d?

In this course, no _real_ failure can await us. Obeying the necessity
which is laid upon us, and simply conducting ourselves as men of
humanity, courage, and honor, we shall surely vindicate the principles
of civilization and Orderly society, within our own States, whether we
immediately succeed in impressing them on South Carolina and her evil
sisterhood or not. Let us but vindicate their existence on any part of
this continent, and that alone will insure their final prevalence on the
continent as a whole. Let us now but make them inexpugnable, and they
will make themselves universal. This law of necessary prevalence, in a
socialization whose vital principle is reverence for the nature of man,
was clearly seen by the masters, or rather, one should say, by the
subjects, of the slave system; and this war signifies their immediate
purpose to build up between it and themselves a Chinese excluding
wall, and their ulterior purpose to starve and trample it out of this
hemisphere.

Finally, just that which teaches us charity toward the slaveholders
teaches us also, forbearing all thought of base and demoralizing
compositions, to press the hand steadily upon the hilt it has grasped,
until war's work is done. These servants of a predaceous principle are
nearly, if not quite, its earliest prey. Enemies to us, they are twice
enemies to themselves. They are driven helplessly on, and will be so
until we slay the tyrant that wrings from them their evil services.
During that fatal month's _siesta_ at Yorktown, the country was
horror-stricken to hear that the enemy were forcing negroes at the point
of the bayonet to work those pieces of ordnance from which the whites,
in terror of our sharpshooters, had fled away. But behind the whites
themselves, behind the whole disloyal South, had long been another
bayonet goading heart and brain, and pricking them on to aggression
after aggression, till aggression found its goal, where we trust it will
find its grave, in civil war. Poor wretches! Who does not pity them? Who
that pities them wisely would not all the more firmly grasp that sword
which alone can deliver them?

Nor has the slave-system been any worse than it must be, in pushing us
and them to the present pass. So bad it must be, or cease to be at all.
All things obey their nature. Hydrophobia will bite, small-pox infect,
plague enter upon life and depart upon death, hyenas scent the new-made
graves, and predaceous systems of soc