his pledge. Thereupon the other set him free, with many
apologies and professions of confidence and friendship. Only a few days,
however, had passed before the shepherd, happening to mount a knoll,
saw at a little distance the self-same wolf eagerly devouring the warm
remains of a lamb.

"Villain! villain!" he shouted, in great wrath, "is this the way you
keep your oath? Did not you swear to mind your own business?"

"I am minding it," said the wolf, with a grin; "it is my business to eat
lambs; it should be yours not to believe in wolves' promises."

So saying, he seized upon the last fragment of the Iamb, and ran away as
fast as his legs would carry him.

_Moral_.--Shepherds who make compromises with wolves sell their mutton
at an exceedingly cheap market.

Now just such short-witted shepherds are we, the people of these free
American States, invited by numbers of citizens to become. Just such, do
I say? A thousand times more silly than such. Our national wolf meets us
with jaws that drip blood and eyes that glare hunger for more. Instead
of professing sanctity and innocence, it only howls immitigable hate and
steadfast resolution to devour. "Give me," it howls, "half the pasture
and flock for my own, with, of course, a supervision over the rest, and
a child or two when I am dainty; and I will be content,--until I want
more!"

In speaking of our "national wolf," we are using no mere rhetoric, but
are, in truth, getting at the very heart of the matter. This war, in
its final relations to human history, is an encounter between opposing
tendencies in man,--between the beast-of-prey that is in him and is
always seeking brute domination, on the one hand, and the rational and
moral elements of manhood, which ever urge toward the lawful supremacy,
on the other. This is a conflict as old as the world, and perhaps one
that, in some shape, will continue while the world lasts; and I have
tried in vain to think of a single recorded instance wherein the issue
was more simple, or the collision more direct, than in our own country
to-day.

That principle in nature which makes the tiger tiger passes obviously
into man in virtue of the fact that he is on one side, on the side of
body and temperament, cousin to the tiger, as comparative anatomy shows.
This presence in man of a tiger-principle does not occur by a mistake,
for it is an admirable fuel or fire, an admirable generator of force,
which the higher powers may first mas