oral law. On this theory, a Commonwealth such as yours ought not
to exist; and you must not be surprised, if, in a fit of spleen, the
great cynic grasps his club and knocks your cause on the head, as he
thinks, with a single blow. Here is the end of an unsound, though
brilliant theory,--a theory which had always latent in it the worship of
force and fraud, and which has now displayed its tendency at once in the
portentous defence of the robber-policy of Frederic the Great and in the
portentous defence of the Slave Power. An opposite theory of human
society is, in fact, finding its confirmation in these events,--that
which tells us that we all have need of each other, and that the goal
towards which society actually moves is not an heroic despotism, but a
real community, in which each member shall contribute his gifts and
faculties to the common store, and the common government shall become
the work of all. For, if the victory in this struggle has been won, it
has been won, not by a man, but by the nation; and that it has been won
not by a man, but by the nation, is your glory and the pledge of your
salvation. We have called for a Cromwell, and he has not come; he has
not come, partly because Cromwells are scarce, partly, perhaps, because
the personal Cromwell belonged to a different age, and the Cromwell of
this age is an intelligent, resolute, and united people.

I might mention other eccentricities of opinion quite distinct from the
general temper of the English nation, such as that of the
ultra-scientific school, which thinks it unscientific philanthropy to
ascribe the attributes of humanity to the negro,--a school some of the
more rampant absurdities of which had, just before I left England,
called down the rebuke of real science in the person of Mr. Huxley. And
I might note, if the time would allow, many fluctuations and
oscillations which have taken place among our organs of opinion as the
struggle went on. But I must say on the whole, both with reference to
our different classes and with reference to our literature, that,
considering the complexity of the case, the distance from which our
people viewed it, and the changes which it has undergone since the war
broke out, I do not think there is much room for disappointment as to
the sympathies of our people. Parties have been divided on this question
much as they are on great questions among ourselves, and much as they
were in the time of Charles I., when this long