oln--liberty or
slavery--democracy or aristocracy--equality or caste--and choose, this
day, whether our republican institutions shall be placed on an
enduring basis, and an eternal peace secured to our children, or
whether we shall leap back through generations of light and
experience, and meekly bow again to chains and slavery.

Shall Northern freemen yet stand silent lookers-on when through
Topeka, St. Paul, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, and New York, men and
women, little boys and girls, chained in gangs, shall march to their
own sad music, beneath a tyrant's lash? On our sacred soil shall we
behold the auction-block--babies sold by the pound, and beautiful
women for the vilest purposes of lust; where parents and children,
husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, shall be torn from each
other, and sent East and West, North and South? Shall our free presses
and free schools, our palace homes, colleges, churches, and stately
capitols all be leveled to the dust? Our household gods be desecrated,
and our proud lips, ever taught to sing peans to liberty, made to
swear allegiance to the god of slavery? Such degradation shall yet be
ours, if we gird not up our giant freemen now to crush this rebellion,
and root out forever the hateful principle of caste and class. Men
who, in the light of the nineteenth century, believed that God made
one race all booted and spurred, and another to be ridden; who would
build up a government with slavery for its corner-stone, can not live
on the same continent with a pure democracy. To counsel grim-visaged
war seems hard to come from women's lips; but better far that the
bones of our sires and sons whiten every Southern plain, that we do
their rough work at home, than that liberty, struck dumb in the
capital of our Republic, should plead no more for man. Every woman who
appreciates the grand problem of national life must say war,
pestilence, famine, anything but an ignoble peace.

We are but co-workers now with the true ones of every age. The history
of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality. All men, born
slaves to ignorance and fear, crept through centuries of discord--now
one race dominant, then another--but in this ceaseless warring, ever
wearing off the chains of their gross material surroundings of a mere
animal existence, until at last the sun of a higher civilization
dawned on the soul of man, and the precious seed of the ages, garnered
up in the _Mayflower_, was carri