g thefts. The unfortunate Lord Eldons of our own day must be
weeping in rivers. Slavery is dead, and the freedmen are its bequest.
Through a Red Sea which no one would have dared to contemplate, we have
attained to the Promised Land. By the sublimest revenge which history
has placed on record, we have returned good for evil, and have punished
those who wronged us by requiring them to cease from doing wrong. The
grand poetic justice by which Maryland, the first State to shed her
brothers' blood, has been the first to be transformed into a condition
of happy liberty, only symbolizes a like severity of kindness in store
for all. Five years of devastating war will have only rounded the
sublime cycle of retribution predicted so tersely by Whittier long
ago:--

"Have they chained our free-born men?
Let us unchain theirs."

The time has come to put in practice that fine suggestion of the wise
foreign traveller, Von Raumer, which some of us may remember to have
read with almost hopeless incredulity twenty years ago. "The European
abolition of the dependent relations between men of one and the same
race was an easy matter, compared with the task which Americans have to
perform. But if, on the one part, this task carries with it many cares,
pains, and sufferings, on the other hand, the necessary instruction and
guardianship of the blacks, and their final reconciliation with the
whites, offer an employment so noble, influential, and sublime, that the
Americans should testify with awe and humility their gratitude to
Providence for intrusting them with this duty also, in addition to many
others of the greatest importance to the progress of the race. Were its
performance really impossible, it would not have been imposed."

In important periods, words are events; and history may be read in the
successive editions of a dictionary. The transition from the word "serf"
to the word "citizen" marked no European epoch more momentous than that
revealed by the changes in our American vocabulary since the war began.
In the newspapers, the speeches, the general orders, one finds, up to a
certain time, a certain class recognized only as "slaves." Suddenly the
slaves vanish from the page, and a race of "contrabands" takes their
place. After another interval, these, too, gradually disappear, and the
liberated beings are called "freedmen." The revolution is then virtually
accomplished; and nothing remains but to rectify the details, and