As we cast our eyes over the history of nations, we discern with horror the succession of murderous slaughters by which their progress has been marked. As the hunter traces the wild beast, when pursued to his lair, by the drops of blood on the earth; so we follow man, faint, weary, staggering with wounds, through the black forest of the past, which he has reddened with his gore. Oh! let it not be in the future ages as in those which we now contemplate. Let the grandeur of man be discerned in the blessings which he has secured; in the good he has accomplished; in the triumphs of benevolence and justice; in the establishment of perpetual peace. As the ocean washes every shore, and clasps with all-embracing arms every land, while it bears upon its heaving bosom the products of various climes; so peace surrounds, protects, and upholds all other blessings. Without it, commerce is vain, the ardor of industry is restrained, happiness is blasted, virtue sickens and dies.

war.

And peace has its own peculiar victories, in comparison with which Marathon and Bannockburn and Bunker Hill, fields held sacred in the history of human freedom, shall lose their lustre. Our own Washinton rises to a truly heavenly stature,-not when we follow him over the ice of the Delaware to the capture of Trenton; not when we behold him victorious over Cornwallis at Yorktown,-but when we regard him, in noble deference to justice, refusing the kingly crown which a faithless soldiery proffered, and at a later day upholding the peaceful neutrality of the country, while he received unmoved the clamor of the people wickedly crying for What glory of battle in England's annals will not fade by the side of that great act of justice, by which her legislature, at a cost of one hundred million dollars, gave freedom to eight hundred thousand slaves! And when the day shall come (may these eyes be gladdened by its beams !) that shall witness an act of greater justice still, the peaceful emancipation of three millions of our fellow-men, "guilty of a skin not colored as our own," now held in gloomy bondage, under the Constitution of our country, then shall there be a victory, in comparison with which that of Bunker Hill shall be as a farthing candle held up to the sun. That victory shall need no monument of stone. It shall be written on the grateful hearts of uncounted multitudes, that shall proclaim it to the latest generation. It shall be one of the links in the golden chain by which humanity shall connect itself with the throne of God.

As the cedars of Lebanon are higher than the grass of the valley; as the heavens are higher than the earth; as man is higher than the beasts of the field; as the angels are higher than man; as he that ruleth his spirit is higher than he that taketh a city; so are the virtues and victories of peace higher than the virtues and victories of war.

WILLIAM H. SEWARD (1801-1872)

THE WAR-TIME SECRETARY OF STATE

O

N that fatal April day in 1865, when Lincoln fell victim to the bullet of an assassin, William H. Seward, his Secretary of State, then on a bed of sickness, narrowly escaped a similar fate, he being stabbed in several places, and only saved from death by the courage of the old soldier who acted as his nurse. The assassins were shrewd in selecting Seward for one of their intended victims, since in his special field of duty he was almost as important a figure in the government as Lincoln himself. Five years before, when Lincoln was first nominated for the Presidency, Seward was really the most prominent man in the party-too prominent, as it appeared, to receive the nomination in the face of the enemies he had made. Deeply disappointed as he undoubtedly was, he did not permit his private feeling to conflict with his public duty, but did his utmost to check the schemes of the conspirators in Buchanan's cabinet, and smooth the way for the new President. Chosen as Secretary of State by Lincoln, he doubtless accepted the office with the idea that he would be "the power behind the throne," and exert a controlling influence over the inexperienced Westerner. Disappointed in this again, he fell gracefully into his true vocation, that of a faithful counsellor of the President. In his sphere of duty no man could have been more efficient and his skillful handling of the Trent affair and the French occuption of Mexico, saved the country from dangerous foreign complications at a time when it needed all its energies at home. The war ended, Seward, who remained Secretary of State under Johnson, quickly cleared Mexico of the French invaders. Another great service he did and one for which he was then severely criticised, was the purchase of Alaska, whose actual value he was one of the first to perceive.

While in the Senate he took an advanced position among the opponents to slavery, a position which he firmly held throughout the troublous times that followed, despite all criticism and abuse. During this period his oratory made him a power in the Senate, while the views expressed by him formed a declaration of principles upon which all sections of anti-slavery men could agree. As regards his powers, a marked example of them was shown in 1846, when he defended a negro murderer against whom a bitter popular feeling existed, greatly endangering his popularity by his persistence in this charitable action, though he much enhanced his reputation by his treatment of this case. Mr. Gladstone said to Charles Sumner, "Mr. Seward's argument in the Freeman case is the greatest forensic effort in the English language." He would not even except Erskine in this opinion, which was certainly a highly flattering one, coming from such a source.

AMERICA'S TRUE GREATNESS

[As an example of Seward's oratory we offer the following selection, taken from one of his addresses, which is of much interest as showing his elevated conception of the mission of the United States, and of the perils which threatened the development of this mission. It was by working at the bottom, not at the top, by training the young in the exercise of public virtue, that the great Republic was to be saved and its mission accomplished.]

At present we behold only the rising of our sun of empire,—only the fair seeds and beginnings of a great nation. Whether that glowing orb shall attain to a meridian height, or fall suddenly from its glorious sphere; whether those prolific seeds shall mature into autumnal ripeness, or shall perish, yielding no harvest, depends on God's will and providence. But God's will and providence operate not by casualty or caprice, but by fixed and revealed laws. If we would secure the greatness set before us, we must find the way which those laws indicate, and keep within it. That way is new and all untried. We departed early, we departed at the beginning, from the beaten track of national ambition. Our lot was cast in an age of revolution—a revolution which was to bring all mankind from a state of servitude to the exercise of self-government; from under the tyranny of physical force to the gentle sway of opinion; from under subjection to matter to dominion over nature.

It was ours to lead the way, to take up the cross of republicanism and bear it before the nations, to fight its earliest battles, to enjoy its earliest triumphs, to illustrate its purifying and elevating virtues, and by our courage and resolution, our moderation and our magnanimity, to cheer

WILLIAM H. SEWARD

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and sustain its future followers through the baptism of blood and the martyrdom of fire. A mission so noble and benevolent demands a generous and self-denying enthusiasm. Our greatness is to be won by beneficence without ambition. We are in danger of losing that holy seal. We are surrounded by temptations. Our dwellings become palaces, and our villages are transformed, as if by magic, into great cities. Fugitives from famine, and oppression, and the sword crowd our shores, and proclaim to us that we alone are free, and great, and happy. Our empire enlarges. The continent and its islands seem ready to fall within our grasp, and more than even fabulous wealth opens under our feet. No public virtue can withstand, none ever encountered, such seductions as these. Our own virtue and moderation must be renewed and fortified, under circumstances so new and peculiar.

Where shall we seek the influence adequate to a task so arduous as this? Shall we invoke the press and the pulpit? They only reflect the actual condition of the public morals, and cannot change them. Shall we resort to the executive authority? The time has passed when it could compose and modify the political elements around it. Shall we go to the Senate? Conspiracies, seditions, and corruptions in all free countries have begun there. Where, then, shall we go to find an agency that can uphold and renovate declining public virtue? Where should we go but there where all republican virtue begins and must end; where the Promethean fire is ever to be rekindled until it shall finally expire; where motives are formed and passions disciplined? To the domestic fireside and humbler school, where the American citizen is trained. Instruct him there that it will not be enough that he can claim for his country Lacedæmonian heroism, but that more than Spartan valor and more than Roman magnificence is required of her. Go, then, ye laborers in a noble cause; gather the young Catholic and the young Protestant alike into the nursery of freedom, and teach them there that, although religion has many and different shrines on which may be made the offering of a "broken spirit " which God will not despise, yet that their country has appointed only one altar and one sacrifice for all her sons, and that ambition and avarice must be slain on that altar, for it is consecrated to humanity.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1817-1895)

THE SLAVE-BORN ORATOR

A

MONG those who spoke for the rights of man and the freedom

of the slave in the period "before the war," there is one to whom we must accord peculiar credit; Frederick Douglass, a member of the race whose cause he advocated, born a slave himself, yet escaping from his bonds, becoming self-educated, and developing a gift for oratory that gave him a high standing in the ranks of the opponents of human slavery. He stood alone, the first and foremost American orator of his race, a fact which in itself gave him marked prominence. Yet it was not solely as a prodigy that he won reputation, for he had true power in oratory; being a man of intellect and feeling, with fine powers of expression and much self-control. His lectures against the slave system, begun about 1841, attracted wide attention, and on his visit to England in 1845 his earnest and fluent eloquence drew large audiences. He edited a newspaper, The North Star, at Rochester, New York, and after 1870 held several positions under the government, the last being that of Minister to Haiti, in 1889-1891.

FREE SPEECH IN BOSTON

[In 1841, when Douglass delivered at Music Hall, Boston, the speech whose closing portions we give, free-speech in certain directions was a nondescript in that famous centre of intellect and reform. Men were free to speak, if they accorded in views with the multitude, but addresses in favor of slavery abolition were tabooed, and those who indulged in them did so at imminent peril. The anti-slavery doctrine, which was to grow so immensely in the two following decades, was still in its infancy, and Boston itself was a strong seat of the pro-slavery element. In the following words Douglass scores it for its lack of liberal sentiment.]

Boston is a great city-and Music Hall has a fame almost as extensive as that of Boston. Nowhere more than here have the principles of