The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously emphasize as “sentiments” considered as motives of action.  It is charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with them, as certain so-called “learned” quadrupeds play with the printed characters set before them.  In all questions involving duty, we act from sentiments.  Religion springs from them, the family order rests upon them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any two of its members implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment.  It is true that men often forget them or act against their bidding in the keen competition of business and politics.  But God has not left the hard intellect of man to work out its devices without the constant presence of beings with gentler and purer instincts.  The breast of woman is the ever-rocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or later steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion; which will by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world’s teachers, and at last thunder forth in the edicts of its law-givers and masters.  Woman herself borrows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that shudders at the picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration “from God, who is our home.”  To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinctively attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the natural sensibilities.

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in the other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics.  For what is meant by self-government is, that a man shall make his convictions of what is right and expedient regulate the community so far as his fractional share of the government extends.  If one has come to the conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular institution or statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it is to be expected that he will choose to be represented by those who share his belief, and who will in their wider sphere do all they legitimately can to get rid of the wrong in which they find themselves and their constituents involved.  To prevent opinion from organizing itself under political forms may be very desirable, but it is not according to the theory or practice of self-government.  And if at last organized opinions become arrayed in hostile shape against each other, we shall find that a just war is only the last inevitable link in a chain of closely connected impulses of which the original source is