crisis of the State,
the absolute powers of a Dictator. The existing Administration is
entitled to the utmost candor. It is to be thanked for its angelic
virtue, compared with any executive experiences with which we have been
familiar. But the times will not allow us to indulge in compliment. I
wish I saw in the people that inspiration which, if Government would not
obey the same, it would leave the Government behind, and create on the
moment the means and executors it wanted. Better the war should more
dangerously threaten us,--should threaten fracture in what is still
whole, and punish us with burned capitals and slaughtered regiments, and
so exasperate the people to energy, exasperate our nationality. There
are Scriptures written invisibly on men's hearts, whose letters do not
come out until they are enraged. They can be read by war-fires, and by
eyes in the last peril.

We cannot but remember that there have been days in American history,
when, if the Free States had done their duty, Slavery had been blocked
by an immovable barrier, and our recent calamities forever precluded.
The Free States yielded, and every compromise was surrender, and invited
new demands. Here again is a new occasion which Heaven offers to sense
and virtue. It looks as if we held the fate of the fairest possession
of mankind in our hands, to be saved by our firmness or to be lost by
hesitation.

The one power that has legs long enough and strong enough to cross the
Potomac offers itself at this hour; the one strong enough to bring all
the civility up to the height of that which is best prays now at the
door of Congress for leave to move. Emancipation is the demand of
civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue. This
is a progressive policy,--puts the whole people in healthy, productive,
amiable position,--puts every man in the South in just and natural
relations with every man in the North, laborer with laborer.

We shall not attempt to unfold the details of the project of
emancipation. It has been stated with great ability by several of its
leading advocates. I will only advert to some leading points of the
argument, at the risk of repeating the reasons of others.[B]

[Footnote B: I refer mainly to a Discourse by the Rev. M.D. Conway,
delivered before the "Emancipation League," in Boston, in January last.]

The war is welcome to the Southerner: a chivalrous sport to him, like
hunting, and suits his semi-civilized c