Our nation has a political faith.  Will you, conservative men, conserve this, and so regain and multiply the blessing it has already brought? or will you destroy it, and wait till, through at least a century of tossing and tumult, another, and that of less value, is grown?  A faith, a crystallizing principle for many millions of people is not grown in a day; if it can be grown in a century is problematical.  The fact, and the choice, are before you.

Our nation had a faith which it cherished with sincerity and sureness.  If half the nation has fallen away from this,—­if half the remaining moiety is doubtful, skeptical about it,—­if, therefore, we are already a house divided against itself and tottering to its fall,—­to what is all due?  Simply to the fact that no nation can long unsay its central principle, and yet preserve it in faithfulness and power,—­that no nation can long preach the sanctity of natural right, the venerableness of man’s nature, and the identity of pure justice with political interest, from an auction-block on which men and maidens are sold,—­that, in fine, a nation cannot continue long with impunity to play within its own borders the part both of Gessler and Tell, both of Washington and Benedict Arnold, both of Christ and of him that betrayed him.

We must choose.  For our national faith we must make honest payment, so conserving it, and with it all for which nations may hope; or else, refusing to meet these costs, we must suffer the nation’s soul to perish, and in the imbecility, the chaos, and shame that will follow, suffer therewith all that nations may lawfully fear.

What good omens, then, attend our time, now when the first officer of the land has put the trumpet to his mouth and blown round the world an intimation that, to the extent of the nation’s power, these costs will begin to be paid, this true conservation to be practised!  The work is not yet done; and the late elections betoken too much of moral debility in the people.  But my trust continues firm.  The work will be done,—­at least, so far as we are responsible for its doing.  And then!  Then our shame, our misery, our deadly sickness will be taken away; no more that poison in our politics; no more that degradation in our commercial relations; no more that careful toning down of sentiment to low levels, that it may harmonize with low conditions; no more that need to shun the company of all healthful and heroic thoughts, such as are fit, indeed, to brace the sinews of a sincere social order, but sure to crack the sinews of a feeble and faithless conventionalism.  Base men there will yet be, and therefore base politics; but when once our nation has paid the debt it owes to itself and the human race, when once it has got out of its blood the venom of this great injustice, it will, it must, arise beautiful in its young strength, noble in its new-consecrated faith, and stride away with a generous and achieving pace upon the great