Our nation is now paying the price, not only of its vice, but also of its virtue,—­not alone of its evil doing, but of its noble and admirable doing as well.  It has of late been a customary cry with a certain class, that those who cherish freedom and advocate social justice are the proper authors of the present war.  No doubt there is in this allegation an ungracious kind of truth; that is, had the nation been destitute of a political faith and of moral feeling, there would have been no contest.  But were one lying ill of yellow-fever or small-pox, there would be the same sort of lying truth in the statement, that the life in him, which alone resists the disease, is really its cause; since to yellow-fever, or to any malady, dead bodies are not subject.  There is no preventive of disease so effectual as death itself,—­no place so impregnable to pestilence as the grave.  So, had the vitality gone out of the nation’s heart, had that lamp of love for freedom and justice and of homage to the being of man, which once burned in its bosom so brightly, already sunk into death-flicker and extinction, then in the sordid and icy dark that would remain there could be no war of like nature with this that to-day gives 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.