kets and swamps, to
be pierced by bullets, torn by shells, to eat crusts, wear rags, shiver
in the cold, burn in the heat, famish in the prison, welter in the
bloody trench, above them a fiery hail, beside them their dying comrades
falling into the arms of death. It is a strange, wild, chivalrous,
divine story of the world's greatest enthusiasm, our fathers' enthusiasm
for liberty and democracy! What God thinks of freedom, is written in the
price that people paid for it! What God thinks of slavery is in the woe
and sorrow and wreckage it has always brought upon those who have sought
to live on the sweat of other men's faces!

The Russian would not fight against the Japanese because the Russian
peasant owned no lands, had no schoolhouse, no ballot box, no free
printing-press, no religious liberty. The Russian stood sullenly in the
trenches and had to be flogged into the battle. If the Russian peasant
lost, he lost nothing, because he had nothing to lose; if the peasant
won, he gained nothing, because the Russian aristocrat and the baron
took all of the treasure; therefore he would not fight. But the Northern
soldier had everything to fight for. No such treasures were ever thrown
on the earth to be struggled for. Liberty and the Union were worth a
thousand lives and ten thousand deaths.

It was an awful and a gallant fight, waged by the finest of the world's
manhood on both sides. The Southerner fought for local self-government
and the right to enslave and govern other men; the Northerner fought for
universal self-government and the institutions which had made that
possible without injustice to other men. There can be no choice as
between the splendid qualities that entered into the contest--of
sincerity, earnestness, devotion and fidelity on either side: but the
South lost because slavery had eaten out the enduring vigour of its
resources; the North won because free labour and the rights of man had
given it the greater effective power. At last, the theory on which the
South stood for self-justification crumbled under the supreme test.

IX

HENRY WARD BEECHER: THE APPEAL TO ENGLAND

One November morning in the White House, Abraham Lincoln kept his
Cabinet waiting while he finished reading a newspaper, containing an
account of Beecher's speeches in England. At last he laid the paper on
the table before them, and in substance said to Stanton, "When this war
is fought to a successful issue, this man, Henry Ward