at has its source in the
heart must be eradicated by slow medicinal cure of the blood. To fight
against the stars in their courses, one must have brands of starry
temper. No sudden shocks of battle will sweep Slavery from the sphere.
Can one conquer the universe by proclamation? 'Lyra will rise
to-morrow,' said some one, after Caesar reformed the calendar.
'Doubtless,' replied Cicero, 'there is an edict for it.' But, believe
me, there can be no broad, stupendous evil, unless it be a part of God's
plan; and in His own time, without other help from us than the
performance of our duty, it will slough off its slime and rise into some
fair superstructure. Our efforts dash like spray against the rock,--the
spray is broken, the rock remains. To annihilate evil with evil,--that
is an error in itself against which every man is justified in taking up
his sword.

"So far, I have allowed the sin. Yet, sin or not, in this country the
estate of the slave is unalterable. Segregately, the institution is
their protection. For though there is no record of the contact of
superior and inferior races on a basis of equality, where the inferior
did not absorb the superior, yet, if every slave were set free to-day,
imbruted through generations, it could not be on a basis of equality
that we should meet, and they would be as inevitably sunk and lost as
the detritus that a river washes into the sea. If the black stay here,
it must be as a menial. In his own latitudes, where, after the third
generation, the white man ceases to exist, he is the stronger; there the
black man is king: let him betake himself to his realm. Abolition is
impracticable, colonization feasible; on either is gunpowder wasted: one
cannot explode a lie by the blast.

"But saying the worst of our incubus that can be said, could all its
possible accumulation of wrong and woe exceed that of four years of such
a war as this? Think a moment of what this land was, what a great beacon
and celestial city across the waves to the fugitives from tyranny; think
of our powerful pride in eastern seas, in western ports, when each
ship's armament carried with it the broadside of so many sovereign
States, when each citizen felt his own hand nerved with a people's
strength, when no young man woke in the morning without the perpetual
aurora of high hopes before him, when peace and plenty were all about
us,--and then think of misery at every hearth, of civilization thrust
back a century, of th