Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the First Session Thirty-ninth Congress

[Extract.]

Mr. Bigelow to Mr. Seward

No. 110.]

Legation of the United States, Paris, May 31, 1865.

Sir: I have pleasure in transmitting to you an elaborate article which has just appeared from the pen of the Count de Montalembert, of the institute, on the recent triumph of the United States over her enemies. It appears in the Revue Correspondent. The position which the Count de Montalembert has occupied for some years, not only as one of the most eloquent living writers of France, but as one of the most cherished lay champions of the Latin church, gives a political significance to this article which does not ordinarily attach to contributions to the periodical press. *****

I am, sir, with great respect, your very obedient servant,

JOHN BIGELOW

Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, &c., &c., &c.

Article by Count de Montalembert from the Revue Correspondent.

[Translation.]

THE VICTORY OF THE NORTH IN THE UNITED STATES.

Whilst during the last days of the debates on the address an orator, illustrious for all time, charmed our minds and our hearts in pleading the best of causes; whilst upborne, on the wings of justice and of truth, he soared to unaccustomed heights, and caused his rapt audience to rise with him, news, happy and glorious above all, traversed the seas, and came to bring to souls steadfastly enamored of liberty a trembling sensation of a joy and of a consolation for too long time unknown.

The deep sorrow which has befallen, to impress on the triumph of the northern States a sacred character, should not take anything from this joy. It must survive the consternation, the terror, caused throughout the world by the assassination of President Lincoln, victim immolated on the altar of victory and of country, in the midst of one of those supremely tragic catastrophes which crown certain causes and certain existences with an incomparable majesty, by adding the mysterious grandeur of expiation, and of an expiation unmerited, to the virtues and the glories which humanity the most esteems.

Let us then greet, with unmingled satisfaction, the happy victory which has now assured to the United States the triumph of the north over the south; that is to say, of lawful power over inexcusable revolt, of justice over iniquity, of truth over falsehood, of freedom over slavery.

It is well known that it is not our habit to offer incense to victory—to applaud the conqueror. This is the first time it has happened to us for more than thirty years. It is very sure we shall not abuse this novelty, and shall not make a practice of applause. Let us then be allowed to-day to abandon ourselves without reserve to a joy so rare, by connecting our present emotions with those days, too quickly passed away, when the charter of 1814, the enfranchisement of Greece, the emancipation of English Catholics, the conquest of Algeria, the creation of Belgium, came in succession to adorn the young years of this century, to rejoice and strengthen liberal hearts, and mark the stepping-stones of true progress. Behold, anew, after a too long interval, a happy victory. Behold once, at least, evil subdued by good, strength triumphant in the service of right, and which procures for us the singular and supreme enjoyment of sharing, on this side the world, in the success of a good cause sustained by good measures and gained by worthy people. Let us then thank the God of armies for this glory and this happiness. Let us thank Him for this great victory which He has now granted, for the everlasting consolation of the friends of justice and of liberty, for the eternal confusion of diverse and numerous categories of those who take advantage of and oppress their fellow-creatures by slavery as well as by corruption; by falsehood as by cupidity; by sedition as by tyranny.

But already I hear the murmur of surprise, of discontent, of protest. Even in the Catholic camp the cause of the north has been, is still, unpopular. Even on the rumor of its victory, this shameful cry, “so much the worse” brought home by the Moniteur to the bosom of the legislative body, escaped perhaps from more than one breast, from more than one heart habituated to contend, like ours, for the causes we love and have served from the cradle.

Should we then, we are asked, should we then truly rejoice and bless God for this victory? Without fear we answer, yes, we should. Yes, God should be thanked because a great nation lifts herself up again; because she has cleansed herself forever from a hideous leprosy which served as a pretext and reason to all the enemies of liberty to revile and defame her; because she now justifies all the hopes which rested on her; because we have need of her; and because she is returned to us, repentant, triumphant, saved. Yes, God should be thanked, because that leprosy of slavery has disappeared under the steel of the conquerors of Richmond, extirpated forever from the only great Christian nation which, with Spain, was still infected by it; because this great man-market is closed; and again, because we shall no more see on the glorious continent of North America a human being, formed in God’s image, put up to the highest bidder, to be knocked down and delivered as prey, with his female companion and their little ones, to the arbitrary will, the cruel selfishness, the infamous cupidity, the vile passions, of one of his fellow-creatures.

Yes, God should be thanked because in lifting herself up again, and purifying herself America has done justice to, honored, glorified, France and French policy, her true policy, the old, honest and bold policy of our better times, that which sent forth the foremost men of the chivalric and liberal French nobility on the foot-prints of Lafayette to the camp of Washington; because there, at least, the generous devotion of our fathers would not have led, as elsewhere, to a bloody and cruel miscarriage; because from that results another crown for Louis 16th, for the royal martyr, for him who was himself among us the expiatory victim of a great revolution, victim the more touching and the more sacred because, in place of disappearing like Lincoln in the midst of universal sorrow, he was outraged before he was immolated; that those outrages still endure, and that for this cause he carries along our admiration and our compassion to a height which has nothing above it but that of God crucified.

Yes, God should be thanked, because, in this great and terrible strife between slavery and freedom, it is freedom that remains victorious; freedom, which habituated among usto so many mistakes, to such treachery and confusion, compromised and dishonored by so many false friends and unworthy champions, had great need of one of those grand requitals the inestimable value of which at once shines forth to the view of all.

Yes, God should be thanked, because, according to the best averred narratives, the victory has been unstained; because the good cause has not been tarnished by any excess, nor soiled by any crime; because its advocates have not had to blush for its soldiers, nor the soldiers for their leaders, nor the leaders for their success, nor their success for having crowned base cupidity and perverse conspiracies.

Yes, in fine, God should be thanked, because the aggressors have been conquered; because those who were the first to draw the sword have perished by the sword; because impunity has not been accorded to those who provoked an iniquitous revolt, an impious war; because this time, at least, boldness and cunning have not sufficed to mislead right-minded people; because the authors of the crime have become its victims; because on passing the rubicon of lawful action they have found on the other shore defeat and death; because having hazarded the fortune and the future of their country, with the rashness of the adventurer and the dexterity of the conspirator, the alea jacta est has not availed them, and that at this impious and bloody game they have not succeeded; they have played, and have lost. Justice is done.

I.

Let us resume and persist. Let us not be made giddy by the temporary discomfiture of the adversaries of the American cause, and of our own. Let us not believe them to be definitively converted and enlightened. By degrees, as the dazzling brilliancy of the light which the capture of Richmond all at once shed over Europe, followed by the tragic death of Lincoln, begins to fade; by degrees, as the shadows inseparable from all victory and every human cause appear along the horizon, we shall hear anew those invectives, of which the United States in general, of which the northern States in particular, have been the object. Raillery and calumny will recommence the assault to reanimate that ill-natured opinion which we have seen so ably and so wittingly maintained within and without. That perverse joy, so often given utterance to by all the enemies of liberty since the fall of the great republic might have been thought of, will again become noisy and potential on the first embarrassment, on the first mistake, of our friends beyond the sea. To-day all the world denies that it wishes, or that it ever even wished, for the continuance of slavery, but the arguments and interests favorable to slavery have not ceased to maintain their empire.

It has not been an unimportant teaching to watch how, from the first days of the breaking out of the conflict between the north and the south, the classifying of opinions has been going on. I do not say, please God, that all friends of the south are enemies of justice and liberty; still less do I say that all partisans of the north ought to be regarded as truly and sincerely liberals. But I say that an instinct, involuntary perhaps, all powerful and unconquerable, has at once arrayed on the side of the proslavery people all the open or secret partisans of the fanaticism and absolutism of Europe. I say that all the open or secret enemies, political or theological, of liberty, have been in favor of the south. It would be useless and puerile to deny that the United States count a certain number of adversaries among the Catholics, and that notwithstanding the so prodigious and so consoling progress of Catholicism in that country, a progress no one has witnessed anywhere else since the first ages of the church.^*

I will carefully refrain from fathoming the causes of this unpopularity of America in general, and of American abolitionists in particular. That investigation would lead me too far. I will confine myself to observing that the men of my time have always encountered in their path an opinion mistakenly religious and blindly conservative. It is that which in 1821 was for Turkey against Greece; in 1830 for Holland against Belgium; in 1831 for Russia against Poland; the same which is to-day for the pro-slavery men of the south against the abolitionists of the north. Events in the first place, and then the sympathies of the mass of the clergy and of Catholics, enlightened by events, have inflicted on this tendency severe contradictions and humiliating recantations on the Oriental question, the Belgian question, and the Polish question. I am convinced the same will happen some day or other on the American question.

But if it is annoying to arrive too late to the aid of justice and truth; if, with the exception of the learned and eloquent Dr. Brownson, we do not discover among Catholics in the United States any champion of the emancipation of the negro race, we have at least the small consolation of being able to prove that there has not issued from their ranks any apology for American slavery. It is repugnant to me to acknowledge the sacerdotal character in the author of a recent and anonymous publication, entitled “Slavery in the Confederate States, by a Missionary.”If the author of this shameless book were really a priest, and if it sufficed him, as he affirms, to live among American planters for twenty-four years, to maintain loftily the usefulness and lawfulness of the slavery of the negro, even to discover in their servitude the only possible barrier to their loose habits, the fact alone of such a perversion of the moral sense and sacerdotal conscience would in itself constitute the strongest argument against the social and religious rule in slaveholding countries.

But outside of the question of slavery, and even before this question occupied attention, there prevailed among a too large number of Catholics an instinctive aversion towards America, the origin of which it is perhaps proper to trace back to Count de Maistre. His influence, it is known, over the greatest as well as the smallest questions was incontestably the most powerful of all those which the Catholics of the nineteenth century have submitted to. This great man, like many of his peers, owes still more of his renown to his exaggerations than to his great intellect. His paradoxes have had more success, and certainly more resonance, than the genius and good sense of which he has left in the greater part of his works the ineffaceable impress; we yet are too little acquainted with the exquisite tenderness of his charming spirit, and much less still with the haughty independence, the intellect at once chivalric and liberal, the luminous and often very far-reaching policy which are revealed in him through his various correspondence recently published. But he did not like the United States; their origin and their progress contradicted some of his most cherished theories. He fell into the error of transforming his repugnancies into prophecies. We know what has been the fortune of that which he reduced to form about the capital of the United States: “Either that city will not exist, or it will be called by another name than that of Washington.” He had more common sense when he restrained himself in the expression of impatience which the extravagant admirers of the new American nation inspired, saying, “Leave, leave that child in the cradle to grow bigger.”

Well, we can say, in our turn, the child has grown; has become a man; and the man is a giant. This people, disdained, condemned, calumniated, laughed at, has shown in the most formidable crisis which any nation can pass through, an energy, a devotedness, an intelligence, a heroism which have confounded its adversaries, and surprised its most ardent friends; it now mounts to the first rank among the great nations of earth.

M. de Maistre dies, and in presence of the increasing greatness of the United States other arguments are sought to decry them. It is said to us, Don’t talk about your America, with its slavery. Well, our America henceforth is without slaves. Let us talk of it, therefore, although many without doubt would rather talk less than ever about it. It is said especially, “The American people will not know how to make war; and if it does so, conqueror or conquered, it will fall a prey to some fortunate general, some Bonaparte, who will begin with a dictatorship, and end with a despotism which his fellow-citizens will entreat him to save them from, and who, m exchange for this safety, will claim from them that which all Caesars claim, their honor and liberty.

But the experience has been had, at least on this point, and never has prophecy received a more bloody contradiction.

The Americans have known how to make war; they have made it with an energy, a dash and perseverance that are incontestable; they have not become the prey of any general, of any dictator, of any Cæsar: they have waged the most difficult and most terrible of all wars—civil war; they have made it while developing in its course all the qualities, all the virtues which form great military nations; they have made it on an immense scale. No modern nation, not even revolutionary France with its fourteen armies, has set on foot or hurled against the enemy forces proportionately so numerous, so disciplined, so well equipped, so steady under fire. These traders have cast as a prey to the exigencies of war their fortunes with as much prodigality as the English shopkeepers in their struggle against Napoleon, and their children with as much of heroic abnegation as did the France of 1792 in her struggle against Europe. Whilst absurd slanderers denounced to Europe these pretended armies of mercenaries, attaching to them the like stigma as to our young and gallant countrymen of Castel Fidardo, more than a million of volunteers took up arms on one side for the defence of the Union and of republican institutions; on the other, for the setting up of their independence and maintenance of their local franchises;^* and of this million of armed men not one, thank God, has become the butcher of his brethren or the satellite of a dictator.

These forces have been commanded by improvised generals, many of whom have shown themselves worthy of marching in the steps of the most celebrated of our republican generals; by men who have been not only masters in tactics and strategy, but heroes in valor and moderation, great statesmen and great citizens; Grant and Lee, Burnside and Sherman, McClellan and Beauregard, Sheridan and Stonewall Jackson, have inscribed their names on the great page of history.

I name, designedly, the chief among the leaders of the two hostile armies; for I am happy to acknowledge that to the whole American people is due, in this relation at least, the homage of our admiration. The two parties, the two camps, have evinced the like bravery, the like indomitable tenacity, the like wonderful energy, the like intrepid resolution, the like self-abnegation, the like spirit of sacrifice. All our sympathies are with the north, but these detract nothing from the admiration with which we are inspired by the heroism of the south. Displayed in the service of injustice and of error, it is nevertheless heroism. It even seems certain that the southerners have shown more military merit, more energy and talent, more dash and brilliancy than their enemies, above all, in the first period of the struggle. How can we avoid admiring them, while at the same time regretting that such high and rare qualities have not been consecrated to a more irreproachable cause; what men, and also, and beyond all, what women, daughters, wives, mothers, these South Americans have brought to life again in the very midst of the nineteenth century, the patriotism, the devotedness, the self-denial of the Roman women of the best days of the republic.

The Clelias, the Cornelias, the Portias have found their rivals in many a hamlet, many a plantation of Louisiana or Virginia. We have seen even in our midst fragile girls, unassuming wives separated from their kindred, despoiled of fortune, but proud of their poverty, resigned to distress, to ruin, to exile, happy thus to offer up their sacrifice for the cause of the nation, repelling with indignation the slightest idea of bargain, of concession, bearing in their haughty aspect the incontestable mark of that determination which gives birth to a manly race. Such heroines make it understood better than any thesis of what soldiers the army of the confederation must be composed, and what prodigies of resolution and constancy were needed to bring this about. These prodigies have been effected, but at the cost of efforts and of sacrifices which prove the obstinate bravery and wonderful steadfastness of the southern soldiery. It required four years of effort and seven hundred thousand men to achieve Richmond, the capital of the south. No fortress, not even Sebastopol, has cost such efforts; and as for European capitals, we need not even mention them. We know how they fall. Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Paris, are there to tell us.

The war began ill for the north; this sudden outbreak had thrown up all the dregs of the social condition to the surface, and disclosed them to the view of all. Corruption and treason had shamelessly done their part, but presently they were denounced, restrained, subdued, and thrust back into nothingness; conquered in presence of the enemy, whose best auxiliaries they were, they disappeared; as often happens to a good cause, such causes as have God’s blessing, the trial has been of advantage to that of the Americans. It has purified, warned, corrected them. Thus. then, this republic which was supposed to be absorbed in trade and agriculture, enervated by riches and prosperity, incapable of efforts and of sacrifices which pertain to war; this republic has already shown itself to be the emulator and rival on the field of battle of the Roman republic and of the Grecian republics. Like them, it has already had its two heroic wars; its Medean war and its Peloponesian war. The war of 1774 to 1782 which created its nationality, and the war of 1861 to 1865, which has destroyed slavery, has engraven its name in the front rank of the pageant of military renown. That may suffice it; may it be enabled to halt at that point in this bloody and perilous career!

But these military virtues, as rare and as heroic as they are, seem commonplace and insignificant side by side with the civic virtues with which the American race has shown itself to be stocked through the whole course of this formidable war. Not any liberty repressed, not any law violated, not any vote smothered, not any guarantee abandoned, no dictatorship implored—that is the real wonder and the supreme victory. Listen and look on, nations of Europe; nations that run wild as soon as internal dangers menace you; heroic nations are you also on the field of battle, but intimidated and demoralized by every civil danger; servile nations which a temporary dictatorship does not suffice either to reassure or to console, and which does not set you at ease and in shelter unless in its abdication.

Alas, where is the European nation which would have supported with this calmness and this resolution the formidable test of the civil war and of the military fever? Certainly not France, our dear country; she whom the mere apprehension of such mischiefs has reduced to such strange extremities; she who was unable to endure three days of storm, and three years of uncertainty, without making confusion of all the opinions, of all the institutions, of all the guarantees which she had so often proclaimed, reclaimed, or acclaimed with such unbridled passion. Let us then suppose France a prey, during only four months, to an intestine war such as that which for four years has ravaged a portion of the United States. Let us figure to ourselves our cities bombarded, our highways broken up, our fields devastated, our country seats pillaged, our villages burned or plundered by an irritated soldiery, our rivers and canals obstructed, our railroads demolished, our rails torn up, our trade suspended, our manufacturing industry laid desolate, all our affairs entangled, and all our interests endan* gered; and all this upon a question of constitutional law or of religious humanity. Yes, let us fancy France actually subject to such a discipline; let us frankly avow there would be no act of violence, no extreme measure that would not seem legitimate in order to bring it to an end. There would not be a corporal or a mountebank so despised as not to be regarded as a messiah on the single condition of putting an end to the strife, and bringing round the reign of order and of peace at any cost.

Under all reigns in succession amongst us, political offences have always served as the motive or pretext for disturbances in legislation. After the attempt of Louvei, as afterwards with those of Fieschi and Orsini, laws of exception, aggravation of penalties, changes of jurisdiction, measures said to be for the general safety, have been at once called for and passed. If to-morrow the arm of a regicide were by a cowardly assassination to cut short the life of the sovereign whom the nation has itself selected, one-half of France would instantly cry out that the other half should be sent to prison. American democracy does not experience either these panics or these rages. A reprobate, at once, in the midst of a festival, puts an end to the chief of the state, the man who concentrated all attention, ruled all hearts, tranquillized all uneasiness. But neither consternation nor anger disturbed the self-possession of that people, truly great. The day after the crime, as on its eve, it continued master of itself and of its destiny; not a law was disregarded or changed, not a newspaper was suppressed or suspended, not a single violent or exceptional measure occurred to disturb the regular and natural movement of society. Everything kept its accustomed order; America, calm and self-assured in the midst of her poignant grief, might present this noble spectacle with legitimate pride to those officious Paris journals, the known panegyrists of all restrictions and usurpations, which dare to preach moderation to her.

The American nation, then, has not thought of recourse to suicide in order to avoid the anxieties of fear and uncertainty. It has not imitated those despairing invalids who prefer immediate death to lengthened suffering. Widely differing from those madmen of whom St. Augustin speaks, who through fear of losing the goods of this world forget the heavenly, and thus lose all, the Americans have preserved, above all, the higher good, honor and liberty; at no price would they sacrifice them for the rest, and the rest has been given to them or rendered as profit. They have lost nothing; they have preserved ali: besides, they have given to the world the glorious and consoling example of a people which saves itself without a dictatorship and without proscription, without Cæsar and without Messiah, without becoming faithless to its history and to itself.

The statue of liberty, to employ the vocabulary of the terrorist, has never been veiled. The state of siege remained unknown in all the cities which were not besieged by or directly threatened by the enemy. Unless all our information be controverted, it must be acknowledged that law and order has been everywhere maintained and respected. All the newspapers have continued to appear without any restriction or censure; more than this, notorious correspondents of foreign journals, the most hostile to the northern, cause, have continued to write and to send their letters to their address in Europe, without incurring any danger or meeting with any hindrance; outside of localities wheremilitary operations were in progress, individual liberty suffered no restraint, liberty of assembling together excited no distrust, nor was any class and description of citizens declared suspected or outlawed.

Mob violence, brutal and redoubtable in every democracy, must certainly have produced some offensive scenes, some isolated acts of oppression; but who confound these aberrations, always temporary, as well as justly odious, with the crimes of which the regular authorities, the legislative assemblies, have elsewhere taken the responsibility and the initiative? If liberty has been suspended in certain localities by military leaders, it has been immediately restored by the civil superiors, and everywhere the generals have shown the most exemplary submission to the magistracy; everywhere they have listened respectfully to the voice of the civil authorities, and obeyed the laws with docility; not an instance is cited of interference or insubordination on their part; conquering or conquered, through this long struggle not one has derogated from the fundamental law of a free and well-ordered country; not one has shown the least symptom of realizing the predictions of the false prophets. “We shall see what Wellington will do now,” said Napoleon after his arrival at St. Helena. This great contemner of human conscience did not comprehend that one might live as a worthy man, and simply a peer of England, after having gained the battle of Waterloo. “We shall see what Grant and the other victorious generals will do now,” say, in undertones, the detractors of America and of her institutions. The glorious conqueror of Richmond has already answered them. Placed at the head of the principal federal army seven months ago, and already invested with redoubtable popularity, Grant refused to allow himself to be put in competition with Lincoln at the last presidential election; he refused the chance of becoming the chief of the republic in place of the “rail-splitter” who had intrusted him with the sword of the country in order to save it, as in truth he has saved it.

But that which affects and consoles and charms, is that this victory has remained pure, as pure as legitimate. Admitting, as we must do, that there have been on either part in the blindness of the contest some excesses and outrages, very deeply regrettable, which the law of war still seems to authorize among nations the most civilized; admitting that some soldierly brutalities, although provoked, have been justly surprising and revolting to the proud independence of the men, and especially of the women, of the south; admitting on the part of the northern people certain acts of devastation or of reprisals which we rebuke, whilst we rate them far below the ferocity of the southerners against negro prisoners of the federal army, it remains not the less demonstrated than ever, that at no period of history has a great political contest taken place, no great political cause been gained, costing so little to justice, to humanity, to the human conscience. Never has a great war been made with more humanity. Take for example the wars of religion, and those of our revolution. Then also, as in the America of our day, the question was to reduce by force a portion of the country in insurrection, in the sixteenth century against the old order of things; in the nineteenth against the new order. What horrors, what threatenings, what punishments during those dreadful years, the Consequences of which still weigh upon our national existence. Let us compare especially the measures decreed by the convention, and the horrors committed by the terrorist generals against La Vendée; let us compare the outrages committed only yesterday by the Emperor of Russia against Poland, insurgent and expiring, with the laws and actions of the American government against the secessionists. Nothing can be more analogous than the situation; nothing more different, thank God, than the repression. What contrast, at once lamentable and glorious! There, in Vendée, in Poland, and let us add (for the benefit of English detractors of their brethren beyond the sea) in Ireland, in rebellion in 1798, all that the devilish imagination of tyrants and executioners could invent of punishment, of torture, of outrage against life, chastity, conscience and human compassion. Here, in contemporary America, not a crime. I mean, not a public crime, avowed, official, for which the nation may be accountable, not a prisoner massacred, not a political scaffold. Nothing, absolutely nothing, like the acts of the terrorists, or of the Muscovites. Neither deportations, nor tortures, nor military executions, nor fusillades; neither wholesale drownings, nor showers of grape-shot. Liberty, civilization, democracy, have nothing to blush for. These beyond-sea republicans have neither adopted nor applied the odious maxim that the end justifies the means. Thus they have dug an abyss not only between them and so many monarchs or monarchists, but between them and so many republicans, authors, accomplices, or panegyrists of excesses which dishonored the French revolution in its contest against an insurrection far holier and far more legitimate than that of the south.

It is particularly by the treatment of prisoners and wounded that the progress of true humanity and of Christian civilization is manifested. Nowhere has such progress been so striking as among the Americans during this last war. The prisoners whom European nations, emulous of heathens and barbarians, thought themselves authorized to hang or shoot as soon as civil war broke out, as was done not only by the terrorists in La Vendée, the Muscovites in Poland, but even in our time, and for so long by the Spaniards, both Christinos and Carlists; the prisoners of the civil war in America are treated with the consideration shown for a longtime by Christian nations for the unfortunate brave. None have been seriously ill-treated: none, above all, have incurred risk of life, and we shall see, we already see them reappearing and freely resuming their social rank in their country, conquered but not abased.

What is there finer than the correspondence, published in all the papers, between Grant and Lee, between the two great chiefs of the two armies, at the moment of the capitulation of the confederates of the 7th and 9th April? What mutual respect, what consideration, what delicacy of expression, what scrupulous observance of the laws of honor, and at the same time of the laws of humanity. But above all, what a happy mixture of dignity and of good grace. It might be termed the reproduction, after the battle gained, of that famous meeting of the French and English guards at Fontenoy, were it not for a certain graver feeling, which responds to the gravity of the interests involved in the contest, and to the moral and spontaneous conviction of all those brave men voluntarily engaged in the conflict for which they all feel themselves responsible before God and their conscience.

As to the care of the wounded, as to the immense progress of humanity in this direction, you should read the book published, in Paris even, by an American well known and esteemed by many Frenchmen. Under a modest title (“The Sanitary Commission of the United. States, its origin, organization, and results, &c., by Thomas W. Evans, 1865,”) this volume conceals treasures of consolation and for admiration. There probably exists not in the world a work which gives a better account of the wonders which a beginning combined with discipline can accomplish; nothing which teaches better what a nation of men inspired by religion and liberty, severely trained in the school of spontaneous effort and of self-reliance, can effect. By the side of the perpetual struggle of individual devotedness against bureaucratic routine, are. found admirable and entirely new inventions of humane industry and Christian generosity for the solace of heroic suffering. Sixty millions of francs gathered by voluntary collectors; as many millions of articles of natural production, prepared or brought in by the American women; all these resources put in operation, with as much good sense as presence of mind, by an army of physicians, lawyers, legislators, ministers of religion, merchants, students, all eager to lavish their time, their devotedness, their intelligence, to the service of their fellows; all dispensing without distinction these benefits to friends as to enemies lying side by side in the same ambulances, on the same bed of suffering. Behold a picture which truly does honor to the human race, and above all to the American people, but also a spectacle which fills the heart with the sweetest and purest emotions. We bless God for this incontestable progress, for the anguish spared, the tears wiped away, for all the miseries solaced by an inspiration which it might surely be permissible to trace back to Him.

In view of this combination of civic and military virtues in the bosom of the same people, have we not reason to affirm that the people of the United States have gained the right to be placed in the front rank of modern great nations? This greatness will for a long time yet to come be contested and detested, but it will every day be more dear to generous hearts, to hearts truly Christian, for having been definitively established upon the greatest act of cotem-poraneous history—on the abolition of slavery among Christians. Yes; as was said in the assembly by a worthy man, (Eugene Pelletan,) whose heart and whose intellect master the sympathies of those even who do not partake in all his opinions, the victory of the north, having as its result the disappearance of slavery, is the gage of honor of the nineteenth century. Yes; slavery is abolished, and will never reappear where it has been once abolished. No. man will be found in America strong enough again to subject the enfranchised black man to the chain and the lash, as the First Consul Bonaparte did in the Antilles. It is well to dwell upon this, and to revert to it without ceasing; for if no one, in France at least, any longer is willing to be counted at this day among the apologists of negro slavery, it is not so long since that men, called to preside over the chosen of the people, openly defended, and for hire, colonial slavery.

For this benefit accomplished the blacks themselves are less to be felicitated than the whites, enslaved, through their property in the negroes, by the most shameless passions and most shameless sophisms which can infest human nature.^* It is to them, especially, that has been rendered, in spite of themselves, the most signal and most urgent service. But still the human race and all Christendom should be felicitated. Thanks, then, should be rendered to the Almighty that a young and great nation, a Christian nation, has been able to extirpate from its bosom this monstrous institution which substitutes the herd for the family. Under what a mass of sinful prejudice, of interested falsehood, of casuistic immorality, must not a human heart be crushed, not to bound with joy at the mere thought of a revolution so salutary; not to comprehend, to bless and to shout Hallelujah for all these souls enfranchised. “If slavery is not an evil,” said Lincoln, “nothing is an evil.” And beside, what Christian soul can fail to perceive in this great drama the arm of an avenging God, and side by side with that divine vengeance the empire and the victory of prayer! For they have prayed, those slaves; they are not idolaters or savages; they are Christians subjected to other Christians. They have therefore prayed, and God has given ear to them. “There is a place,” said Burke, the greatest man of modern times, speaking to the peers of England of the victims of the tyranny of the vassals of the East India Company, “there is a place where guiltless and industrious hands, chained and bruised by slavery, are gifted with irresistible strength; when they are raised to implore Heaven against their oppressors, there is no citadel they cannot wrench from its foundations, there is no vengeance those all-powerful hands cannot bring down upon our heads. There is something to tremble at. Look to it, my lords.”

Yes, as the immortal Lincoln said, in his plain and sensible language, in the midst of the serenades and illuminations which accompanied the promulgation of the great act, “The American people has given a great spectacle to the world.” Yes, he was right; no spectacle could be finer. In the future this will be, with the abolition of the traffic imposed on the world by England, the principal conquest of contemporaneous civilization, its title to redemption and eternal honor.

There will then disappear forever that infamous code and social rule which, putting aside all exaggeration and all declamation, and taking note of happy exceptions as well as of exceptional atrocities, reduced four millions of human beings to live deprived of regular marriage, of the right to appear in court; which established for them instruction in crime; which assimilated them to animals more or less well treated, according to their value; which condemned the women to promiscuity, the married, parents and children to heart-rending separations; which exposed all of every age and of either sex to chastisement, the sharnefulness of which was exceeded only by their cruelty.

I refer to the capital work of Mr. Cochin on the abolition of slavery all those who should experience the need of refuting the commonplaces of the apologist of slavery about the pretended happiness of the negroes, the pretended virtues of the slave-dealers, and of the whites given over to the terrible temptations of unlimited power, on the pretended impossibility of tree labor in certain climates, on the pretended impossibility of producing their sugar and cotton without slavery, on the pretended disasters which must everywhere follow emaacipa-vton.

I wish not to dwell for a moment, but on a single point which sometimes disturbs intelligent minds, as to the supposed inferiority of the black race. Without doubt it is not destined to take the first place among the human races; but all that is passing in America proves that the enfranchised blacks are perfectly capable of understanding and practicing the duties of Christian and social life, and also of becoming willing and active servants of the public and of the state. They have at once shown that they are capable of fighting, and of fighting with understanding of the cause, and for the cause which was their own. It is in vain the south has attempted to arm its slaves, and lead them to battle as to compulsory labor, but in vain. “I hav eheard in my lifetime,” said President Lincoln, with that good-hnmored irony which often marked his language, “I have heard many arguments intended to prove that negroes were made for slavery; but if they consent to fight that their masters may keep them in slavery, it will be the best argument of any I have ever known. He who will fight for that will deserve certainly always to be a slave. As for me, I think every man has a right to be free; however, I will willingly permit the blacks who would like to be slaves to remain so; I would even go so far as to allow those whites who boast of and envy the condition of the slaves to become slaves.” But this attempt, which amused Lincoln, had no success while the north formed from the freed negroes excellent regiments, thoroughly disciplined, and as intrepid as the. black regiments in the English service, or the heroic companions of Toussaint Louverture. The party for emancipation has never produced an argument more irrefutable or a result more decisive. It may be relied on, the arms which have wielded the sabre and the bayonet under the banner of liberty will never return to debasing shackles; and these improvised soldiers have revealed, by their example to the race from which they spring, the secret of its strength as well as of its rights.

To bring round this great work, at this day so happily accomplished, Providence has made use of instruments apparently as obscure as weak and insignificant. We surely do not forget the great writers and the great orators who, to the advantage of the emancipation of the blacks, have kindled the fires of their eloquence, nor that Channing whose honored memory receives new brilliancy from the triumph of the cause he so well served, nor that generous and indefatigable Sumner, stricken down in full Senate by a brutal colleague amid the enthusiastic applause of the whole south, and who to-day finds himself recompensed for his labors, for bis trials, and his honored scars; nor that Theodore Parker, who celebrated the marriage of two fugitive slaves, giving as a marriage present to the husband a Bible and a sword. “This,” said he, “is to teach you to serve God with your wife, and this to defend her against any man who shall assert a right to subject her to his indulgence and his lash.” But what touches us above all is to think that the irresistible movement which to-day triumphs in America over such obstacles and such storms has been especially the work of a writer of fiction, and of a man who was hanged. The romance “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” all the world has read, and almost all the world admired; but no one supposed a triumphant and lawful revolution would follow from it. The punishment passed more unnoticed than the romance. There are hardly any who took an interest in old John Brown, so odiously calumniated, who finished an adventurous but honest career by expiating on the scaffold the offence of having wished, by inciting a handful of Virginia blacks to revolt, to show to the world the horrors of American slavery. Those who executed him on the 2d December, 1859, thought then that the matter was ended. Nothing was ended save the scandalous impunity of their homicidal rule.

II.

But I am stopped; I hear the murmurs and interruptions of that too numerous crowd—a crowd uninformed and led astray—which passes on, repeating with inexplicable credulity that slavery was never in question in the contest between the north and south; that the war was only brought on by questions of tariff, or of local independence, provincial and municipal. The ignorance of the uninformed who in good faith repeat these puerilities should be pitied; but we cannot sufficiently brand the hypocrisy of those who, cognizant of the facts, dare to deny in the face of Europe that the upholding of slavery has been from the first, to speak truly, the sole motive of the insurrection. You pretend, I would say to them, that slavery is not in question. I affirm that there is no question but of slavery, and I believe ten minutes would be sufficient, before an assemblage of impartial judges, to demonstrate this beyond reply.

Is it true, yes or no, that the raising of human cattle having replaced with profit the traffic interdicted by England, the number of slaves had, in the southern States, quadrupled between 1787 and 1860, and had increased from about 700,000 to nearly 4,000,000? Is it true, yes or no, that the south, far from laboring for the gradual emancipation of this increasing crowd of slaves, has not ceased drawing more closely the meshes of the network of slavery, aggravating it through a penal code which has been justly defined as one of the most terrible monuments of premeditated wickedness which the world has ever witnessed? Is it true, yes or no, that, notoriously, the laws passed by Georgia in 1829, by Alabama and Louisiana in 1830, by Carolina in 1839, and by Virginia in 1849, punished with the penalty of the lash, for colored people, of imprisonment and fine for whites, the offence of having given any instruction whatever to free blacks, as well as to enslaved blacks, in order that the blacks, freed so far as concerned the body, should forever remain enslaved in mind? Is it true, yes or no, that, not content with maintaining what it called the institution of slavery, the south set at work all means for its propagation; that the conquest and usurpation of Texas in 1835, the violences committed in Kansas and California, and in so many other recently annexed Territories, were exclusively the work of pro-slavery filibusters intoxicated by the vision of a vast empire founded on slavery, which would spread, according to the language of their orators, from the tomb of Washington to the halls of the Montezumas? Is it true, yes or no, that the rupture, exclusively prepared by the ever-increasing exactions of the south in regard to the pursuit of fugitive slaves, exclusively provoked by the aggression of the south, having at last broke out, was not justified, in the official manifestoes of the Confederate States, upon considerations borrowed exclusively from the danger which, according to them, the maintenance of slavery incurred? Is it true, yes or no, that the hostility of the north against slavery was the only complaint made in the manifesto of South Carolina on the 20th December, 1860; in that of Alabama of the 11th January, 1861; in that of Texas of the 1st February, 1861; in that of Virginia of 17th April, 1861, and without there being in any of those documents a single word, not a single word, on disputes about tariffs or any other industrial or political question? Is it true, yes or no, that in the final debate which immediately preceded the rupture, in the minutes of the committee of thirty-three which met from the 11th of December, 1860, to the 14th of January, 1861, there was not a word, a single word, on tariffs or imposts, and that all turned there solely on the maintenance and guarantees of slavery? Is it true, yes or no, that the ultimatum presented by Jefferson Davis in the name of the southern States demanded, formally, that property in man by man, property in slaves, should be assimilated throughout the extent of the United States to any other property, and be declared inviolable? Is it true, yes or no, that in the new constitution which the Confederate States have given themselves, after the rupture was consummated, there are three clauses expressly and solemnly designed for sanctioning and perpetuating slavery? Is it true, yes or no, that the insurrection has closely followed the frontier lines of slavery; that its intensity has borne exact proportion to the intensity of slavery therein; that, for example, in Virginia, in the principal and most known of the Confederate States, all the portion of the State where landed wealth was based on slave-breeding took up arms, while that portion where agriculture was pursued by free labor took scarce any part in the war? Is it true, yes or no, that since the beginning of the war and after their first successes, the language publicly and officially held by southern orators and writers proclaimed more than ever the absolute necessity and the eternal lawfulness of slavery? That a hundred ministers of different sects, gathered in conference at the capital of the new confederacy, Richmond, declared that the abolition of slavery was an usurpation committed in detriment to the plans of God; that the Richmond Inquirer, the Moniteur of the confederacy, of the 28th of May, 1863, printed these words: “For the three maxims of the republican motto, liberty, equality, fraternity, we expressly mean to substitute slavery, subordination, and the government. There are races born to serve, as there are races born to command. Our confederacy is a mission sent by God to reestablish these truths among the nations?” That another Virginia journal, the Southside Democrat, expresses itself in terms which recall language we have heard too often since 1848: “We detest all that bears the epithet of free, even to, and comprising therein, free blacks; we detest free labor, free association, free thought, free will, free schools?” In fine, is it true, yes or no, that the vice-president of the new confederacy, Stephens, in his speech on the 21st of March, 1861, at Savannah, thus explained why it is that he follows the end and aim of that confederacy: “Our constitution has settled for all time the peculiar institution which has been the immediate cause of the rupture and of the revolution; it declares that African slavery as it exists among us is the condition proper for the black amid our civilization. Our government is founded on this great moral and physical truth, that the black is not the equal of the white, and that slavery is his natural condition. Our confederacy is thus constituted on a basis in strict conformity with the laws of nature and the decrees of Providence. It is by conforming the government and all else to the eternal wisdom of the laws of the Creator that we best serve humanity. Therefore, we have made the stone which our first builders rejected the corner-stone of our new edifice?”

These hideous blasphemies have been heard by God; recorded in the books of his judgment, they have not long awaited the receipt of the punishment they deserved.* The reader will remark the almost absolute identity of the official language of this second personage of the insurrection, with that of the miserable assassin of Lincoln, whose crime I am very far from being willing to impute to the confederates, but who has none the less hoisted their flag, held their principles and their phraseology. In the letter of November, 1864, in which he announces the purpose of risking his life in an attempt on the person of the chief of the abolitionists, he wrote these words: “I regard the slavery of the blacks as one of the greatest blessings for them and for us that God ever accorded to a nation protected by his grace.”

We see, then, that the transatlantic pro-slaveryists have left to their partisans in Europe the care of disguising their cause by representing them as strangers to the maintenance of slavery. They have scorned this simplicity or this hypocrisy. They have opened their heart to its core, and spoken the truth with dogged eloquence. The disdain which northern people evince, under every circumstance, toward free blacks residing among them is insisted on, and, in support of this, anecdotes, more or less serious, are cited. Suppose they are all true, what wall be the result? That in some portion of the northern population morals are not so high as the laws, and that the north has itself had something to expiate. Time alone can bring about the changes desirable in this respect; and time itself will with difficulty produce a thorough fusion of races so distinct. The most thorough negrophilists will probably always say, as did a Frenchman, a friend of the blacks, “We are willing to have them for brothers, but not as our brothers-in-law.” Meanwhile, the laws of the north guarantee to the blacks all the rights, all the civil and political liberties which the whites enjoy. And it is to maintain these laws, or rather to modify them in the interest of the blacks, to snatch some poor fugitive blacks from the bolts and bars of their masters, that the north has run the risks of a terrible war which has brought it within a hand’s breadth of destruction. Besides, if the negroes are so ill treated, so unhappy at the north, how happens it we have never heard of a single black who wished to leave the north for the south, whilst every day we see southern slaves flying northward, and that, to stop them and carry them back to the self-styled paradise of negroes, the odious laws against fugitives which brought on the civil war, the providential destruction of the peculiar institution, were necessary. The whole may, then, be resolved into two simple questions. If, in the war just ended, the south had been victorious, can it be supposed that slavery would have been abolished by the conquerors? No; the most audacious would not dare to maintain that. But it is the north which has prevailed, and has not this conqueror decreed abolition, and is he not resolved to maintain it? Yes; that is enough to settle the question in the view of candid men. What must be admitted is, that at the beginning of the war abolition was not in the northern programmi). Immediate and absolute emancipation was not resolved on until the progress of events, and, above all, the imprudent arrogance of the south, intoxicated by its first victories, made it clear to all eyes that the maintenance of slavery was the source of the political and social evil which the civil war had revealed in all its intensity. Therefore, it is in this we must admire the direct, mysterious, and unforeseen action of Providence. It has caused civil war to end in a result which no one dreamed of in the beginning; it has used even the hands of the offenders to provoke and render necessary the chastisement which was due to them.

Yes, it is in this that we should reverence the hand of God. How, not recognize it amid this wonderful concurrence of circumstances, where everything reveals a direction of human affairs superior to all the calculations and all the purposes of man?

If the southern people had acted with moderation or common prudence, slavery would be still existing, and perhaps would have endured still for centuries. The north has never pretended to impose emancipation, immediate, or even gradual, on the south. Far from it; the north had made excessive concessions to the south, concession even culpable, in voting for and giving effect to a law for the extradition of fugitives. No condition, no compromise, was too much for it.

It is well enough known that it was not the north which began the war; it is known that it has only maintained it in self-defence. With the exception of Brown alone, the most ardent of northern abolitionists had never employed or called in the aid of other arms than persuasion, the pulpit, the press, pacific, moral, and intellectual propagandisms. The people of the south, on the contrary, have always appealed to force, to violence, to war. Even before the war they everywhere took the initiative in acts of violence. Let us repeat it, they only had need of a very moderate dose of prudence to assure indefinite duration to their crime. They would not have it so. They have always pushed everything to extremes. When the Missouri compromise, in 1820, traced across the soil of the great republic a line of demarcation between slavery and freedom, in guaranteeing to them south of that line the peaceable possession of this shameful property, that did not satisfy them. In 1850 they exacted and obtained that atrocious law which authorized the pursuit of fugitive slaves into free States. Even that sufficed them not. They needed to obtain, moreover, in 1859, through the famous Dred Scott suit, a decree of the Supreme Court which recognized in every owner of slaves the right to transport his slaves throughout the extent of the territory of the republic. In gaining that famous suit they have, thank God, lost slavery. Blinded by their avaricious egoism, they have themselves fallen into the abyss. By force of exactions and of violences they ended by compelling their too facile, their too complaisant fellows-citizens”, to make head against them and crush them. They notoriously prepared, boldly announced, and spontaneously declared the civil war of which they have become the victims. From 1856, the time of the contested election between Fremont and Buchanan, they announced publicly that if the abolitionist Fremont were elected the Union would not endure an hour after his inauguration. During the four years’ presidency of their candidate, Buchanan, they substituted conspiracy for provocation. Masters of the government, having for Secretary of War of the United States the same Jefferson Davis who has since been president of the insurgent confederacy, they had everything prepared to secure a disloyal advantage in the future strife by confiding the command of the fortresses and arsenals of the republic to pro-slavery officers. Thence their first success, which so singularly led astray and deceived European opinion. The 6th of November, 1860, the designation of electors charged to elect a new President of the republic announced that for the first time a republican, or, in other words, an abolitionist, Would become the chief of the executive power. A month afterward, the 20th of December, 1860, before an act or a word from the new power, South Carolina raised the banner of separation, which twelve other States hoisted afterward. During the four months which passed before the installation of Lincoln, the southern States assembled in convention, then in separated confederation, armed the local militia, laid hands on the public money, on the federal funds—at their leisure organized revolt. The admirable Lincoln said to them in his first message of “March 4, 1861,” My fellow-citizens, you who are dissatisfied, in your hands, and not in mine, is the choice of civil war. The government will not attack you. There will be no conflict unless you are the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven which obliges you to destroy us, whilst 1 have taken the most solemn oath to preserve, to protect, to defend the Union.” To this touching, this generous appeal, the southerners replied by giving the signal for that impious war, in which, by the just judgment of God, they have met the ruin of their dishonored cause.

The American legislature waited not for the conclusion of the war to decree the abolition of crime. On the suggestion of President Lincoln, and by the majority necessary to alter the Constitution of the United States, there was introduced in that Constitution an amendment importing that all voluntary or involuntary servitude should cease to exist in the United States. Lincoln and Congress thus invoke the heavenly blessing on the banners of the Union, and God from the heights of heaven responds to this appeal, to this return to the eternal law. The war, which languished through four years in sad and uncertain alternations at once changed in character. A new spirit, an invincible spirit, inflamed the generals and soldiery of the north. The march of their arms became irresistible. The fortune of war, capricious thus far, no longer ceased from smiling on this great free people, who came forward to decree the irrevocable enfranchisement of four millions of slaves. The strategy, until then always superior, of the southern chiefs, becomes/powerless. The circle of iron formed by the northern forces draws more close, and finally completely shuts in around the hearthstones of the rebellion. That rebellion, once so proud and so strong, totters to its fall. All is in disturbance and confusion around it. At length the day of justice comes; the catastrophe breaks forth: Richmond is taken; the south is crushed. God ratifies the decree of Congress by victory—victory as complete as unforeseen—an irrevocable victory.

Oh, Providence—generous, luminous, ingenious Providence! It was a black regiment that first entered the capital of the insurgents—that Richmond, so long impregnable. These despised blacks, emancipated by victory, march at the head of the liberating army. They are greeted by the acclamations of their brethren, the black slaves they come to deliver and raise to their level. Are they going to avenge the wrongs of ages done to their race and to themselves? Are they going to allay, at the cost of white men and white women, their resentment of crimes and infamies, inseparable from slavery, which their fathers and their brothers, their sisters and their mothers, were so long subject to? No, no! For the fulness of happiness and of honor, these slaves of yesterday penetrated the capital of the slaveholders, took possession of it, became and remained its masters, and not a shadow of excess, not a shadow of reprisal, occurred to tarnish their victory. I attest the story The sun never shone on a grander or more consoling spectacle.

III.

Is there need, after all that precedes, to refute at length the pretence set up by the apologists of the south, of seeing in their clients the representatives of federal law, of the cause of weak States, and even of that decentralization which begins to find favor in the bosom of European democracy? I declare for myself that were this pretence well founded; if, as one day was said by the secretary for foreign affairs of England, Earl Russell, with his proverbial imprudence, if it was true that the south fought for independence, and the north for domination, the south would have a partisan more decided, more sympathizing than myself, I am convinced that the friends and supporters of liberty should favor throughout the world the cause of the weak States so recently and nobly defended by Mr. Thiers in the legislative body. The true greatness of a people is measured, not by the extent of its territory or the sum of its population, but by its liberty and its morality. But history unhappily demonstrates that, with the single exception of England, the liberty of nations decreases and perishes in the direct ratio of the increase of their territory and population. Intelligence and public morality too often follow the same proportion. I wish and hope the United States will give, like England, a fresh contradiction to the cruel result of the teachings of the past, and will show that liberty can co-exist with material greatness. But, at the risk of shocking those among Americans with whom I sympathize the most, I avow that I fear for them the perils of centralization, of unity and indivisibility, which are the natural basis of monarchic or military despotism. While reserving every question of right, and without approving any rebellion, I would look upon not only without alarm and without regret, but with confidence and satisfaction, the division of the immense extent of the existing republic into several States of unequal extent, but equally free, equally republican, equally Christian. American liberty thus split up into several homes of life, of thought, and of action, would possess far different guarantees of duration, and would only better exercise over the rest of the world an influence as fruitful and salutary as that of the immortal lesser states of ancient Greece, or of the Christian and municipal republics of the middle ages.

But there are some things that speak more loudly to every true heart than the experiences of the historian, or the distrusts and partialities of the politician; it is justice, it is humanity. Is it to defend justice and humanity that the southern States broke the federal tie which incorporated them with the great republic? No, certainly; it was to trample underfoot the one and the other. In default of public law, of natural law, had they at least a right or even a legal pretext for insurrection? No! A thousand times no! The primary constitution of the insurgent colonies of 1777 guaranteed the absolute sovereignty of each new State, and confined itself to establishing a federation of independent republics. But the Constitution in force, that made in 1789 by Washington, and by the men “who dared to restrict liberty, because they were sure they would not destroy it,” substituted for this collection of sovereignties absolutely independent, one people, one sole and whole people, not centralized and uniform like ours, but composed of several States, but within, as well as without, bound to strict obedience of certain obligations established by the fundamental compact. It was never foreseen nor admitted by any one that this compact could be broken at the will of one only of the contracting parties. No people, no state, no community could exist if each of its members might withdraw at will, and without provocation, from the associated body. While admitting, in all its dangerous extent, the modern——, such as has been proclaimed on one side and the other in the recent debate on the Roman question, by Mr. Thiers, as well as by Mr. Rouber—that is to say, the right to be well governed; and if not, the right to change one’s government, it is still necessary to prove that there has been bad government, that there has been oppression in such manner as to render the rupture of the social tie more necessary and lawful than its maintenance. Certainly, separation might be lawful, like insurrection, but in certain rare and extreme cases. Has such a case presented itself to the southern States? Evidence, universal conscience, says no, a thousand times no. It is impossible for them or their apologists to produce any proof whatever, a single one, of the slightest attempt made against their independence.

Where are their griefs, their troubles, their sufferings? They may be defied to cite a right violated, a property wasted, a liberty smothered, or even lessened. Yes; which? Is it religion? No! Is it the press? No! Is it association? No! Is it election? No! Education? No! Property? No, not even the property of man in man, until now that after three years of revolt and civil war, they have in some sort compelled the lawful and sovereign authorities of the republic to decree its abolition. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the history of the relations of the north with the south resembles, even in the slightest degree, those violent and oppressive measures which constrained the seven Catholic cantons of Switzerland to form about twenty years ago the sunderbund, so unjustly, so cowardly, so miserably crushed in 1847. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has furnished them even with the shadow of a pretext to break the federal tie, and refuse not merely to obey in certain extreme cases, but even to acknowledge the powers lawfully constituted. There has been, thousands of times, reason to say that good care must be taken not to assimilate the States which compose the Union to our existing departments, or even to our ancient provinces. Each of those States has and should have an executive power, and two elective chambers, a magistracy, courts of justice, codes of law, a police, a fiscal administration of its own—in fine, a special constitution, voted for and sanctioned by the people of each State. This is what constitutes the true foundation of American liberty. But, have all these fundamental bases been respected by all the southern States until the war broke out? Yes; it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to deny this. The northern States had neither made nor attempted to make the slightest encroachment on the legislative independence of the southern States, even in respect of slavery, until war had been declared by the south.

But outside of this local and, so to speak, personal soverignty of each State, there is under the Constitution of the United States a general sovereignty personified in the President, the Senate and House of Representatives, which is located at Washington. Have the northern people exercised this general sovereignty to the detriment of southern interest? No, yet once again; and had they so desired they could not have done so, because the south forestalled them by beginning the war before the north had seized the power.

Let us again, in two words, recapitulate the true state of this question so singularly misunderstood or unknown. The southerners, determined, at any cost, not merely to maintain but to propagate slavery, had succeeded, with the concurrence of their friends, the domocrats of the north, in securing for more than thirty years the majority in the federal legislature, and the election of the quadrennial President of the republic. The day on which, for the first time, by means the most lawful and most regular, by the purely moral movement of public opinion, the majority, elected of representatives of the people and of presidential electors, passed from them, on that day they broke the federal compact and raised the standard of revolt. They became insurgents because they no longer felt themselves to be masters, because they foresaw that perhaps the authorities sprung from the new elections would not only modify property in slaves in the slave States, but the laws which authorized the pursuit of fugitive slaves into the free States. So long as, with complicity of the northern democrats, they retained a majority in Congress and had the President on their side, they held the Union to be unassailable. When the wave of public opinion turned against them; when they found that the north would very probably no longer consent to remain the accomplice and instrument of slavery; when for the first time they saw the lawful majority pass over to the side of the republicans, or abolitionists, then, but then only, they declared the Union impossible and took up arms to destroy it. It is absolutely just the same as if the French socialists had drawn the sword in 1848, after the election of Prince Louis Bonaparte to the presidency; or in 1849, after the elections to the legislative assembly. It is also precisely that which those wished to do who were of the conservatory of arts and trades of the 13th June, 1849. We know what France and the world have thought of that enterprise whose authors fell the first victims, and unpitied of any. Let us then dismiss the argument drawn from this pretended zeal of the south against the united despotism of centralization; let us dismiss it to rejoin the argument which pretends to make of slavery a question foreign to the origin of the war. Let them go together to ingulph themselves in those limbos where sleep, buried forever, unavailable, lies and refuted sophisms.

IV.

What is most annoying in these sophisms is to see them above all repeated and propagated by the English with an inveteracy which the victory of the north will certainly cool, but which none the less has derogated from their good sense, good faith, and national honor. Nowhere, as is known, has the cause of the north aroused an enmity more profound, more universal, more sustained. It is asked through what rancor of sovereignty dispossessed, through what prejudice of caste, or what family enmity, they have been enabled to forget to such degree their own antecedents, their traditions, the most inveterate good or bad. With what face can they who strove with all their might against the colonial insurrection which transformed their provinces into sovereign States—they who repressed with inexcusable cruelty the insurrection in Ireland in 1798, and, with a severity excessive, although legitimate, the revolt of the Sepoys in 1858; with what face can they reproach their American cousins for the energy of the measures employed against the insurgents of the south, and the principle even of the war maintained by the constituted authorities of the republic against the aggression of the confederates? But, above all, how can they, abolitionists pre-eminently, they whose susceptibility on the subject of the slave trade gave birth to the right of visit and so many other complications with us, and with all the maritime nations—they who gave with an unheard of disinterestedness the first signal of emancipation of the negro race at the expense of their own West India Islands; how dare they be renegade of their own glory by suspecting, denouncing, decrying the motives which have guided the American abolitionists? How is it they do not perceive that they thus expose themselves to giving a pretext to the very numerous detractors who have accused them of not having undertaken the work of emancipation except as a matter of calculation, and of having renounced it as soon as the speculation turned out badly? There is in this one of those sad mysteries which the history of the greatest nations occasionally presents, and before which posterity stands amazed as much as contemporaries. Let us hope, beside, that the question now is of only momentary aberration, and let us recall to them this bright page in their own history so well written by one of the Americans they calumniate.* Other nations, “says Channing,” have acquired imperishable glory in defence. of their rights, but there was no example of a nation which, without an interest, and in the midst of the greatest obstacles, espouses the rights of another, the rights of those who have no claim except that they also are human, the rights of those who are the most abased of the human race. Great Britain, under the load of a debt without parallel, with crushing burdens, contracted a fresh debt of one hundred millions of dollars to give liberty, not to Englishmen, but to degraded Africans. It was not an act of policy, it was not the work of statesmen. The Parliament only recorded the edict of the people. The English nation, with one heart, one voice, under one strong Christian impulse, and without distinction of rank, of sex, of party, or of communion, decreed the liberty of the slave. I do not know that history records an act so disinterested, so sublime. In the course of ages the maritime triumphs of England will occupy a space narrower and narrower in the annals of humanity, and this moral triumph will fill therein a wider and a brighter page.” At all events, if the cause of the north and of emancipation in America has encountered only adversaries among the governing classes in England, in the native land of Burke and of Wilberforce, it must be admitted that it has there always been openly and energetically sustained by some of its best known orators and political men, and in the first rank by Messrs. Cobden and Bright; and it should especially be remembered that the manufacturing population of Lancashire, and of the great industrial centres, have exhibited lively and persevering sympathies with American abolitionism. But these populations are precisely they that will suffer most from the consequences of the war, which, in favoring the United States, has interrupted the production of cotton. Nothing can be more admirable, however, than the attitude of the English artizans during the whole continuance of this crisis, so fatal to the interest of the English manufactures, which has not yet ended. The labor of the blacks in the United States gave them bread by producing the raw material of that branch of industry out of which they lived. They, nevertheless, have never imagined, never pretended, like some publicists and some preachers, that negroes were intended by Providence to be always, slaves, in order to be the purveyors for European industry. Until the balance be readjusted by the introduction of the cotton culture in Egypt, where it has freed and enriched the Fellahs, and in southern Italy, where it has served, in a manner so strangely unforeseen, the interests of Italian unity, the crisis produced by the interruption has perhaps been the most severe that has ever affected European industry. The English workmen have endured this crisis, which still continues, with most magnanimous patience. They have experienced the last extremes of hunger, without any outburst, any disturbance having hap-pened to realize the prophecies of those who had counted on their distress to obtain from England the recognition of the southern States and consolidation of slavery. They have suffered without a murmur, without any display of military force having become needful to restrain or intimidate them, without any public right being suspended, without the slightest restriction of the liberty of the press or of publicly assembling; the millions of hungered and suffering beings have maintained an heroic calm and resignation. Compulsory inaction, distress, and hunger had everywhere taken place in that vast hive of English spinning mills, of work, of ease, of economic progress, and of domestic well being. The profusion of public and substantial aid prodigally given by the disinterested sympathies of their neighbors and their countrymen to these innocent victims of the war in America seemed only as a drop o t water in the ocean of this distress. And yet, not only no riot, no public disturbance broke out, but at the numerous meetings, and in the various public notices which marked this crisis, so severe and so prolonged, no symptom of irritation was manifested against the upper classes, or against the government of the country. Enlightened by a good sense which shows the incontestable progress made through the spread of primary instruction since the sanguinary riots of 1819, the workmen in those English districts which constitute the greatest industrial centre of the world readily comprehended that the calamity from which they suffered was not to be imputed to the Queen, nor the aristocracy, nor the ministry, nor the Parliament, nor to any cause in England, but solely to a great historic crisis, the consequences of which would be favorable to religion and human nature. They continued not only docile to the teachings of reason and patriotism in their attitude in regard to the authorities and other classes in their country, but unshakably faithful in their demonstrations and petitions to Parliament, to their sympathies with the northern States, which represented in their eyes the cause of justice and of liberty. They have thus given the best proof of their aptitude for public life, as well as for the political rights which they claim, and which they cannot fail to obtain, and which must be desired for them, in desiring also the regulated and peaceful admission of the masses to the electoral suffrage may be brought about with the guarantees necessary to prevent intelligence and liberty from succumbing beneath the abused preponderance of numbers.

V.

Let us recapitulate, and come to a conclusion. We maintain that the victory of the north is an event as happy as glorious, and we hoped to have proved it; but should we not have succeeded, none of our readers will deny that it is the most important event of the present day, and that whose consequences are of most vital interest for the world entire.

The American Union is henceforth replaced in the first rank of the great powers of earth. All eyes will henceforth be turned on her; all hearts will be agitated by the destiny in reserve for her; all minds will seek enlightenment from her future. For that future will be more or less ours, and her destiny will perhaps decide our own.

From all that has yet passed in America, from all that is about to pass there in the future, there results for us grave teachings, lessons which it is indispensable to make account of, for, willing or unwilling, we belong to a society irrevocably democratized, and democratic societies resemble each other much more than monarchic or aristocratic societies. It is true that differences are still great between all countries, as well as between all epochs; it is true, above all, thank God, that nations, like individuals, preserve, under all rule, their free will, and remain responsible for their condition. To know how to use this free will in the midst of the impetuous and apparently irresistible current of the tendencies of the times is the great problem. To resolve it, account must first be taken of these tendencies, either to contest, or follow, or direct them according to the dictates of conscience.

The question is, then, in the study of contemporary events; not of preferences, but of teachings. It is not in our power here below to choose between things which please Or which displease, but between things that are. I have not to reason here with those who have not done mourning for the political past of the Old World; with those who still dream of a theocratic reconstruction, monarchic or aristocratic, of modern society. I understand all the regrets; I share in more than one; I honor greatly some, in which I do not share. I hold, as much as others the religion, perhaps even the superstitution, of the past, but reserving to myself the faculty of distinguishing the past from the future, as of death from life. I will not exult over any ruin, except that of falsehood and wickedness, which it has not been given to me to contemplate. Thus much said, I mean not to offend any, nor even to utter anything but a commonplace, almost trivial because it is so plain, by proving that the modern world has fallen to the lot of democracy, and that there is only a choice between two forms of democracy, but two forms which differ as much as night from day; between democracy disciplined, authoritative, more or less incarnate in a single, all-powerful man; and liberal democracy, where all powers are restrained and controlled by unlimited publicity and by individual liberty; in other words by Caesarian democracy and American democracy. One might be well pleased not to take either the one or the other. Be it so, that is intelligible. “Delicate people are unfortunate!” But that is no reason why they should become blind and powerless; once again, the choice must be made, and the choice can be only between these two conditions. All the rest are nothing but Utopian fancies, or regrets of the archaeologist; fancies and regrets, very respectable perhaps, but perfectly unproductive.

It is well enough known my choice is made, and I suppose it is also made in the same way by those to whom I would now speak. It is to them, therefore, that I present with gladness and with pride the strife which has traversed America, and the victory she has achieved (if this victory continues unstained) as a gage of trust and hope.

The civil war might have made out of American democracy a Caesarian and military demo-crapy. But the contrary has happened. It remains a liberal and Christian democracy. This is the first great fact which, in the annals of modern democracy, reassures and comforts without reservation, the first which is fit to inspire trust in its future, trust limited, humble, and unassuming, as is becoming all human trust should be, but trust fearless and sincere, as might and should be that of free hearts and clear consciences.

America has just shown, for the first time since the world began, that liberty could be coexistent in a democracy with war, and, moreover, with the almost measureless greatness of a country. This simultaneous existence rests always full of perils and of hazards; but in fine it is possible, it is real, it passes provisionally out of the region of problems into that of facts,

American democracy has its creeds and its morals—Christian creeds, pure and virile morals; it is in that very superior to the greater part of European societies. It professes and practices respect for religious faith, and respect for woman. But above all it practices and maintains liberty in a degree which no nation, except England, has yet been able to attain, liberty without restriction and without inconsistency; entire liberty, that is to say, domestic liberty not less than political liberty; civil liberty side by side with religious liberty; liberty to devise, with the liberty of the press, liberty of association and of instruction, with the liberty of the tribune, Notwithstanding the rudeness of its attractions, notwithstanding á certain decadence of the moral sense which seems to have shown itself there since the death of Washington, it despises and ignores the odious and ridiculous clogs, the hateful and jealous restrictions which our French democrats associate with their strange liberalism.

Besides, it approaches more nearly than any other contemporary society the object which every human society should propose to itself: it offers and secures to every member of community an active participation in the fruits and benefits of the social union.

The new President (Johnson) has frankly adopted in his first allocution the fundamental doctrine of free and Christian countries: “I believe that government was made for man, and not man for government.” In other terms, society is made for man, and not man for society or the state. He has thus laid down the sovereign distinction which separates liberty from absolute power.

Certain it is, that neither want nor immorality are unknown in the great republic. The poison of slavery with which it has been too long infected, the scum which is brought to it by the European emigration from which it is recruited, the dangers and weaknesses belonging to all democracy, aggravated by the untutored rudeness of certain social habits, all that shakes and menaces it, but does not hinder it giving to public order and to property a security, if not complete, at least sufficient, and whose superficial vascillations are a thousand times preferable to the enervating and corrupting peace of despotism.

Certain it is, also, you will never see in the United States, nor in other countries pursuing the same track, effeminate and easy life of the eastern nations, or of southern Europe in the eighteenth century. There will be hardships, difficulties, fatigues, dangers for all and each. This action and this censorship of all the world over all the world, which constitutes the real life and the only efficacious discipline of free nations, draws along with it a thousand cares and sometimes a thousand perils. “The gods,” says Montesquieu, in the words of Sylla, “the gods who have given most men a weak ambition, have attached to liberty almost as many evils as to bondage. But whatever be the cost of this noble liberty, it must be paid to the gods.” America teaches us how to cure ourselves of this weak ambition, without denying any of the principles, any of the conquests of Christian civilization.

That which hurts and disturbs us most, we Europeans, who study America with a desire to read therein the secret of our future, is the system, or rather popular instinct, which keeps at a distance from power, and often even from public life, men the most eminent for talent, for character, and for services rendered. This legal and gradual ostracism, of which the United States have made a sort of habit, is certainly a very great evil. But I hear it said this result is not altogether unknown in certain countries which have nothing in common with American liberty, and where these victims of ostracism have not the same resource of periodic and constitutional changes, still less of weapons offensive and defensive, which guarantees to every citizen of the United States the unrestricted liberty of all. Even under the old time royalty has not St. Simon pointed out to us “the taste to humiliate all,” and “the special graces of obscurity and of nothingness” in the eyes of the master? And after all, must we despair of the world because this phenomenon of the humiliation or even the exclusion of the opulent or elevated classes occurs everywhere (except in England) as often as of old, by their own fault as often, and especially in our days, without there being any serious reproach to make to them? This is sad, this is painful, this is unjust; but this is nevertheless too general not to be an historic law, and the consequences of this new law are not always nor everywhere destitute of grandeur.

America astonishes the world by placing at the head of a nation of thirty millions of people men issuing from the humblest grades of society, by confiding to these obscure and inexperienced men armies of a million of soldiers, who, the war ended, return to their homes without any one being induced to see therein a danger to liberty or a resource against it—a man who was first a wood-cutter, then a husbandman, then a boatman, then a lawyer, becomes President of the United States, and directs in this character a war more formidable and above all more legitimate than the wars of Napoleon. A horrible outrage causes his disappearance, and immediately one, formerly a journeyman tailor, replaces him without the shadow of disorder or protest coming to disturb the national mourning. This is strange and novel; but what is there in it that is unfortunate or affrighting? For my part, I see in it a transformation, historic and social, as remarkable and less stormy than that which substituted through all the west the Clovises and the Alarics for the vile prefects of the Roman empire. The laborers become chiefs of a great nation, are a hundred-fold less repugnant to me than the Caesars with their freedmen and their favorites. I see with an emotion of admiration these proletaries metamorphosed into potentates in nowise bewildered by their elevation. They continue to be prudent, mild, discreet. There is nothing in them which savors of the popular tyrants of other days; nor of those pretended envoys of Providence, who begin by violations of the laws, like Cæsar, and finish in insanity, like Alexander and Napoleon.^*

What rest, what comfort, to feel oneself in the presence of worthy men, simple and truthful, in whom power defined and restricted, although immense, has not turned the head nor perverted the heart. Where search for true greatness, if it be not in these plebeian souls, which, disciplined by responsibility and purified by adversity, seem to us to enlarge with their Situation and to elevate political even to the heights of moral life?

Dark and sad as her future might be imagined, and were she to be buried to-morrow beneath her triumph, America will not the less have bequeathed to the friends of liberty a never-dying encouragement. Numerous and bitter as may be our own mistakes, legitimate as may be our apprehensions, she has given us somewhat to believe in and to hope for, through ages to come, in the ideal which attracted in the last century our fathers under her banner, the ideal of which they gave the only true programme in 1789, and which can only serve as a bond between the sons of the conquerors and the sons of the victims of the French revolution.

Therefore it is that I have not feared to say that at the present hour the American people, coming out victorious and pure from so redoubtable an experience, will take rank amid the first nations of the earth, which does not mean to say that it can be irreproachable. It has not been so in the past, and nothing announces that it must be so in the future. Side by side with all the virtues and all the great characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race are only too distinguishable excess and gross faults, cynic and cruel egoism, fierce instincts. Behold her at the moment when these vices and defects are about to encroach on and menace her more than ever. The blindness of pride satisfied, the overweening spirit of triumphant strength, are about to expose her to the vices of power, to the depravity resulting from victory, of which democracies are as much the subjects as dictatorships. She has also much to expiate, because in the interval which has separated the war of independence from the civil Avar the external policy of the United States has too much resembled the external policy of the Romans or of the English; it has been selfish, iniquitous, violent, even brutal, and characterized by absolute absence of scruples. Mexico on the one hand, on the other the native and independent races, have learned to understand all the cruel consequences of the preponderance of a race eager for gain and born for conquest.

Behold her at the decisive period of her inner life. The question to be demonstrated is whether the American people, like the Roman people at the time of Publicola and Cincinnatus, possesses the spirit of moderation which causes republics to last, or whether, like the contemporaries of the Gracchi, it would open the door which leads to proscriptions and dictatorships.

There is every reason to hope that amid the first rejoicings of victory the republican ma-lority will show itself as generous as resolved, in accordance with the noble speech of Lincoln in his negotiation with the south in January last. May it please God that there be no recourse after the triumph to reprisals, which have been abstained from in the heat of battle, which would also render inexcusable the prompt submission and complete dispersion of the conquered armies. The spirit of revenge would instil in the veins of the great nation a poison more fatal and more inextirpable than that of slavery abolished. Posthumous repressions, confiscations, proscriptions of the Muscovite order against the conquered and prisoners, offences against local franchises, or the sovereign independence of states, would excite universal indignation, and would change all the sympathies of the liberals of Europe against the transatlantic rivals of Mouravieff. To substitute centralization for liberty under pretext of guaranteeing the latter, would be to condemn America to become nothing but a miserable and servile counterfeit presentment of Europe, in place of being our guide and precursor in the right path.

For the rest, notwithstanding all the violence of language, notwithstanding many alarming symptoms, we may still hope that nothing will come of them. Americans will remember as their defender, Burke has said that greatness of soul is the wisest policy, and that littleness of mind does not lead to a great empire. Reconciliation should and must be brought about without humiliation, and consequently without difficulty and without delay, between parties which are not separated by any antipathies, national or religious, of creed or of language. The works and the benefits of peace, the immense industrial commercial and agricultural movement, which war itself has scarcely slackened, will seal anew the Union between north and south. But will not the reconciled belligerents carry abroad the henceforth sterile ardor? Will the warlike spirit, so quickly and so prodigiously developed, suffer itself to be reduced to and restrained within the necessary limits? From these disbanded armies will there not issue bands of adventurers and filibusters, the terror and scourge of the neighboring people? Fearful questions, of which we ardently hope a pacific solution, because our ardent aspirations for the glory and the prosperity of the United States accord with those which every friend of right should entertain for the consolidation of the new Anglo-American confederation, in which our brethren of Canada, brethren of race and religious faith, may act a part so advantageous and so preponderant.

But our solicitudes and apprehensions are much more concentred on the domestic condition of the great republic than on its foreign relations, even much more on the dangers pertinent to all the elements of its Constitution than upon the immediate consequences of the contest which has just terminated. May it never be forgotten that the origin of its noble institutions, of its incomparable liberty, of its invincible energy, goes back to the traditional liberties and the Christian civilization, under the shelter of which the insurgent colonies of 1775 had grown up. May it acquire the difficult secret of preserving individuals as well as public authority from that subjection to the omnipotence of majorities which so naturally moulds the hearts of men to submit to the absolute power of a single individual. Let us wish for it that susceptibility of conscience, that delicacy, “that chastity of honor,” almost always wanting in democratic societies, even when they know how to remain free. Let us wish they may escape, or rather resist, one of their greatest perils, that contempt for ideas, for studies, for intellectual enjoyments, which engenders torpor or drowsiness of spirit in the midst of the noisy yet monotonous agitation of local and personal policy. Let us wish them to renounce, sooner or later, that love for mediocrity, that hatred of natural and legitimate superiority, natural consequence of the passion of equality, which carries into the bosom of democratic assemblies the spirit of the courts and ante-chambers, and there too often reproduces one of the most debasing characteristics of despotism, perfected and popularized by modern civilization. Let us wish that there universal suffrage, more and more clothed with all elective functions, may not condemn the enlightened and superior classes to that discouragement, that political apathy, which ends by excluding them in fact, if it do not in law, from public life; but, above all, that nothing may ever induce the Americans to weaken the federation principle which has made thus far their greatness and their liberty by preserving them from all the shoals on which democracy has made wreck in Europe. To confine the central government to functions strictly necessary, by respecting scrupulously the local liberties of the different States, is the first duty, and above all the first interest, of American statesmen. Assuredly on the day succeeding an unjustifiable rebellion, and a terrible war, undertaken in the name of an abusive and immoral interpretation of the federative principle, of federative law, the temptation to lessen and limit this principle, to tend with flowing sail toward centralizing unity, would be strong with many, but it is only by resisting this temptation and maintaining unshakable fidelity to the national, liberal, and federal tradition of the country that America will continue to be worthy of her glory and of her destiny.

That which mainly reassures us against the dangers which menace the republic, or with which she may menace the world, is the character of the American people—the nation which has learned how to pass through such terrible trials without giving herself a master, without even dreaming of it, has evidently received from Heaven a moral constitution, a political temperament quite different from that of the turbulent and servile races which know not how to secure themselves against their own blunderings but by precipitating themselves from revolution into servitude, and has no refuge or alleviation of the shame and annoyance of their domestic subjection but in foreign adventures.

What gives the best pledge of this national temperament is the personage, truly unique, whom the nation, in full possession of its free will and its natural sympathies, has twice in succession chosen as President. Everything has been said about Abraham Lincoln. He has presented to us in the ripeness of the nineteenth century a fresh example, which is not either a copy or a counterfeit of the calm and worthy from which Washington issued. His glory will not be eclipsed in history even by that of Washington. He honors human nature, not less than the country whose destinies he directed, and whose pacification he brought about with such intelligent moderation. His eulogy is everywhere, and we yield only to the imperious appeal of conscience in joining in it. But it behooves us above all, humble advocates of liberty, whose glorious and victorious champion he has been, to engrave in our souls and seal with our lives this pure and noble memory, to encourage, to console, and to bind us more and more to the laborious duty on which we have voluntarily entered. It behooves us to prove that which the study of this career, so short but so resplendent, brings especially to light, to wit, this combination of rectitude and of kindness, of sagacity and simplicity, of modesty and firm courage, which make of him a type so attaching and so rare a type that no prince, no public man of our age, has equalled or surpassed. This woodcutter become lawyer, then placed at the head of one of the greatest peoples of the earth, has displayed all the virtues of the honest man beside all the qualities of the politician. His head was no more affected than his language. Since his accession to supreme rank, no one can cite of him a single expression of menace or bravado, a single expression vindictive or extravagant. No sovereign, hereditary or elective, has spoken a language more eloquent or more worthy; none has shown more calmness and good temper, more perseverance and magnanimity.

“Let us unite,” he wrote to the governor of Missouri on the 20th February last, in pointing out to him the means for pacifying that State, recently submitting but still severely agitated. “Let us meet only to look to the future, without any care for what we have been able to do, say or think about the actual war, or no matter what. Let us pledge one another to harass no man, and to make common Cause against any who shall persist in disturbing his neighbor. Thus the old friendship will again spring up in our hearts, because honor and Christian charity will come to our aid.”

Honor and Christian charity: is it not that which is most wanting in the action and language of politicians? What can be more touching than to look upon this “rail-splitter,” this Illinois husbandman, recalling the inspirations and vital conditions of humanity first to his own people; then, thanks to the prestige with which his death has crowned him, to the whole world, which attentively gathers up his slightest sayings to enlarge the too scanty treasury of moral lessons which the shepherds of men bequeath to posterity. Let us collect in turn, and seek in these words, especially what bears the stamp of that Christian faith with which he was imbued, and which all the public men of America so simply and naturally confess. Orators and generals, authors and diplomatists, and, let us add quickly, northerners and southerners, without distinction, have the thought of God ever present to them, care to call Him to witness, and the duty of rendering Him public homage always inspires them. Nothing better demonstrates, in contradiction to European revolutionists, that the most energetic and unrestricted development of ideas of institutions and of modern liberties has absolutely nothing in it incompatible with the public profession of Christianity, with the solemn proclamation of gospel truth. Let us listen to his adieus to his neighbors and friends on leaving his modest residence at Springfield, Illinois, to become for the first time President of the United States:

“No one can understand the sadness I feel at this moment of farewell. To these around I owe all that I am. Here I have lived a quarter of a century; here my children were born; here one of them lies buried. I know not; whether I shall ever see you again; a duty is imposed on me, greater perhaps than any imposed on any citizen since the days of Washington. Washington never could have succeeded without the help of Divine Providence, in which he ever placed trust. I feel that I cannot succeed without the same assistance, and it is from God that I also look for aid.”

Listen to him in his inaugural address on his first presidency, 4th March, 1861: “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust all our present difficulties.”

After four years had passed, and four years of cruel war, which he had done everything to avoid, elected for a second term let us hear him uttering, the 4th March, 1865, the wonderful language one wearies not of admiring and repeating:

“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both north and south this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan— to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Listen to the last public remarks pronounced by him three days before his death in a speech on Louisiana, April 11, 1865:

“We are assembled this evening not in sadness, but in the joy of our hearts. The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the capitulation of the main army of the insurgents, authorizes the hope of a just peace. Our gratification at these events should not be restrained, but in these circumstances He from whom all blessings flow must not be forgotten. A proclamation for a day of national thanksgiving is purposed, and will in due time be promulgated. Let us not be forgetful of those who, undertaking the severest duties, have gained for us this cause for rejoicing, and deserve special honor. I have been to the front of the army, and have myself had the pleasure of sending to you a good share of good news, but neither the plan, its execution, nor its honors belong to me. The whole belong to General Grant, to the skill of his officers, and the valor of his soldiers.”

You there see—and it is always so about this great, honest man—the same humility, the same simplicity, the same charity. I do not believe that since Saint Louis any among the princes and the great of the earth have uttered better words. Listen now to Mr. Stanton, Secretary of War, announcing to the people the news of the victory:

“Friends and fellow-citizens: In this great triumph my heart and yours are penetrated with gratitude to Almighty God for the deliverance of this nation. Our gratitude is due to the President, to the army and to the navy, to the brave officers and soldiers who have exposed their lives on the battle-field, and drenched the ground with their blood; our pity and our aid are due to the wounded and suffering. Let us offer our humble thanksgivings to Divine Providence for its care for us; let us supplicate it to continue to direct us in our duties, as it has led us to victory, and to help us to consolidate the foundations of the republic, cemented as they are with blood, that the republic may endure forever. Nor let us forget the millions of toiling men of foreign countries who, through this trial, have given us their sympathies, their support, and their prayers; and let us invite them to share with us in our triumph. That done, let us trust ourselves through the future to that great God who will guide us in the future as he has guided us to this time in his infinite goodness.”

Listen to his improvised successor in his inaugural address:

“The working and the honest support of the great principles of free government have been the objects of my whole life. The duties of head of the state devolve on me; I will discharge them as I best may; God alone controls the result.”

Listen, on the other hand, to his rival, Jefferson Davis, president of the rebel confederacy, in his late message of March 13, 1865:

“Let us learn to rise above every egotistic consideration.; let us learn how to make for the country the sacrifice of all that belongs to us; let us learn to bow humbly to the will of God, and invoke with reverence the blessings of our Heavenly Father, to the end that, as he protected our fathers in a contest similar to our own, He may deign to permit us to defend our homes and our altars, and to maintain inviolate the political rights of which we are the inheritors.”

Listen, again, to the gallant Lee,. general-in-chief of the insurgent army, in his farewell proclamation, after the capitulation of the 10th of April:

“Soldiers, you will carry with you the satisfaction of duty faithfully performed; and I sincerely pray that a merciful God may grant you his blessing, and extend his protection over you. With an admiration without bounds of your devotion to your country, and with great remembrance of your kind and generous consideration toward me, I make you my affectionate farewell.

“R. E. LEE, General:”

Listen, in fine, to the representative of the United States in France, Mr. Bigelow, responding to an address of his countrymen at Paris on the 11th of May:

“This blow has fallen with peculiar seventy, and I thank you for the faithful eloquence with which you have interpreted our common sorrow.

“But no crime was ever committed that was not an involuntary homage to virtue. The war between the principles of good and evil is always waging; and if the Lamb that took away the sins of the world had to bear his testimony upon the cross, why should he who proclaimed deliverance to a race of bondmen be safe from the treacherous hand of the assassin? How more appropriately could our great national reproach ultimate itself? Was it more than historic justice to mark the grave of chattel slavery in the United States by a crime that was never perpetrated, whatever the pretence, except in the interest of slavery?

“Those who, like myself, are accustomed to search for the hand of God in all the phenomena of human life, cannot but feel as, after much reflection, I am led to feel, that our people were never nearer to Him than at the dreadful moment when we seemed, humanly speaking, most deserted. What revelations that crime has made.”

The nation whose representatives and civil and military chiefs speak such language in sucha crisis is a great nation, and, I add, a great Christian nation. I know not whether the eye of God, casting a regard down to earth, would find there, in the times in which we live, a sight more worthy of him.

All that, some will say, does not pass beyond a vague and imperfect Christianism—a Christianisai too close upon Deism, like that of Washington. That may be true, but, as the Bishop of Orleans says, we are still far from this in Europe. Vague and imperfect as it may be, it appears that the most scrupulous and exacting of Catholics can nevertheless admire and respect it, for Pope Pius 9th has not disdained to contribute to the monument of Washington.

If it be just to apply in politics the rule laid down by our Lord for a spiritual life, “By their fruits ye may know them,” I think we may look without much inquietude to the future of the United States, and of all nations which, placed under the same conditions, shall know how to march in the same path. The social constitution which produces a Lincoln, and others like him, is a good tree, an excellent tree, whose sure fruits leave nothing to envy in the products of any monarchy or of any aristocracy. I know very well there are other fruits more pungent and less savory; but those mentioned suffice to justify the trust and hope which I feel, and which I would inspirem all who wish to leave, not merely their bones, as Lacordaire said, but their heart and their recollections on the pleasant side of things.

Let us, then, turn away our vision from all that in the Old World draws us by a too natural descent towards discouragement, depression and apathy, and let us seek beyond the Atlantic to breathe the inspiration of a better future. Those who, like me, have grown gray in the faith in a future of liberty, and the necessity of its alliance with religion, must without cease recall the fine language of Tocqueville and of Madame Swetchinee: “The effort, outside of self, and more still the effort within, is more necessary in proportion as one advances in age than in youth. I compare man in this world to a traveller, who approaches without stopping a cold and colder climate, and is obliged to make more effort the further he goes. The great malady of his soul is the cold, and to combat this redoubtable evil he must not only keep the active movement of his spirit on the alert by work, but also by friction with his fellow beings in the affairs of the world. It is especially in his old age that he is no longer permitted to live on what he has already acquired, but must make an effort to achieve more; and in place of reposing on ideas on which he would soon become drowsy and oblivious, must, without ceasing, place himself in contact and in contest with ideas that are adopted by what is suggested by the state of society and of opinions at the period that has been reached.”

All this is true, not only of old people but of old parties and also of old creeds. Ours is the oldest in the world. It is its august privilege, it is also its glory and its strength. But that this strength in its application to public and private life may not fade, may not waste itself on vain chimeras, it must be unceasingly refreshed in the living waters of the time in which God has given us life, in the current of the emotions of the legitimate aspirations of those whom God has given us for brethren. Let us, then, make advantage of the fact that the Almighty has vouchsafed to us to witness this great triumph of liberty, of justice, and of the Gospel; of this great defeat of wickedness, of egoism, of tyranny. Let us thank him for having given to Christian America vigor enough and virtue enough to maintain so gloriously the promises of her youth. Let us adore his goodness, who has spared us the shame and sorrow of witnessing the miserable miscarriage of the great hope of modern humanity.

CH. DE MONTALEMBERT.

1. In 1774 in all the English colonies, from which the United States arose, were only 49 priests. Tue first bishop appeared in 1790. In 1839 the church counted in the United States 1 province, 16 dioceses, 18 bishops, 418 priests, 418 churches. In 1849, 3 provinces, 30 dioceses, 26 bishops, 1,000 priests, 966 churches. In 1859, 7 provinces, 45 dioceses, 2 vicariats, 45 bishops, 2.108 priests, 2,334 churches.
2. The report of the War Department of 1862 showed the presence of 800,000 men in the federal armies, nineteen twentieths whereof were enlisted volunteers. The proportions must have changed, and the draft has filled up the gaps. This omits the confederate forces, less in number, but equals in courage and discipline to the federal force.
3. “At first I was moved by the condition of the oppressed, of the poor race which constituted the fortune of those who perpetuated its misery; at last I take to pitying the oppressors. I conjure them to have pity on themselves.”—Augustin Cochin—Abolition of Slavery.
4. “Recall to mind that Mr. Thiers, our illustrious and national historian, has demonstrated, at the end of his great work, the folly which the exercise of full powers substituted in the spirit of Napoleon for the wisdom of his earlier years.”