The power of Emancipation is this, that it alters the atomic social constitution of the Southern people.  Now their interest is in keeping out white labor; then, when they must pay wages, their interest will be to let it in, to get the best labor, and, if they fear their blacks, to invite Irish, German, and American laborers.  Thus, whilst Slavery makes and keeps disunion, Emancipation removes the whole objection to union.  Emancipation at one stroke elevates the poor white of the South, and identifies his interest with that of the Northern laborer.

Now, in the name of all that is simple and generous, why should not this great right be done?  Why should not America be capable of a second stroke for the well-being of the human race, as eighty or ninety years ago she was for the first? an affirmative step in the interests of human civility, urged on her, too, not by any romance of sentiment, but by her own extreme perils?  It is very certain that the statesman who shall break through the cobwebs of doubt, fear, and petty cavil that lie in the way, will be greeted by the unanimous thanks of mankind.  Men reconcile themselves very fast to a bold and good measure, when once it is taken, though they condemned it in advance.  A week before the two captive commissioners were surrendered to England, every one thought it could not be done:  it would divide the North.  It was done, and in two days all agreed it was the right action.  And this action which costs so little (the parties injured by it being such a handful that they can very easily be indemnified) rids the world, at one stroke, of this degrading nuisance, the cause of war and ruin to nations.  This measure at once puts all parties right.  This is borrowing, as I said, the omnipotence of a principle.  What is so foolish as the terror lest the blacks should be made furious by freedom and wages?  It is denying these that is the outrage, and makes the danger from the blacks.  But justice satisfies everybody,—­white man, red man, yellow man, and black man.  All like wages, and the appetite grows by feeding.

But this measure, to be effectual, must come speedily.  The weapon is slipping out of our hands.  “Time,” say the Indian Scriptures, “drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action which ought to be performed, and which is delayed in the execution.”

I hope it is not a fatal objection to this policy that it is simple and beneficent thoroughly, which is the attribute of a moral action.  An unprecedented material prosperity has not tended to make us Stoics or Christians.  But the laws by which the universe is organized reappear at every point, and will rule it.  The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation.  It is not free institutions, ’t is not a republic, ’t is not a democracy, that is the end,—­no, but only the means.  Morality is the object of government.  We want a state of things in which crime shall not pay.  This is the consolation on which we rest in the darkness of the future and the afflictions of to-day, that the government of the world is moral, and does forever destroy what is not.