n has
a right to govern its own destinies. With what world tyrannies and
oppressions, the outcome of man's selfish lust of power and wealth, have
not the peoples had to fight and struggle in order at length to win and
get recognized that principle of freedom without which a nation can be
neither strong nor holy, neither a citadel nor a temple! The Iron Duke
used to say, "There is but one thing worse than a battle gained, and
that is a battle lost." Yet what battles lost and what battles gained,
with all their sickening sights and sounds--

"Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of lungs,
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying and voices of the dead";

what bloody conflicts through the long ages have not had to be fought
out to gain this freedom! Truly we might apostrophize Freedom in the
words of the Hebrew prophet: "Who is this that cometh with her garments
dyed in blood?" Through what long centuries did not what Sir John Seeley
called the "mechanical theory of government" survive, the theory which
recognized no vital bond of blood and historical tradition between a
people and its government, but looked upon nations as royal appanages,
to be banded about with royal alliances and passed under an alien sway
without consent on its own part! Did it not require a Napoleon to work
out this false premiss to its bitter end, drenching Europe in blood to
gratify his own greed of power, and reducing nation after nation to his
alien and despotic rule, till it was felt to be intolerable, and with a
convulsive struggle Europe threw off the yoke? Truly a struggle which
was the birth-throes of national sentiment and the recognition that the
tie between the governed and the governing must be an organic one, a tie
of blood from within, not a force from without--in one word, the
recognition of the great principle of national freedom which, when the
nation is sufficiently developed and self-disciplined to be fit for it,
is the great mother of progress. Sown in the corruption of those mangled
and decaying corpses on many an awful battle-field, freedom is raised to
the glory of an incorruptible truth of national life.

Once again, was it not in his age-long conflict with the great world
evil of slavery that man worked out the true nature of a moral
personality? Man started at the outset with the evil premiss of the
right of the strong to possess hi