can give it; that Liberty, the one of the two claimants
who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves
and divided between them, is the true mother of this
blessed Union; that the contest in which we are engaged
is one of principles overlaid by circumstances; that
the longer we fight, and the more we study the movements
of events and ideas, the more clearly we find the moral
nature of the cause at issue emerging in the field
and in the study; that all honest persons with average
natural sensibility, with respectable understanding,
educated in the school of northern teaching, will have
eventually to range themselves in the armed or unarmed
host which fights or pleads for freedom, as against
every form of tyranny; if not in the front rank now,
then in the rear rank by and by;—assuming
these propositions, as many, perhaps most of us, are
ready to do, and believing that the more they are
debated before the public the more they will gain
converts, we owe it to the timid and the doubting to
keep the great questions of the time in unceasing
and untiring agitation. They must be discussed,
in all ways consistent with the public welfare, by
different classes of thinkers; by priests and laymen;
by statesmen and simple voters; by moralists and lawyers;
by men of science and uneducated hand-laborers; by
men of facts and figures, and by men of theories and
aspirations; in the abstract and in the concrete; discussed
and rediscussed every month, every week, every day,
and almost every hour, as the telegraph tells us of
some new upheaval or subsidence of the rocky base
of our political order.
Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen
the convictions of the great body of loyal citizens.
They may do nothing toward changing the views of
those, if such there be, as some profess to believe,
who follow politics as a trade. They may have
no hold upon that class of persons who are defective
in moral sensibility, just as other persons are wanting
in an ear for music. But for the honest, vacillating
minds, the tender consciences supported by the tremulous
knees of an infirm intelligence, the timid compromisers
who are always trying to curve the straight lines
and round the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual
debate of these living questions is the one offered
means of grace and hope of earthly redemption.
And thus a true, unhesitating patriot may be willing
to listen with patience to arguments which he does
not need, to appeals which have no special significance
for him, in the hope that some less clear in mind
or less courageous in temper may profit by them.