ng another race, it is the same tyrannical
principle.

VI. MORAL ASPECT OF THE AMERICAN WAR

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Taken from a speech delivered in London, October 20, 1863. In a
series of five speeches in order at Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh,
Liverpool, and London, Henry Ward Beecher changed the attitude of
the English nation from one of open hostility to the Union to
neutrality and even to favor. It is doubtful if there ever was a
greater triumph in the history of eloquence.

This war began by the act of the South, firing at the old flag that had
covered both sections with glory and protection. The attack made upon us
was under circumstances which inflicted immediate humiliation and
threatened us with final subjugation. The Southerners held all the keys
of the country. They had robbed our arsenals. They had made our treasury
bankrupt. They had possession of the most important offices in the army
and navy. They had the advantage of having long anticipated and prepared
for the conflict. We knew not whom to trust. One man failed and another
man failed. Men, pensioned by the Government, lived on the salary of the
Government only to have better opportunity to stab and betray it. And
for the North to have lain down like a spaniel, to have given up the
land that every child in America is taught, as every child in Britain is
taught, to regard as his sacred right and his trust, to have given up
the mouths of our own rivers and our mountain citadels without a blow,
would have marked the North in all future history as craven and mean.

Second, the honor and safety of that grand experiment, self-government
by free institutions, demanded that so flagitious a violation of the
first principles of legality should not carry off impunity and reward,
thereafter enabling the minority in every party conflict to turn and say
to the majority, "If you don't give us our way we will make war." Oh,
Englishmen, would you let a minority dictate in such a way to you? The
principle thus introduced would literally have no end, would carry the
nation back to its original elements of isolated states. Nor is there
any reason why it should stop with states. If every treaty may be
overthrown by which states have been settled into a nation, what form of
political union may not on like grounds be severed? There is the same
force in the doctrine of secession in the application of counties as in
the application t