of benefit to the human race, can act in the interest of civilization.  Government must not be a parish clerk, a justice of the peace.  It has, of necessity, in any 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 condition.  On the climbing scale of progress, he is just up to war, and has never appeared to such advantage as in the last twelve-month.  It does not suit us.  We are advanced some ages on the war-state,—­to trade, art, and general cultivation.  His laborer works for him at home, so that he loses no labor by the war.  All our soldiers are laborers;