ke of Man. Whoever is born here, or whoever comes here,
brought by poverty or violence, an exile from misery or from power,
and whatever be his ethnological distinction, is a republican of this
country because he is a man. Here he is to find safety, cooperation,
and welcome. His very ignorance and debasement are to be welcomed by
a country eager to exhibit the plastic power of its divine idea,--how
animal restrictions can be gradually obliterated, how superstition and
prejudice must die out of stolid countenances before the steady gaze of
republican good-will, how ethnic peculiarities shall subserve the
great plan and be absorbed by it. The country no longer will have a
conventional creed, that men are more important than circumstances and
governments; we always said so, but our opinion was at the mercy of a
Know-Nothing club, a slaveholding cabal, a selfish democracy: it will
have a living faith, born with the pangs of battle, that nothing on
earth is so precious as the different kinds of men. It will want them,
to illustrate its preeminent idea, and it will go looking for them
through all the neglected places of the world, to invite them in from
the by-lanes and foul quarters of every race, expressly to show that
man is superior to his accidents, by bringing their bodies into a place
where their souls can get the better of them. Where can that be except
where a democracy has been waging a religious war against its own great
evil, and has repented in blood for having used all kinds of men as the
white and black pawns in its games of selfish politics, with its own
country for the board, and her peace and happiness lying in the pool for
stakes? Where can man be respected best except here, where he has
been undervalued most, and bitterness and blood have sprung from that
contempt?

This is the first truly religious war ever waged. Can there be such a
thing as a religious war? There can be wars in the interest of different
theologies, and mixed wars of diplomacy and confessions of belief, wars
to transfer the tradition of infallibility from a pope to a book, wars
of Puritans against the divine right of kings in the Old World and the
natural rights of Indians in the New, in all of which the name of God
has been invoked for sanction, and Scripture has been quoted, and Psalms
uplifted on the battle-field for encouragement. And it is true that
every conflict, in which there are ideas that claim their necessary
development agai