hy that Northern winds
carried to the listening ear of the Southern slave-holder, and in every
oppression of the weak by the strong, every proud assumption of idleness
over labor which echoed the music of Southern life back to us. Here in
our midst lived that worse and falser nature, side by side with the true
and better nature which God meant should be the nature of Americans, of
which he was shaping out the type and champion in his chosen David of
the sheepfold.

Here then we have the two. The history of our country for many years is
the history of how these two elements of American life approached
collision. They wrought their separate reactions on each other. Men
debate and quarrel even now about the rise of Northern Abolitionism,
about whether the Northern Abolitionists were right or wrong, whether
they did harm or good. How vain the quarrel is! It was inevitable. It
was inevitable in the nature of things that two such natures living here
together should be set violently against each other. It is inevitable,
till man be far more unfeeling and untrue to his convictions than he has
always been, that a great wrong asserting itself vehemently should
arouse to no less vehement assertion the opposing right. The only wonder
is that there was not more of it. The only wonder is that so few were
swept away to take by an impulse they could not resist their stand of
hatred to the wicked institution. The only wonder is, that only one
brave, reckless man came forth to cast himself, almost single-handed,
with a hopeless hope, against the proud power that he hated, and trust
to the influence of a soul marching on into the history of his
countrymen to stir them to a vindication of the truth he loved. At any
rate, whether the Abolitionists were wrong or right, there grew up
about their violence, as there always will about the extremism of
extreme reformers, a great mass of feeling, catching their spirit and
asserting it firmly, though in more moderate degrees and methods. About
the nucleus of Abolitionism grew up a great American Anti-Slavery
determination, which at last gathered strength enough to take its stand
to insist upon the checking and limiting the extension of the power of
slavery, and to put the type-man, whom God had been preparing for the
task, before the world, to do the work on which it had resolved. Then
came discontent, secession, treason. The two American natures, long
advancing to encounter, met at last, and a who