A putative citizen of the United States commits murder in the jurisdiction of a friendly power, and the Chief Executive of fifty millions of people deems it incumbent upon him as the head of the faction to which he belongs to “call the attention of Congress” to the fact, ostensibly in the interest of justice and fair-play, but obviously to court the good will of the American sympathizers of the assassin.  While on the contrary, within a few hundred miles of the National capital, an armed mob of citizens shoot down in cold blood a dozen of their fellow-citizens, but the Chief of the Nation did not deem it at all pertinent or necessary to “call the attention of Congress” to the matter.  And why?  Because, forsooth, the newspapers, voicing the wishes of the rabble and the cormorants of trade, cry down the “Bloody Shirt,” proclaiming, with brazen effrontery, that each State is “sovereign,” and that its citizens have a perfect right to terrorize and murder one another, if they so desire.  The Bible declares that “Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people.”  God save the Union!

But such argument is indicative, not only of American politics but of Caucasian human nature as well—­that human nature which seldom rises above self-interest in business or politics.  If you have abundance of money, the merchant is all accommodation, the lawyer all smiles; if you have votes that count, politicians cannot be too obsequious, too affable, too anxious to serve you.  But if you simply have common humanity, clothed in the awful majesty of a just cause, you appeal in vain to the cormorants of trade, the harpies of law, or the demagogues of power.  Unless you are of the salt salty, unless you are clothed in broadcloth and fine linen, you cannot obtain even a respectful hearing.

It took the Abolitionists full thirty years to convince the American people, the ministry of Christ included, that slavery was, pure and simple, a “Covenant with death and an agreement with hell;” and then, sad to say, they were convinced against their wills.  Their sense of justice had become so obtuse as to wholly blunt the sense of reason, the brotherly sympathy of a common race-feeling, and the broad, liberal and just inculcations of Jesus Christ.  The nation was sunk to the moral turpitude of Constantinople; and not even a John crying in the wilderness could arouse it to a sense of the exceeding foulness in the midst of which it grovelled, or of the storm gathering on the distant horizon.

Although the abolition of slavery had been agitated for more than thirty years, the nation, which was ruled by politicians of the usual mental caliber, was startled at the defiant shot upon Fort Sumter—­the shot that echoed the downfall of the foulest institution which has sapped the vitality of any modern government, and that aroused the people to a sorrowful realization that the power which defied them was strong enough and desperate enough to stop at nothing short of the disintegration of the American Union.  So the nation, still sympathizing with slavery, still playing with a coal of fire, grappled with the monster, feeling itself powerful to crush it in a few short months.