to consent to the weakness
of their country by admitting you to a share in its government before
you have given evidence of sincere loyalty to its principles, or, at
least, of wholesome fear of its power. They believe, and I heartily
agree with them, that a strong nation begets strong citizens, and a
weak one weak,--that the powers of the private man are invigorated and
enlarged by his confidence in the power of the body politic; and they
see no possible means of attaining or securing this needed strength but
in that homogeneousness of laws and institutions which breeds unanimity
of ideas and sentiments, no way of arriving at that homogeneousness but
the straightforward path of perfect confidence in freedom. All nations
have a right to security, ours to greatness; and must have the one as
an essential preliminary to the other. If your prejudices stand in the
way, and you are too weak to rid yourselves of them, it will be for the
American people to consider whether the plain duty of conquering them
for you will be, after all, so difficult a conquest as some they have
already achieved. By yourselves or us they must be conquered.
Gentlemen, in bidding you farewell, I ask you to consider whether you
have not forgotten that, in order to men's living peacefully together
in communities, the idea of government must precede that of liberty,
and that the one is as much the child of necessity as the other is a
slow concession to civilization, which itself mainly consists in the
habit of obedience to something more refined than force."

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

1866

The late Philadelphia experiment at making a party out of nullities
reminds us of nothing so much as of the Irishman's undertaking to
produce a very palatable soup out of no more costly material than a
pebble. Of course he was to be furnished with a kettle as his field of
operations, and after that he asked only for just the least bit of beef
in the world to give his culinary miracle a flavor, and a pinch of salt
by way of relish. As nothing could be more hollow and empty than the
pretence on which the new movement was founded, nothing more coppery
than the material out of which it was mainly composed, we need look no
further for the likeness of a kettle wherewith to justify our
comparison; as for the stone, nothing could be more like that than the
Northern disunion faction, which was to be the chief ingredient in the
newfangled pottage, and whose leadin