nor can human law be pleaded at this bar as the
excuse for a violation of conscience. It is a dangerous doctrine,
doubtless, to preach that there may be a "higher law" than obedience
to law; but truth is not to be rejected because dangerous, and the
time is not long past when the phrase voiced a conviction, the
forcible assertion of which brought slavery to an end forever.

The resort to arms by a nation, when right cannot otherwise be
enforced, corresponds, or should correspond, precisely to the acts of
the individual man which have been cited; for the old conception of an
appeal to the Almighty, resembling in principle the mediaeval trial by
battle, is at best but a partial view of the truth, seen from one side
only. However the result may afterwards be interpreted as indicative
of the justice of a cause,--an interpretation always questionable,--a
state, when it goes to war, should do so not to test the rightfulness
of its claims, but because, being convinced in its conscience of that
rightfulness, no other means of overcoming evil remains.

Nations, like men, have a conscience. Like men, too, the light of
conscience is in nations often clouded, or misguided, by passion or by
interest. But what of that? Does a man discard his allegiance to
conscience because he knows that, itself in harmony with right, its
message to him is perplexed and obscured by his own infirmities? Not
so. Fidelity to conscience implies not only obedience to its
dictates, but earnest heart-searching, the use of every means, to
ascertain its true command; yet withal, whatever the mistrust of the
message, the supremacy of the conscience is not impeached. When it is
recognized that its final word is spoken, nothing remains but
obedience. Even if mistaken, the moral wrong of acting against
conviction works a deeper injury to the man, and to his kind, than can
the merely material disasters that may follow upon obedience. Even the
material evils of war are less than the moral evil of compliance with
wrong.

"Yes, my friend," replied to me a foreign diplomatist to whom I was
saying some such things, "but remember that only a few years ago the
conscience of your people was pressing you into war with Great Britain
in the Venezuelan question." "Admitting," I replied, "that the first
national impulse, the first movement of the conscience, if you like,
was mistaken,--which is at least open to argument,--it remains that
there was no war; time for delibera