Who are the persons that use this argument?  They are the very ones who are at the present moment most zealous in maintaining the right of free discussion.  At a time when every power the nation can summon is needed to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and turn their force upon its foes,—­when a false traitor at home may lose us a battle by a word, and a lying newspaper may demoralize an army by its daily or weekly stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim upon the liberty of speech and of the press; liberty, nay license, to deal with government, with leaders, with every measure, however urgent, in any terms they choose, to traduce the officer before his own soldiers, and assail the only men who have any claim at all to rule over the country, as the very ones who are least worthy to be obeyed.  If these opposition members of society are to have their way now, they cannot find fault with those persons who spoke their minds freely in the past on that great question which, as we have agreed, underlies all our present dissensions.

It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards reformers.  They are never general favorites.  They are apt to interfere with vested rights and time-hallowed interests.  They often wear an unlovely, forbidding aspect.  Their office corresponds to that of Nature’s sanitary commission for the removal of material nuisances.  It is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she employs for this duty.  It is not the bird of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of dark plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is entrusted the sacred duty of eliminating the substances that infect the air.  And the force of obvious analogy teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please the general taste in those whose instincts lead them to attack the moral nuisances which poison the atmosphere of society.  But whether they please us in all their aspects or not, is not the question.  Like them or not, they must and will perform their office, and we cannot stop them.  They may be unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but they are alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses as soon as they are dead, and often to help them to die.  To quarrel with them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far from profitable.  They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones of court-yard pavements.  If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr.  They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June just passed, the Governor of Missouri, chairman of the Committee on Emancipation, introduced to the Convention an Ordinance for the final extinction of Slavery!  They hunted another through the streets of a great Northern city in 1835; and within a few weeks a regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing the marks of the slave-driver’s whip on their backs, marched out before a vast multitude tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the streets of the same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and Liberty!