sembled thousands, who
listened to the intellectual attack and defense. In their famous debate,
Lincoln and Douglas were over against one another like two fortresses,
bristling with bayonets, and with cannon shotted to the muzzle.

The many millions of people in the United States, born or immigrated
here since the Civil War, busied with many things during this rich,
complex and prosperous era, have suffered a grievous loss, through the
weakening of their patriotism. Multitudes have forgotten that with great
price their fathers bought our industrial liberty for white and black
alike. The study of no era, perhaps, is so rewarding to the youth of the
country as the study of the Anti-Slavery epoch. It was an era of
intellectual giants and moral heroes. Great men walked in regiments up
and down the land. It was the age of our greatest statesmen of the North
and South,--Webster and Calhoun; of our greatest soldiers,--Grant,
Sherman, Thomas and Sheridan, and of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It was
the era of our greatest orators, Phillips and Beecher; of our greatest
editors, led by Greeley and Raymond; of our greatest poets and scholars,
Whittier and Lowell and Emerson; and of our greatest President, the
Martyr of Emancipation. So wonderful are those scenes named Gettysburg,
Appomattox, and the room where the Emancipation Act was signed, that
even the most skeptical have felt that the issues of liberty and life
for millions of slaves justified the entrance of a Divine Figure upon
the human battle-field. This Unseen Leader and Captain of the host had
dipped His sword in heaven, and carried a blade that was red with
insufferable wrath against oppression, cruelty and wrong.

Now that fifty years have passed since the Civil War, the events of that
conflict have taken on their true perspective, and movements once
clouded have become clear. For great men and nations alike, the
suggestive hours are the critical hours and epochs. That was a critical
epoch for Athens, when Demosthenes plead the cause of the republic, and
insisted that Athens must defend her liberties, her art, her laws, her
social institutions, and in the spirit of democracy resist the tyrant
Philip, who came with gifts in his hands. That was a critical hour for
brave little Holland, dreaming her dreams of liberty,--when the burghers
resisted the regiments of bloody Alva, and, clinging to the dykes with
their finger-tips, fought their way back to the fields, expelled Phi