deathless aspirations, the onward triumphant march of humanity, ever to be deserted. The fortunes of individuals may change; empires be born and blotted out; kings rise and fall; wealth, honor, distinction, fade as the dying pageant of a dream: but Democracy must live. While man lasts, it must live. Its origin is among the necessary relations of things, and it can only cease to be when eternal truth is no more.

Democracy, in its true sense, is the last and best revelation of human thought: I speak, of course, of that true and genuine Democracy which breathes the air and lives in the light of Christianity, whose essence is justice, and whose object is human progress. I have no sympathy with much that usurps the name, like that fierce and turbulent spirit of ancient Greece, which was only the monstrous misgrowth of faction and fraud, or that Democracy whose only distinction is the slave-like observance of party usages-the dumb repetition of party creeds; and still less for that wild, reckless spirit of mobism which triumphs, with remorseless and fiendish exultation, over all lawful authority, all constituted restraint. The object of our worship is far different from these; the offering is made to a spirit which asserts a virtuous freedom of act and thought, which insists on the rights of men, demands the equal diffusion of every social advantage, asks the impartial participation of every gift of God; which sympathizes with the down-trodden, rejoices in their elevation, and proclaims to the world the sovereignty, not of the people merely, but of immutable justice and truth.

THE TRUE GRANDEUR OF NATIONS

CHARLES SUMNER

Taken from an oration delivered in Tremont Temple, before the authorities of the city of Boston, July 4, 1845.

Casting our eyes over the history of nations, with horror we discern the succession of murderous slaughters by which their progress has been marked. Even as the hunter traces the wild beast, when pursued to his lair, by the drops of blood on the earth, so we follow man, 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, not in bloody victories, or in ravenous conquests, but 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, with allembracing arms, clasps every land, while, on its heaving bosom, it bears 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, justice is arrested, happiness is blasted, virtue sickens and dies.

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 luster. Our own Wash

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55

ington 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 war.

THE GLORY OF WAR

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING

From a discourse delivered January 25, 1835.

That the idea of glory should be associated strongly with military exploits ought not to be wondered at. From the earliest ages, ambitious sovereigns and states have sought to spread the military spirit by loading it with rewards. Badges, ornaments, distinctions the most flattering and intoxicating, have been the prizes of war. The aristocracy of Europe, which commenced in barbarous ages, was founded on military talent and success; and the chief education of the young noble was for a long time little more than a training for battle. Hence the strong connection between war and honor. All past ages have bequeathed us this prejudice, and the structure of society has given it a fearful force.

The idea of honor is associated with war. But to whom does the honor belong? If to any, certainly

not to the mass of the people, but to those who are particularly engaged in it. The mass of a people, who stay at home and hire others to fight, who sleep in their warm beds and hire others to sleep on the cold, damp earth, who sit at their well-spread board and hire others to take their chance of starving, who nurse the slightest hurt on their own bodies and hire others to expose themselves to mortal wounds and to linger in comfortless hospitals; certainly this mass reaps little honor from war. The honor belongs to those immediately engaged in it.

Let me ask, then, what is the chief business of war? It is to destroy human life; to mangle the limbs; to gash and hew the body; to plunge the sword into the heart of a fellow-creature; to strew the earth with bleeding frames, and to trample them under foot with horses' hoofs. It is to batter down and burn cities; to turn fruitful fields into deserts; to level the cottage of the peasant and the magnificent abode of opulence; to scourge nations with famine; to multiply widows and orphans.

Are these honorable deeds? Were you called to name exploits worthy of dernons, would you not naturally select such as these? Grant that a necessity for them may exist; it is a dreadful necessity, such as a good man must recoil from with instinctive horror; and though it may exempt them from guilt, it cannot turn them into glory. We have thought that it was honorable to heal, to save, to mitigate pain, to snatch the sick and sinking from the jaws of death. We have placed among the revered benefactors of the human

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race the discoverers of arts which alleviate human sufferings, which prolong, comfort, adorn, and cheer human life; and if these arts be honorable, where is the glory of multiplying and aggravating tortures and death?

THE PRINTING-PRESS AND THE SWORD

THOMAS CARLYLE

Taken from the opening pages of Carlyle's "Essay on Voltaire," first published in 1829.

When Tamerlane had finished building his pyramid of seventy thousand human skulls, and was seen standing at the gate of Damascus, glittering in his steel, with his battle-ax on his shoulder, till his fierce hosts filed out to new victories and carnage, the pale looker-on might have fancied that Nature was in her death-throes; for havoc and despair had taken possession of the earth, and the sun of manhood seemed setting in a sea of blood. Yet it might be on that very gala-day of Tamerlane that a little boy, whose history was more important than that of twenty Tamerlanes, was playing nine-pins in the streets of Mentz. The Khan, with his shaggy demons of the wilderness,

passed away like a whirlwind," to be forgotten forever; but that German artisan has wrought a benefit which is yet immeasurably expanding itself, and will continue to expand itself, through all countries and all times.

What are the conquests and the expeditions of