingering traditions of the ancient animosities gradually died away, and now Tuscan and Lombard, Sardinian and Neapolitan, as if to shame the degenerate sons of America, are joining in one cry for a united Italy. In France, not to go back to the civil wars of the League in the sixteenth century and of the Fronde in the seventeenth; not to speak of the dreadful scenes throughout the kingdom which followed the revocation of the edict of Nantes; we have, in the great revolution which commenced at the close of the last century, seen the bloodhounds of civil strife let loose as rarely before in the history of the world. The reign of terror established at Paris stretched its bloody Briarean arms to every city and village in the land; and if the most deadly feuds which ever divided a people had the power to cause permanent alienation and hatred, this surely was the occasion. But far otherwise the fact. In seven years from the fall of Robespierre, the strong arm of the youthful conqueror brought order out of this chaos of crime and woe; Jacobins whose hands were scarcely cleansed from the best blood of France met the returning emigrants; whose estates they had confiscated and whose kindred they had dragged to the guillotine, in the Imperial ante-chambers; and when, after another turn of the wheel of fortune, Louis XVIII. was restored to his throne, he took the regicide Fouché, who had voted for his brother's death, to his cabinet and confidence. The people of loyal America will never ask you, sir, to take to your confidence or admit again to share in the government the hard-hearted men whose cruel lust of power has brought this desolating war upon the land, but there is no personal bitterness felt even against them. They may live, if they can bear to live after wantonly causing the death of so many of their fellow-men; they may live in safe obscurity beneath the shelter of the government they have sought to overthrow, or they may fly to the protection of the governments of Europe,-some of them are already there seeking, happily in vain, to obtain the aid of foreign power in furtherance of their own treason. 'There let them stay. The humblest dead soldier, that lies cold and stiff in his grave before us, is an object of envy beneath the clods that cover him, in comparison with the living man, I care not with what trumpery credentials he may be furnished, who is willing to grovel at the foot of a foreign throne for assistance in compassing the ruin of his country. But the hour is coming and now is, when the power of the leaders of the Rebellion to delude and inflame must cease. There is no bitterness on the part of the masses. The people of the South are not going to wage an eternal war for the wretched pretexts by which this rebellion is sought to be justified. The bonds that unite us as one people,-a substantial community of origin, language, belief, and law (the four great ties that hold the societies of men together); common national and political interests; a common history; a common pride in a glorious ancestry; a common interest in this great heritage of blessings; the very geographical features of the country; the mighty rivers that cross the lines of climate, and thus facilitate the interchange of natural and industrial products, while the wonder-working arm of the engineer has levelled the mountain-walls which separate the East and the West, compelling your own Alleghanies, my Maryland and Pennsylvania friends, to open wide their everlasting doors to the chariot wheels of traffic and travel,-these bonds of union are of perennial force and energy, while the causes of alienation are imaginary, factitious, and transient. The heart of the people, North and South, is for union. Indications, too plain to be mistaken, announce the fact, both in the East and the West of the states in rebellion. In North Carolina and Arkansas the fatal charm at length is broken. At Raleigh and Little Rock the lips of honest and brave men are unsealed, and an independent press is unlimbering its artillery. When its rifled cannon shall begin to roar, the hosts of treasonable sophistry, the mad delusions of the day, will fly like the rebel army through the passes of yonder mountain. The weary masses of the people are yearning to see the dear old flag again floating upon their capitols, and they sigh for the return of the peace, prosperity, and happiness which they enjoyed under a government whose power was felt only in its blessings. And now, friends, fellow-citizens of Gettysburg and Pennsylvania, and you from remoter states, let me again, as we part, invoke your benediction on these honored graves. You feel, though the occasion is mournful, that it is good to be here. You feel that it was greatly auspicious for the cause of the country, that the men of the East and the men of the West, the men of nineteen sister states, stood side by side, on the perilous ridges of the battle. You now feel it a new bond of union, that they shall lie side by side, till a clarion, louder than that which marshalled them to the combat, shall awake their slumbers. God bless the Union; it is dearer to us for the blood of the brave men which has been shed in its defence. The spots on which they stood and fell; these pleasant heights; the fertile plain beneath them; the thriving village whose streets so lately rang with the strange din of war; the fields beyond the ridge, where the noble Reynolds held the advancing foe at bay, and, while he gave up his own life, assured by his forethought and self-sacrifice the triumph of the two succeeding days; the little streams which winds through the hills, on whose banks in after time the wondering ploughman will turn up, with the rude weapons of savage warfare, the fearful missiles of modern artillery; Seminary Ridge, the Peach Orchard, Cemetery, Culp and Wolf Hill, Round Top, Little Round Top-humble names, henceforward dear and famous, no lapse of time, no distance of space, shall cause you to be forgotten. "The whole earth," said Pericles, as he stood over the remains of his fellow-citizens, who had fallen in the first year of the Peloponnesian War, "the whole earth is the sepulchre of illustrious men. All time, he might have added, is the millennium of their glory. Surely I would do no injustice to the other noble achievements of the war, which have reflected such honor on both arms of the service,rand have entitled the armies and the navy of the United States, their officers and men, to the warmest thanks and the richest rewards which a grateful people can pay. But they, I am sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, and down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country there will be no brighter page than that which relates the battles of Gettysburg. SPEECH AT GETTYSBURG. ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. THE TREASON OF SLAVERY. CARL SCHURZ. Brooklyn, October 7, 1864. MR. PRESIDENT and Fellow-CITIZENS-To ascribe great effects to small, far-fetched, and merely incidental causes, is a manner of explaining historical events which weak minds pass off, and weaker minds take, as an evidence of superior sagacity. Even in those cases where individuals are powerful enough to produce great commotions on their own private motives, such an historical theory is but rarely admissible; but where a nation acts upon the impulses of the popular heart it is never so. There are those who find the cause of the downfall of the Roman republic in the financial embarrassments of some of her ambitious men. There are those who find the origin of the great religious reformation of the sixteenth century in the desire of some German ecclesiastics to get married. There are those who tell us that the French Revolution would never have happened but for the secret organization of the Freemasons. Such ridiculous exhibitions of human ingenuity might amuse us had they not frequently exercised a most dangerous influence upon the actions of large classes of people; for even in our days there are those who pretend to find the origin of the great struggle which it now convulsing this country in a few antislavery tracts circulated by a few abolitionists from New England; and what is worse, there are many who believe it; and what is still worse, there are many who are prepared to act upon that belief. True, the first origin of great developments is sometimes apparently small, but only apparently so. It requires an acorn fallen from an oak-tree to make another oak tree grow. Ever so large a quantity of mustard-seed will never do it. And even an acorn will not, if it falls upon a rock. They In order to make clear to our minds the true nature of the struggle in which we are engaged, you must suffer me to look back upon the original composition of American society. The men who established the first settlements in New England were almost all plebeians-true children of the people. They had not abandoned their old homes merely for the purpose of seeking in the wilds of the new world a material fortune, which the old world had refused them. They were the earnest champions of a principle, and they left their native shores because there that principle was persecuted and oppressed. sought and found upon the rocky soil of New England a place where they could conform their social condition to their religious belief. Equal in their origin and social standing, inspired by the same motives, engaged with equal interest in the same enterprise, pursuing the same ends, and sharing the same fortunes their instincts, however crudely developed, were necessarily all democratic. Their natural tendency was not to produce in the new world a social inequality, which in the old world had heavily weighed upon them but had never existed among themselves. Every institution they founded had in view the equality of the citizens, and by originating a system of public education for all the children of the people, they endeavored to perpetuate that equality which originally was the characteristic feature of their society. It is true, there was a great variety in their occupations: agriculture, handicraft, commerce, industry, learned professions; but all these occupations being equally respectable, they produced no permanent distinctions in society; for, what one might be, another might become. Equality, and the democratic spirit arising from it, was the basis of their whole social and political organization. These tendencies they and their descendants carried all over the Northern States, and although the Puritans gradually dropped most of their religious and social peculiarities, although they, as a race, became largely intermingled with other classes of people, yet those original tendencies pervaded the whole social and political system as a powerful leaven, and thus determined the character of Northern society and civilization. This is the spirit to which the North owes her thrift and industry, her education, her liberty, her progressive enterprise, her prosperity, and her greatness. It was not so with the original settlers of the Southern country, especially Virginia. Some of them were scions of the noble houses of England; they belonged to the privileged class at home. They went to the new country, those that were rich and powerful, in order to increase their wealth and power, and those that were poor and insignificant, in order to gain in the new world what they had been vainly striving to find in the old. All were seeking new fortunes upon a new |