Moral.—­Shepherds who make compromises with wolves sell their mutton at an exceedingly cheap market.

Now just such short-witted shepherds are we, the people of these free American States, invited by numbers of citizens to become.  Just such, do I say?  A thousand times more silly than such.  Our national wolf meets us with jaws that drip blood and eyes that glare hunger for more.  Instead of professing sanctity and innocence, it only howls immitigable hate and steadfast resolution to devour.  “Give me,” it howls, “half the pasture and flock for my own, with, of course, a supervision over the rest, and a child or two when I am dainty; and I will be content,—­until I want more!”

In speaking of our “national wolf,” we are using no mere rhetoric, but are, in truth, getting at the very heart of the matter.  This war, in its final relations to human history, is an encounter between opposing tendencies in man,—­between the beast-of-prey that is in him and is always seeking brute domination, on the one hand, and the rational and moral elements of manhood, which ever urge toward the lawful supremacy, on the other.  This is a conflict as old as the world, and perhaps one that, in some shape, will continue while the world lasts; and I have tried in vain to think of a single recorded instance wherein the issue was more simple, or the collision more direct, than in our own country to-day.

That principle in nature which makes the tiger tiger passes obviously into man in virtue of the fact that he is on one side, on the side of body and temperament, cousin to the tiger, as comparative anatomy shows.  This presence in man of a tiger-principle does not occur by a mistake, for it is an admirable fuel or fire, an admirable generator of force, which the higher powers may first master and then use.  But at first it assumes place in man wholly untamed and seemingly tameless, indisposed for aught but sovereignty.  Of course, having place in man, it passes, and in the same crude state, into society.  And thus it happens, that, when the unconquerable affinities of men bring them together, this principle arises in its brutal might, and strives to make itself central and supreme.

But what is highest in man has its own inevitable urgency, as well as what is lowest.  It can never be left out of the account.  Gravitation is powerful and perpetual; but the pine pushes up in opposition to it nevertheless.  The forces of the inorganic realm strive with might to keep their own; but organic life will exist on the planet in their despite, and will conquer from the earth what material it needs.  And, in like manner, no sooner do men aggregate than there begin to play back and forth between them ideal or ascending forces, mediations of reason, conscience, soul; and the ever growing interpretations of these appear as courtesies, laws, moralities, worships,—­as all the noble communities which constitute a high social state.  In fine, there is that in man which seeks perpetually, for it seeks necessarily, to give the position of centrality in society to the ideal principle of justice and to the great charities of the human soul.