North which answered the roar of
the first gun at Sumter? Worse than all, are we permitted to doubt that
in the very bosom of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but
not sleeping, which only listened for the first word that made it safe
to strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend
its golden scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the
cotton-fields. Who would not wish that he were wrong in such a
suspicion? yet who can forget the mysterious warnings that the allies
of the rebels were to be found far north of the fatal boundary line; and
that it was in their own streets, against their own brothers, that the
champions of liberty were to defend her sacred heritage?

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had
suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish
the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves
on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud
labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of
freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands
of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere,
and to humanity. You have only to see who are our friends and who are
our enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are
combating. We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with
us. We know what the West End of London wishes may be result of this
controversy. The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the
shears, threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or
later cut into shreds the old charters of tyranny. How they would exult
if they could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one
resistless weapon! The man who of all living Americans had the best
opportunity of knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in March,
1862: "That Great Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our
domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social evil she had
earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to
master it, and then become the only foreign nation steadily contributing
in every indirect way possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably
be the verdict made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of
the evidence."

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the