o long?

To Weidmann, Roland confessed what was weighing on his heart; and
Weidmann succeeded in changing his sorrow into joy, that the time had
now come in which these things would have an end. He was peculiarly
severe upon those, who, like sentimental criminals, represent, sin and
crime as _evil_, and yet say, "There is no help for it. So it has been,
and so it must be."

Goethe's verses now occurred to Roland, and he repeated them to
Weidmann, who said,--

"It is the free man's inherited privilege to see absolute perfection in
no man. Like Goethe, the Americans boast in having no mediaeval
conditions to overcome; but they have inherited slavery, which many
even declare to be the natural condition of the laboring classes."

Weidmann gave Roland, Abraham Lincoln's speech at the Cooper Institute
in New York.

Roland was requested to read it aloud; but his voice choked, and his
utterance was painfully agitated, when he came to the words,--

"Were we even to withhold our votes, Republicans, you may be sure the
Democrats would not be satisfied. We could not stop there. We must
leave off calling slavery a wrong, and justify it loudly and
unconditionally; we must pull down our Free State Constitutions; the
whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to
slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles
proceed from us.

"And since the Southerners pretend that slavery is a righteous
institution, honorable to mankind, the logical inference is, that it
ought universally to be recognized as a moral good and a social
blessing, and everywhere introduced.

"Our sense of duty forbids such a thought. And, if so, then let us
stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by
none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so
industriously plied and belabored,--contrivances such as seeking for
some middle ground between the right and wrong, vain as the search for
a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man,--such as a
policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do
care,--such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to
Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling not sinners but
the righteous to repentance.

"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against
us; nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government,
nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes