who can think that it would have been quite the same with him, had he in early life, when first he began to meditate turning devil, been met by a prohibition he dared not encounter? Those malignants of the South who had long been diligently sowing treason and tyranny, and have now seen it spring up under their fostering care in wide-spread murder, what has brought them to the present pass? Only their full belief that Northern men were too cowardly and too avaricious to withstand them. Had they known twenty or thirty years ago that justice and freedom would never be bartered by us for gold, and that, when persuasion and forbearance were outworn, we should prove ourselves masters of sterner arts, then not only would this insurrection never have broken out, but thousands of men, of whom it has made butchers and pirates, would have been lovers of good order, and might even have been lovers of liberty. O that a score of years ago they could have seen the edge of the sword that gleams against them now! that they could have looked into these peaceful Northern bosoms, and discovered the stern principle and steely courage that lay hidden there! They thought us cowards, and the thought made them villains. They thought God's-earnest wanting from our hearts; and thereupon devil's-earnest matured in theirs. And the evil of this is seen not alone in the blazing calamity of war, but still more in the mad wishes which were thus allowed to spring up in the bosoms of Southern men; in the accursed ambitions to which these ripened; and in the epidemic perversion of private sentiment and public tendency which finally resulted. Tendencies are the lords of history and masters of effects. Before the traitorous tides that now run in Southern hearts we have seen such men as John Bell and Sam Houston go down,-swept in, and borne helplessly away. And before a traitorous and tyrannous tendency, of which these are but the later effects, men have been so falling there for many years. Meantime nothing can be more sure than that, save for the want of some wholesome terrors, this false tendency would never have been established, and worthier aspirations would have occupied those whom it has now led astray. Thus, to conclude this branch of the subject, we have VOL. LXXII.—5TH S. VOL. X. NO. I. 2 -- sought to show that the protection of the head and heart by the hands that the conservation of all spiritual and social wealths by the quelling of barbarous aggression and the coercive contradiction of crime is justified by the universal order and economy of Nature; that in the bosoms of all men the sacred bidding of Nature strengthens this privilege into obligation; that physical life has no such inviolability as forbids obedience to this behest; and that in justly obeying it we, so far from rendering evil for evil, are indeed rewarding evil with good, are using the only method by which, under the circumstances assumed, base and mischievous men may be overshadowed with the hands of real and availing benediction. Times, therefore, may arrive when Mercy herself, sweet-hearted, heavenly Mercy, shall place the sword in our grasp, and bid us bear it not in vain; when love to enemies can reach its objects only as it inhabits the hands and goes forth in the heroic healing and balm of blows, only, perchance, as it flames toward them from the rifle's muzzle or cannon's mouth; and when submission and forbearance, soft speeches and soothing of the palms, by their unintended flattery of tyrannous imaginations, shall bear all the fruits, though they want all the animus, of hate and injury. We affirm this, while forward and glad to confess that Mercy will commonly come bringing tender counsels; that love to enemies is oftenest shown by long-suffering and meekness, by turning a cheek to the smiter, and yielding yet more to him who is already endowed beyond his due; that life is exceedingly precious, and not to be lightly taken; and that men err far more frequently by over suddenness of wrath and fierceness of demand for redress, than by excess of charitable delay and noble endurance of wrong. Yet the Italians and ourselves have erred otherwise; they to the Bourbons, and we to the slave-drivers, have yielded, not only to our own hurt, but to that of the tyrants themselves. The doctrine which condemns as sin all physical resistance to outrage is probably not wide-spread, though some flavor of it is far more widely spread than is commonly supposed; yet ours is manifestly the epoch of the Peace Society; a feeling prevails, that war in the nineteenth century is not only a moral, but an historical archaicism, and that the profession of arms can no longer be justified. Provisions for national defence have therefore in our country been made with a little shame and no little grudging; the army has been kept at a minimum, or below it; the navy received stinted support; militia soldiering been half frolic to those engaged in it, and more than half nuisance to many who did not; and the military life has found hardly more than mere toleration from the better part of American society. That our little army has been officered chiefly from the South is not the result of favoritism alone, but is also due in part to the displeasure, and almost contempt, with which the military profession has been regarded by men of culture and humanity at the North. With the desire of peace it would seem that every man of right mind ought to sympathize, and that no one should say a word to delay the advent of that millennium, which, of course, is always near at hand! Yet there are discriminations to be made. There is a living, and there is a dead peace; the one obtaining place where justice prevails, the other where it is not even held precious; that where its supremacy is undisputed, this where it is undesired; the former indicates the highest health of nations, the latter their leprosy and lowest debasement. These stand to each other as yea and nay, as life and death, as heaven and hell; not to distinguish between them is to elect the worse; while to choose the true peace is so to deny and abhor the false, that war, with all its fearfulness, shall be incomparably less fearful. If, therefore, the Peace Society do not steadily perceive and proclaim that war is worthy of all good men's choice in comparison with this peace of perfidy and corruption, it becomes the patron of all that is inimical to the weal of men; and if it advocate in the terms of faith and conscience this treachery to all that is precious in civilization, then is it the very flower of a nation's rottenness. To make composition with chaos for the sake of ease, safety, gain; to call this traitorous pact by the sacred title of peace; and then to pray over the lie, is but adding to whatsoever is basest and wickedest in action whatsoever is falsest and most blasphemous in words. When, therefore, we say that peace is precious, let us mean that broad, established, intelligent communion in justice, broad common understandings for the best ends, are precious; and then our meaning will be one that the laws of the world can recognize as good. But if, on the contrary, our meaning be that justice is less precious than the outward circumstances of peace, and may with advantage be paid away in purchase of these, then are we not only renegade from right, which we intend to 'betray, but are traitors to Peace herself. It is no less an every-day truth than if the Bible did not intimate it, that peace follows after purity, and only as it is worthy can be enduring. There is a dead peace; but upon the heels of death treads decay, - decay and its soldier, the worm. No allegiance, therefore, to peace can there be, without due recognition of the fact that war, whenever it takes place in needful vindication of justice, is honorable, noble, sacred, so far as the champions of justice are concerned. Therefore, a Peace Society that respects outward peace only or chiefly is the very Judas of the time, not only selling God's justice for a price, but in the end hanging its cause and itself on a tree. For wars in and of themselves we have no word either of praise or extenuation. Let them be hateful, not to mothers alone, as Horace has it, but to all women and all men forever. But who extols the ocean storm? Praiseworthy, nevertheless, is the mariner that braves it. And praiseworthy in the same way is he who, when the red billows of battle lie between his time and that port of pure manners and just rule toward which all times must sail, launches thereon his bark, to sink or swim as the destinies permit. Wars are great evils; but barbarous tyranny, and the submissions that flatter and perpetuate it, are great crimes. And between evils and crimes there is but one choice. But consider, further, the function of war as simply potential and preventive. "The Empire is Peace," said Louis Napoleon; and a satirist offers the substitute, "War is Peace." But in one important sense war is peace, possible war is the gage of actual peace. It is the alternative Right or Fight which secures right, and saves from the necessity of fighting. On this basis reposes the state, with every civil means of adjustment and redress. Legislature, jury, bench, the binding codes and rites that house nations and encircle the sanctities of homes, whatsoever secures men and women from perpetual liability to naked contact with savage passions and brutish apprehensions, these, and all the priceless immunities of civilization, all most slow-built and costly architectures of time, -rest, as their bases of security, upon no other foundation. Lessing's Nathan may be right in saying that "No man must must"; but every society must put an Imperative, an It shall be, beneath its civilities, the hidden rocky foundation from which its majestic and delicate superstructures go safely aloft. And the loftier and more human the social edifice, the more adamantine-resolute must these foundations be. A public law differs from a public request only in virtue of that extreme resolution, those terrors of the imperative which uphold it; and a nation is a nation only as it is religiously banded and bound to support a social order against all assault. Hence the sacredness of law; hence patriotism, religious love of native land, and the dulce est pro patria mori. Love and terror, these are the two powers which uphold civilization. It avails not to say, "If love enough abounded, fear could be dispensed with." It were as wise to say, "If we dwelt in the moon," and thereupon assume that we do dwell in the moon. Terror in the service of love holds the world together; and no sooner are its sharp ministries withdrawn than human society is dissolved, and chaos come. Terror serving love and guided by reason, - take this away, and then would result a state of affairs such as the observer may see among domestic dogs, among whom, at any distance from home, there is, at each meeting, cautious, questioning approach, the query, "Is it amity, or hostility?" looking from each pair of anxious eyes, and this question never so answered on the fairer side that it may not in a moment pass to the fouler decision. Men rise from this state, and society begins. there where two men say, implicitly or otherwise, “We two will guarantee each other's defence, and between us reason |