to be banded about with royal alliances and passed under an alien sway without consent on its own part!  Did it not require a Napoleon to work out this false premiss to its bitter end, drenching Europe in blood to gratify his own greed of power, and reducing nation after nation to his alien and despotic rule, till it was felt to be intolerable, and with a convulsive struggle Europe threw off the yoke?  Truly a struggle which was the birth-throes of national sentiment and the recognition that the tie between the governed and the governing must be an organic one, a tie of blood from within, not a force from without—­in one word, the recognition of the great principle of national freedom which, when the nation is sufficiently developed and self-disciplined to be fit for it, is the great mother of progress.  Sown in the corruption of those mangled and decaying corpses on many an awful battle-field, freedom is raised to the glory of an incorruptible truth of national life.

Once again, was it not in his age-long conflict with the great world evil of slavery that man worked out the true nature of a moral personality?  Man started at the outset with the evil premiss of the right of the strong to possess himself of the weak and the conquered, and enslave him for his own use, shunting the toil and burden of life upon his bowed shoulders.  Through long ages he had to work out this wrong premiss in disaster to empires through the laziness and worthlessness of their ruling classes engendered by slave labor, in the dumb suffering and bitter wrongs of millions of enslaved men and women.  Through centuries the Church protested against these wrongs in vain, since the evil root, in the face of all protests, will go on bearing the evil fruit.  England, herself the mother of free peoples, was stained with the guilt of being one of the first to originate the worst form of slavery that the world has ever seen, the African slave-trade, her great Queen Elizabeth not scorning to enrich her royal coffers out of the profits of slave-raiding expeditions conducted by her sea-captains.  It needed the horrors of this latest development of the principle of slavery, the horrors of the middle passage, of whole regions of Africa decimated to supply the slave market, of mothers torn from their children, or, worse still, compelled to bear them to their slave masters, only to see them in their turn sold to some far-off station; of the degradation of men and women brought up in heathen ignorance lest they should use their knowledge to rebel—­it needed all this weight of evil and disaster at last to rouse the conscience of Europe to recognize that slavery was wrong in itself and to cast out the evil premiss on which it rested.  By the mere force of moral revulsion in England, by the throes of a great civil war engendered by slavery in America, at last the true nature of a moral personality got itself recognized,—­the inviolability of personal responsibility, the sanctity of the individual,