incommensurate with their rights.  We do not wish to cut a man’s head off because he comes of a dull race that has been taught for generations to think itself better than the rest of mankind, and has learned to believe it and practise on it.  But if nations are fast becoming educated to a state in which they are competent to manage their own interests, we wish these privileged personages to recognize it, for their own sake, as well as for that of the people.

The spirit of republican America is not that of a wild propagandism.  It is not by war that we have sought or should ever seek to convert the Old World to our theories and practice in government.  If this young nation is permitted, in the Providence of God, to unfold all its possibilities into powers, the great lesson it will teach will be that of peaceful development.  Where the public wealth is mainly for the governing class, the splendid machinery of war is as necessary as the jewels which a province would hardly buy are to the golden circlet that is the mark of sovereignty.  Where the wealth of a country is for the people, this particular form of pyrotechnics is too costly to be indulged in for amusement.  American civilization hates war, as such.  It values life, because it honors humanity.  It values property, because property is for the comfort and good of all, and not merely plunder, to be wasted by a few irresponsible lawgivers.  It wants all the forces of its population to subdue Nature to its service.  It demands all the intellect of its children for construction, not for destruction.  Its business is to build the world’s great temple of concord and justice; and for this it is not Dahlgren and Parrott that are the architects, but men of thought, of peace, of love.

Let us not, therefore, waste our strength in threats of vengeance against those misguided governments who mistook their true interest in the prospect of our calamity.  We can conquer them by peace better than by war.  When the Union emerges from the battle-smoke,—­her crest towering over the ruins of traitorous cities and the wrecks of Rebel armies, her eye flashing defiance to all her evil-wishers, her breast heaving under its corselet of iron, her arm wielding the mightiest enginery that was ever forged into the thunderbolts of war,—­her triumph will be grand enough without her setting fire to the stubble with which the folly of the Old World has girt its thrones.  No deeper humiliation could be asked for our foreign enemies than the spectacle of our triumph.  If we have any legal claims against the accomplices of pirates, they will be presented, and they will be paid.  If there are any uncomfortable precedents which have been introduced into international law, the jealous “Mistress of the Seas” must be prepared to face them in her own hour of trouble.  Had her failings but leaned to Freedom’s side,—­had she but been true to her traditions, to her professions, to her pretended principles,—­where could she have found a truer ally than her own offspring, in the time of trial which is too probably preparing for her?  “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!” No tardy repentance can efface the record of the past.  We may forgive, but history is inexorable.