If, now, such be, in very deed, our guilt, let us lose no moment in confessing the fact,—­nor afterwards lose a moment in creeping to the gallows, that must, in that case, be hungering for us.  But if no such guilt be ours, then why should not our courage be as good as our cause?  If not only by the warrant, but by the imperative bidding of Heaven, we have taken up arms, then why should we not, as under the banner of Heaven, bear them to the end?

In this course, no real failure can await us.  Obeying the necessity which is laid upon us, and simply conducting ourselves as men of humanity, courage, and honor, we shall surely vindicate the principles of civilization and Orderly society, within our own States, whether we immediately succeed in impressing them on South Carolina and her evil sisterhood or not.  Let us but vindicate their existence on any part of this continent, and that alone will insure their final prevalence on the continent as a whole.  Let us now but make them inexpugnable, and they will make themselves universal.  This law of necessary prevalence, in a socialization whose vital principle is reverence for the nature of man, was clearly seen by the masters, or rather, one should say, by the subjects, of the slave system; and this war signifies their immediate purpose to build up between it and themselves a Chinese excluding wall, and their ulterior purpose to starve and trample it out of this hemisphere.

Finally, just that which teaches us charity toward the slaveholders teaches us also, forbearing all thought of base and demoralizing compositions, to press the hand steadily upon the hilt it has grasped, until war’s work is done.  These servants of a predaceous principle are nearly, if not quite, its earliest prey.  Enemies to us, they are twice enemies to themselves.  They are driven helplessly on, and will be so until we slay the tyrant that wrings from them their evil services.  During that fatal month’s siesta at Yorktown, the country was horror-stricken to hear that the enemy were forcing negroes at the point of the bayonet to work those pieces of ordnance from which the whites, in terror of our sharpshooters, had fled away.  But behind the whites themselves, behind the whole disloyal South, had long been another bayonet goading heart and brain, and pricking them on to aggression after aggression, till aggression found its goal, where we trust it will find its grave, in civil war.  Poor wretches!  Who does not pity them?  Who that pities them wisely would not all the more firmly grasp that sword which alone can deliver them?

Nor has the slave-system been any worse than it must be, in pushing us and them to the present pass.  So bad it must be, or cease to be at all.  All things obey their nature.  Hydrophobia will bite, small-pox infect, plague enter upon life and depart upon death, hyenas scent the new-made graves, and predaceous systems of society open their mouths ever and ever for prey.  What else can they