s the land
its woful baptism of blood and tears. Oh, no! there would have been
peace--_and_ putrefaction: peace, but without its sweetness, and
death, but without its hopes.

In one important sense, however, this war--hateful and horrible though
it be--is the price which the nation must pay for its ideas and its
magnanimity. If you take a clear initial step toward any great end,
you thereby assume as a debt to destiny the pursuit and completion of
your action; and should you fail to meet this debt, it will not fail
to meet you, though now in the shape of retribution and with a biting
edge. The seaman who has signed shipping-papers owes a voyage, and
must either sail or suffer. The nation which has recognized absolute
rights of man, and in their name assumed to shed blood, has taken
upon itself the burden of a high destination, and must bear it, if
not willingly, reluctantly, if not in joy and honor, then in shame and
weeping.

Our nation, by the early nobility of its faith and action, assumed
such a debt to destiny, and now must pay it. It needed not to come in
this shape: there need have been no horror of carnage,--no feast of
vultures, and carnival of fiends,--no weeping of Rachel, mourning
for her children, and refusing to be comforted, because they are not.
There was required only a magnanimity in proceeding to sustain that of
our beginning,--only a sympathy broad enough to take our little planet
and all her human tribes in its arms, deep enough to go beneath
the skin in which men differ, to the heart's blood in which they
agree,--only pains and patience, faith and forbearance,--only a
national obedience to that profound precept of Christianity which
prescribes service to him that would be greatest, making the knowledge
of the wise due to the ignorant, and the strength of the strong due
to the weak. The costs of freedom would have been paid in the patient
lifting up of a degraded race from the slough of servitude; and the
nation would at the same time have avoided that slough of lava and
fire wherein it is now ingulfed.

It was not to be so. History is coarse; it gets on by gross feeding
and fevers, not by delicacy of temperance and wisdom of regimen. Our
debt was to be paid, not in a pure form, but mixed with the costs of
unbelief, cowardice, avarice. Yet primarily it is the cost, not of
meanness, but of magnanimity, that we are now paying,--not of a base
skepticism, but of a noble faith. For, in truth, normal