A^^Ihe social significance 
 
 OUR INSTITUTIONS 
 
 AN R A i" I N 
 
 DELIVERED BY REQUEST OF THE CITIZENS AT NEWPORT, R. I. 
 
 July 4TH, 1861. 
 
 By henry JAMES 
 
 BOSTON: 
 TICK NOR AND FIELDS 
 1861. 
 
Gass tH 2 ^ 
 Book .H'<i)7 
 
 \?(^ 
 
THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE 
 
 OUR INSTITUTIONS: 
 
 AN ORATION 
 
 DELIVERED BY REQUEST OF THE CITIZENS AT NEWPORT, R. I. 
 
 July 4TH, 1861. 
 
 By henry JAMES 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 TICKNOR AND FIELDS 
 
 1861. 
 

 [The Oration as printed contains several passages omitted in the delivery. 
 
 ^Vfo 
 
 7? 
 
 University Press, Cambridge : 
 Printed by Wclrh, Bigolow, and Company. 
 
ORAT ION. 
 
 A FRIEND observed to me a few days since, as I ac- 
 cepted the invitation with which your Committee of 
 Arrangements has honored me, to officiate as your 
 orator on this occasion, that I could hardly expect, 
 under the circumstances, to regale my auditors with 
 the usual amount of spread-eagleism. I replied, that 
 that depended upon what he meant by spread-eagle- 
 ism. If he meant what was commonly meant by it, 
 namely, so clearly defined a Providential destiny for 
 our Union, that, do what we please, we shall never 
 fall short of it, I could never, under any circum- 
 stances, the most opposed even to existing ones, con- 
 sent to flatter my hearers with that unscrupulous 
 rubbish. No doubt many men, whose consciences 
 have been drugged by our past political prosperity, 
 do fancy some such inevitable destiny as this before 
 us, — do fancy that we may become so besotted with 
 the lust of gain as to permit the greatest rapacity 
 on the part of our public servants, the most undis- 
 guised and persistent corruption on the part of our 
 municipal and private agents, without forfeiting the 
 Providential favor. From that sort of spread-eagle- 
 
ism I told my friend that I hoped we were now un- 
 dergoing a timely and permanent deliverance. But 
 if he meant by that uncouth word an undiminished, 
 yea, a heightened confidence in our political sanity 
 and vigor, and in the fresh and glowing manhood 
 which is to be in yet larger measure than ever the 
 legitimate fruit of our institutions, I could assure 
 him that my soul was full of it, and it would be 
 wholly my fiiult if my auditors did not feelingly re- 
 spond to it. 
 
 1 never felt proud of my country for what 
 many seem to consider her prime distinction, name- 
 ly, her ability to foster the rapid accumulation 
 of private wealth. It does not seem to me a 
 particularly creditable thing, that a greater number 
 of people annually grow richer under our institu- 
 tions than they do anywhere else. It is a fact, 
 no doubt, and like all facts has its proper amiable 
 signification when exposed to the rectifying light 
 of Truth. But it is not the fact which in a foreign 
 land, for example, has made my heart to throb and 
 my cheeks to glow when I remembered the great 
 and happy people beyond the sea, when I thought 
 of the vast and fertile land that lay blossoming 
 and beckoning to all mankind beyond the setting 
 sun. For there in Europe one sees this same pri- 
 vate wealth, in less diffused form, it is true, con- 
 centrated in greatly fewer hands, but at the same 
 time associated in many cases with things that go 
 every way to dignify it or give it a lustre not 
 its own, — associated with traditional family refine- 
 
ment, with inoffensive unostentatious manners, with 
 the practice of art and science and literature, and 
 sometimes with the pursuit of toilsome and hon- 
 orable personal adventure. Every one knows, on 
 the other hand, how little ive exact from our rich 
 men ; how meagre and mean and creeping a race 
 we permit our rich men to be, if their meanness 
 is only flavored with profusion. I have not been 
 favored with a great many rich acquaintance, but 
 still I have known a not inconsiderable number, 
 and I have never found them the persons to whom 
 one would spontaneously resort in his least per- 
 sonal moments, or communicate with the most 
 naturally in his hours of the purest intellectual 
 elation or despondency. Of course I have known 
 exceptions to this rule, men whose money only 
 serves to illustrate their superior human sweet- 
 ness, men of whose friendship everybody is proud. 
 But as a general thing, nevertheless, one likes best 
 to introduce one's foreign acquaintance, not to our 
 commercial nabobs, who aggravate the price of 
 house-rent and butcher's meat so awfully to us poor 
 Newporters ; not to our fast financiers and bank 
 cashiers, who on a salary of three thousand a year 
 contrive to support in luxury, beside their proper 
 wife and offspring, a dozen domestic servants and 
 as many horses ; but to our, in the main, upright, 
 self-respecting, and, if you please, untutored, but 
 at the same time unsophisticated, children of toil, 
 who are the real fathers and mothers of our fu- 
 ture distinctive manhood. 
 
6 
 
 No ; what makes one's pulse to bound when 
 he remembers his own home under foreign skies, 
 is never the rich man, nor the learned man, nor 
 the distinguished man of any sort who illustrates 
 its history, for in all these petty products almost 
 every country may favorably, at all events te- 
 diously, compete with our own ; but it is all simply 
 the abstract manhood itself of the country, man 
 himself unqualified by convention, the man to 
 whom all these conventional men have been simply 
 introductory, the man who — let me say it — for 
 the first time in human history finding himself in 
 his own right erect under God's sky, and feeling 
 himself in his own right the peer of every other 
 man, spontaneously aspires and attains to a far 
 freer and profounder culture of his nature than 
 has ever yet illustrated humanity. 
 
 Shallow people call this pretension of ours the 
 offspring of national vanity, and stigmatize it as 
 implying the greatest immodesty in every one 
 who asserts it. Is it not the same as saying, 
 they ask, that ignorance is as good as experience, 
 weakness as good as skill, nature as good as cul- 
 ture, the crude ore as good as the polished metal 
 which is extracted from it? I will show you the 
 absurdity of this criticism in a few moments, when 
 I show you the peculiar foundation which the sen- 
 timent in question, the sentiment of human equal- 
 ity, claims in our historic evolution and growth. 
 For the present, I have a word more to say in 
 regard to the contrasts of European and American 
 thought and aspiration. 
 
No American, who is not immersed in abject 
 spread-eagleism, — that is to say, no American 
 who has had the least glimpse of the rich social 
 promise of our institutions, or of the free play 
 they accord to the spiritual activities of our na- 
 ture, — values the mere political prestige of his 
 nation, or the repute it enjoys with other nations, 
 as the true ground of its glory. Much less, of 
 course, does he esteem the mere personnel of his 
 government as conferring any distinction upon him. 
 Loyalty, which is a strictly personal sentiment, has 
 long given place even in the English bosom where 
 it was native, to j)atriotism, which is a much more 
 rational sentiment. Loyalty bears to patriotism 
 the same relation that superstition bears to relig- 
 ion. The zealot worships God, not as an infinite 
 Spirit of Love, but as a finite person : not for what 
 He is inwardly in himself, but for what He may 
 outwardly be to the worshipper. He adores him, 
 not for what alone renders him worthy of adora- 
 tion, namely, his essential humanity, that infinitely 
 tender sympathy with his infirm creature which 
 leads him forever to humble himself that the lat- 
 ter may be exalted, but simply because he is 
 eminent in place and power above all beings, and 
 so is able to do all manner of kindness to those 
 who please him, and all manner of unkindness to 
 those who displease him. Exactly so the loyalist 
 worships his king or his queen, — not for their ra- 
 diant human worth; not for the uses their great 
 dignity promotes to the common or associated life ; 
 
8 
 
 in short, not from any rational perception of their 
 inward adjustment to the place they occupy; but 
 simply because they do occupy that eminent place, 
 simply because they happen to be crowned king 
 and crowned queen, traditional sources of honor 
 and dishonor to their subjects. In both cases alike, 
 the homage is purely blind or instinctive, and, 
 though befitting children, is unworthy of adult 
 men. Eeligion, on the contrary, clothes the Di- 
 vine supremacy with essentially spiritual attributes, 
 makes His perfection the perfection of character, the 
 perfection of love and wisdom, and of power thence 
 alone energized, so that no religious man wor- 
 ships God from choice or voluntarily, but spontane- 
 ously, or because he cannot help himself, so much 
 does the overpowering loveliness constrain him. 
 That is to say, every man truly worships God in 
 the exact measure of his own unaffected goodness, 
 purity, and truth. And it is thus precisely that 
 the patriot loves his king or queen, — not for their 
 traditional sanctity, not for their exalted privilege, 
 not for their conventional remoteness, in short, from 
 other men, — but for their willing nearness to them, 
 that is, for their positive human use or worth, and 
 consequent fitness to lead the great honest hearts 
 they represent. In one word, what the patriot sees 
 and loves in his king is his country and his country 
 only ; and he serves him, therefore, as the spir- 
 itually enlightened man serves God, not with a 
 ceremonial or ritual devotion, but with a cordial 
 or living one, with a service which only exalts, 
 
9 
 
 instead of any longer degrading, either of the par- 
 ties to it. 
 
 No wonder, then, that the sentiment of loyalty 
 should have utterly died out of our blood, when 
 even that higher sentiment of country, to which 
 alone it ministered in the bosom of our Ensrlish 
 ancestry, has in its turn given place in o«r bosoms 
 to a sentiment still higher, that of humanity. We 
 are the descendants, not of English loyalists by any 
 means, but of English patriots exclusively ; that is, 
 of men who valued royalty only so long as it served 
 the common life, and when it grew tired of that 
 service, and claimed only to be served in its turn, 
 unhesitatingly suspended it by the neck, and sent 
 its descendants skipping. And this English patri- 
 otism, which was itself a regenerate loyalty, or a 
 love of country purified of all personal allegiance, 
 has itself become glorified in our veins into a still 
 grander sentiment, — that is, from a love of country 
 has become exalted into a love of humanity. It is 
 the truest glory any nation may boast, that the love 
 it enkindles in the bosom of its children is the 
 love of man himself; that the respect it engenders 
 there for themselves is identical with the respect 
 which is due to all men. As Americans, we love 
 our country, it is true, but not because it is ours 
 simply; on the contrary, we are proud to belong 
 to it, because it is the country of all mankind, 
 because she opens her teeming lap to the exile 
 of every land, and bares her hospitable breast to 
 whatsoever wears the human form. This is where 
 
 2 
 
10 
 
 the ordinary European mind inevitably fails to do 
 us any justice. The purblind piddling mercenaries 
 of literature, like Dickens, and the ominous scribes 
 and Pharisees of the Saturday Review,* have just 
 enough of cheap wit to see and caricature the 
 cordial complacency we feel in our virgin and beau- 
 tiful mother; but it takes an acumen bred of no 
 London police-courts, and an education of the heart 
 which all the studies of Oxford will never yield, 
 to see the rich human soul that vivifies that com- 
 placency, that burns away all its dross, and makes 
 it laughable only to literary louts and flunkies who 
 live by pandering to the prejudices of the average 
 human understanding. 
 
 The American misses in European countries and 
 institutions this exquisite human savor, this ex- 
 quisite honor which is due to man alone, and this 
 exquisite indifference which is due to persons. In 
 European institutions, — I do not say in existing 
 European sentiment, for that, no doubt, is greatly in 
 advance of the institutions, — but in European in- 
 stitutions persons are everything and man compar- 
 atively nothing. It is always the skilled man, or 
 the learned man, or the mighty man, or the noble 
 man, in short the propertied or qualified man of 
 some sort, that is had in reverence ; never our 
 common humanity itself, which, on the contrary, 
 is starved in garrets in order that the man of qual- 
 ity may live in plenty, is ground to powder by 
 toil in order to keep up his iniquitous state, is 
 
 * See Appendix A. 
 
11 
 
 butchered in crowds to maintain his peace, and 
 rots in prisons to avouch his purity. Abroad every 
 American sees, of course and accordingly, any 
 amount of merely political energy and efficiency, 
 sees governments flourishing by the permanent 
 demoralization of their people. He sees every ap- 
 pliance of luxurious art, all manner of imposing 
 edifices, of elaborate gardens and pleasure-places, 
 the deadliest arsenals of war, armies innumerable, 
 and navies disciplined with infernal force, all con- 
 secrated to the sole purpose of keeping up the 
 purely political status of the country, or aggrandiz- 
 ing its own selfish aims and repute to the eyes of 
 other nations and its own people. And he cries 
 aloud to his own heart. May America perish out 
 of all remembrance, before what men blasphemous- 
 ly call public order finds itself promoted there by 
 this costly human degradation ! Disguise it as you 
 will in your own weak, wilful way, in no country 
 in Europe has the citizen as yet consciously risen 
 into the man. In no country of Europe does the 
 government consciously represent, or even so much 
 as affect to represent, the unqualified manhood of 
 the country, its lustrous human worth, the honest 
 imadulterate blood of its myriad beautiful and lov- 
 ing bosoms, its fathers and mothers, its brothers 
 and sisters, its sons and daughters, its husbands 
 and wives, its lovers and friends, every throb of 
 whose life is sacred with God's sole inspiration ; 
 but only the adulterate streams which course 
 through the veins of some insignificant conven- 
 
12 
 
 tional aristocracy. Take England itself for an ex- 
 ample of the perfect truth of my allegations. We 
 may easily do injustice to England just now ; may 
 easily forget the shining and proud pre-eminence 
 which belongs to her political development among 
 all the polities of the earth. Another nation so 
 great, so vowed in its political form to freedom, so 
 renowned for arms, for art, for industry, for the 
 intelligence of its scholars, for its public and pri- 
 vate morality, does not illustrate human annals ; 
 and yet, because she now thinks of herself before 
 she thinks of us, because she listens to the prayer 
 of her starving operatives before she listens to 
 the demands of our betrayed nationality, we are 
 ready to forget her glorious past, and pronounce 
 her a miracle of selfishness. But no truly human 
 virtue is compatible with an empty stomach ; and 
 England, like everybody else, must be allowed first 
 of all to secure her own subsistence before she 
 bestows a thought upon other people. I will not 
 blame England, then, for her present timidity. I 
 will never forget the inappreciable services she has 
 rendered to the cause of political progress. But 
 just as little can I be blind to the immense limita- 
 tions she exhibits when measured by American 
 humanitary ideas. She claims to be the freest of 
 European nations ; and so she is, as I have already 
 admitted, so far as her public or political life is 
 concerned. But viewed internallj^, viewed as to 
 her social condition, you observe such a destitution 
 of personal freedom and ease and courtesy among 
 
13 
 
 her children as distinguishes no other people, and 
 absolutely shocks an American. Conventional rou- 
 tine, a wholly artificial morality, has so bitten it- 
 self into the life of the people, into the national 
 manners and countenance even, that the kindly 
 human heart within is never allowed to come to 
 the surface, and what accordingly is meant among 
 them for civility to each other is so coldly and 
 grudgingly rendered as to strike the stranger like 
 insult. The intensely artificial structure of society 
 in England renders it inevitable in fact, that her 
 people should be simply the worst-mannered people 
 in Christendom. Indeed, I venture to say that no 
 average American resides a year in England with- 
 out getting a sense so acute and stifling of its hid- 
 eous class-distinctions, and of the consequent awk- 
 wardness and bnisqiierie of its upper classes, and the 
 consequent abject snobbery or inbred and ineradi- 
 cable servility of its lower classes, as makes the 
 manners of Choctaws and Potawatamies sweet and 
 christian, and gives to a log-cabin in Oregon the 
 charm of comparative dignity and peace. 
 
 For, after all, what do we prize in men? Is it 
 their selfish or social worth? Is it their personal 
 or their human significance ? Unquestionably, only 
 the latter. All the refinement, all the accomplish- 
 ment, all the power, all the genius under heaven, 
 is only a nuisance to us if it minister to individual 
 vanity, or be associated with a sentiment of aloof- 
 ness to the common life, to the great race which 
 bears us upon her spotless bosom and nourishes 
 
14 
 
 us with the milk of her own immortahty. What 
 is the joy we feel when we see the gifted man, 
 the man of genius, the man of high conventional 
 place of whatever sort, come down to the recogni- 
 tion of the lowliest social obligations, — what is it 
 but a testimony that the purest personal worth is 
 then most pure when it denies itself, when it leaps 
 over the privileged interval which separates it from 
 the common life, and comes down to identify itself 
 with the commonest? This sentiment of human 
 unity, of the sole original sacredness of man and 
 the purely derivative sanctity of persons, no matter 
 who they are, is tvhat ive are horn to, and what we 
 must not fail to assert with an emphasis and good- 
 will which may, if need be, make the world re- 
 sound. For it is our very life, the absolute breath 
 of our nostrils, which alone qualifies us to exist. 
 I lived, recently, nearly a year in St. John's Wood 
 in London, and was daily in the habit of riding 
 down to the city in the omnibus along with my 
 immediate neighbors, men of business and profes- 
 sional men, who resided in that healthy suburb, and 
 fared forth from it every morning to lay up honest, 
 toilsome bread for the buxom domestic angels who 
 sanctified their homes, and the fair-haired cherubs 
 who sweetened them. Very nice men, to use their 
 own lingo, they were, for the most part ; tidy, un- 
 pretending, irreproachable in dress and deportment ; 
 men in whose truth and honesty you would confide 
 at a glance ; and yet, after eight months' assiduous 
 bosom solicitation of their hardened stolid visages. 
 
15 
 
 I never was favored with the sHghtest overture to 
 human mtercourse from one of them. I never once 
 caught the eye of one of them. If ever I came nigh 
 doing so, an instant film would surge up from their 
 more vital parts, if such parts there we^-e, just as a 
 Newport fog suddenly surges up from the cold re- 
 morseless sea, and wrap the organ in the dullest, fish- 
 iest, most disheartening of stares. They took such 
 extreme pains never to look kt one another, that I 
 knew they must be living men, devoutly intent each 
 on disowning the other's life ; otherwise I could 
 well have believed them so many sad well-seasoned 
 immortals, revisiting their old London haunts by 
 way of a nudge to their present less carnal satisfac- 
 tions. I had myself many cherished observations to 
 make upon the weather, upon the lingering green 
 of the autumn fields, upon the pretty suburban cot- 
 tages we caught a passing glimpse of, upon the end- 
 less growth of London, and other equally conservative 
 topics ; but I got no chance to ventilate them, and 
 the poor things died at last of hope deferred. The 
 honest truth is what Dr. Johnson told Boswell, that 
 the nation is deficient in the human sentiment. 
 "Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, "though himself a stern, 
 true-born Englishman, and fully prejudiced against all 
 other nations, had yet discernment enough to see, 
 and candor enough to censure, the cold reserve 
 among Englishmen toward strangers (of their own 
 nation). 'Sir,' said he, ' two men of any other nation 
 who are shown into a room together, at a house 
 where they are both visitors, will immediately find 
 
16 
 
 some conversation. But two Englishmen will prob- 
 ably go each to a different window and remain in 
 obstinate silence. Sir, we do not, as yet,' proceeded 
 the Doctor, ' understand the common rights of 
 humanity.' " 
 
 These common rights of humanity of which Dr. 
 Johnson speaks are all summed up in the truth 
 of man's social equality; that is,' every man's joint 
 and equal dependence with every other man upon 
 the association of his kind for all that he himself 
 is or enjoys. These common rights of humanity 
 have got political ratification in England, as they 
 have got it nowhere else in Europe out of Switzer- 
 land ; but the private life of England, as Dr. John- 
 son charges, is shockingly indifferent to them. The 
 moral sentiment, the sentiment of what is excep- 
 tionally due to this, that, or the other person, utterly 
 dominates in that sphere the social sentiment, the 
 sentiment of what is habitually due to every man 
 as man. It is this unchallenged primacy of the 
 moral life over the social life of England, this in- 
 tense sensibility among her scholars to personal 
 claims over human claims, which so exalts her Phar- 
 isaic pride and abases her true spirituality, which 
 leaves her outwardly the greatest and inwardly 
 the poorest of peoples, and makes the homesick be- 
 cause better-nurtured foreigner feel, when exposed 
 to it, how dismal and dingy the very heaven of 
 heavens would become if once these odiously cor- 
 rect and lifeless white-cravatted and black-coated 
 respectabilities should get the run of it. 
 
17 
 
 You see at a glance that this penury of Eng- 
 land in all spiritual regards is owing to the simple 
 fact that not man, but English-Ymn, is the key-note 
 of her aspirations. European thought generally 
 and at best is peninsular, — that is, almost insular, — 
 in that it regards European culture as constituting 
 the probable limits of the human mind. But Eng- 
 lish thought is absolutely insular, in that it makes 
 England the actual measure of human develop- 
 ment. Every Englishman who lives and dies an 
 Englishman, that is to say, who has not been made 
 by God's grace a partaker in heart of the common- 
 wealth of mankind, or a spiritual alien from the 
 mother that bore him, believes that not Europe, 
 but England itself, one of the smallest corners of 
 Europe, as Judaea was one of the smallest corners of 
 Asia, furnishes the real Ultima Thiile of human pro- 
 gress. This being the key-note of English thought, 
 the pitch to which all its tunes are set, you are 
 not surprised to see the sentiment dominating the 
 whole strain of English character, till at last you 
 find the Englishman not only isolating himself from 
 the general European man, but each individual 
 Englishman becoming a bristling independent un- 
 approachable little islet to every other Englishman, 
 ready, as Dr. Johnson describes them, to leap out 
 of the windows rather than hold that safe and 
 salutary parley with each other which God and 
 nature urge them to ; so that probably a huger 
 amount of painful plethoric silence becomes an- 
 nually accumulated under English ribs than befalls 
 
18 
 
 the whole world beside, and an amount of spirit- 
 ual numbness and imbecility generated which is 
 not to be paralleled by anything this side of old 
 Judaea. And it is exactly the rebound of his thought 
 from all this social obstruction and poverty which 
 causes the American wayfarer's heart to dance with 
 glee when he remembers his own incorrect and 
 exceptionable Nazareth, his own benighted but com- 
 fortable and unsuspecting fellow-sinners, who are 
 said to sit sometimes with their tired feet as hio;h 
 as their head, who light their innocent unconscious 
 pipes at everybody's fire, and who occasionally, 
 when the sentiment of human brotherhood is at 
 a white heat in their bosom, ask you, as a gentle- 
 man from Cape Cod once asked me at the Astor 
 House table, the flxvor of being allowed to put 
 his superfluous fat upon your plate, provided, that 
 is, the fat is in no way offensive to you. That 
 the forms in which human freedom expresses itself 
 in these latitudes are open to just criticism in 
 many respects, I cordially admit, and even insist; 
 but he who sees the uncouth form alone, and has 
 no feeling for the beautiful human substance within 
 it, for the soul of fellowship that animates and re- 
 deems it of all malignity, would despise the shape- 
 less embryo because it is not the full-formed man, 
 and burn up the humble acorn because it is not 
 yet the branching oak. But the letter is nothing, 
 the spirit everything. The letter kills, the spirit 
 alone gives life ; and it is exclusively to this un- 
 deniable spiritual difierence between Europe and 
 
19 
 
 America, as organized and expressed in our own 
 constitutional polity, that all our formal differences 
 are owing. Our very Constitution binds us, that 
 is to say, the very breath of our political nostrils 
 binds us, to disown all distinctions among men, to 
 disregard persons, to disallow privilege the most 
 established and sacred, to legislate only for the 
 common good, no longer for those accidents of 
 birth or wealth or culture which spiritually indi- 
 vidualize man from his kind, but only for those 
 great common features of social want and depend- 
 ence which naturally unite him with his kind, and 
 inexorably demand the organization of such unity. 
 It is this immense constitutional life and inspira- 
 tion we are under which not only separate us 
 from Europe, but also perfectly explain by antag- 
 onism that rabid hostility which the South has al- 
 ways shown towards the admission of the North 
 to a fair share of government patronage, and which 
 now provokes her to the dirty and diabolic struggle 
 she is making to give human slavery the sanction 
 of God's appointment. 
 
 When I said awhile ago that an American, as such, 
 felt himself the peer of every man of woman born, I 
 represented my hearers as asking me whether that 
 claim was a righteous one ; whether, in fact, he 
 whose conscience should practically ratify it in ap- 
 plication to himself would not thereby avouch his 
 own immodesty, — confess himself devoid of that 
 humility which is the life of true manhood. To this 
 question I reply promptly, No ! for this excellent 
 
20 
 
 reason, — that the claim in question is by no means 
 a distinctive personal claim, but a claim in behalf of 
 every man. When, by virtue of our national gen- 
 esis and genius, I claim before God and man a right- 
 ful equality with every other man, what precisely is 
 it that I do ? Do I claim for myself an equality of 
 wit, of learning, of talent, of benevolence, with this, 
 that, or the other special person whom you may 
 name as remarkable for those endowments ? Do I 
 mean to allege my private personal equality with 
 all other persons ; my equal claim, for example, to 
 the admiring or sympathetic homage of mankind, 
 with Shakespeare, with Washington, with Franklin ? 
 No man who is not an ass can believe this ; and yet 
 you perpetually hear the paid scribes of old-fogyism 
 repeating the slander throughout the world, as if it 
 were the most indisputable of truths. Nothing is \ 
 more common than to hear persons who are disaf- 
 fected to the humane temper of our polity affecting 
 to quote the Declaration of Independence as saying 
 that all men are horn equal, and under cover of 
 that audacious forgery exposing it to ridicule. The 
 Declaration is guilty of no such absurdity. It 
 does not say that all men are born equal, for it 
 is notorious that they are born under the greatest 
 conceivable inequalities, — inequalities of heart and 
 head and hand, — inequalities even of ph^^sical form 
 and structure ; but it says that, notwithstanding 
 these inequalities, they are all created equal, — that 
 is, are all equal before God, or can claim no suj)e- 
 rior merit one to another in his sight, being all 
 
21 
 
 alike dependent upon his power, and possessing 
 a precisely equal claim, therefore, each with the 
 other, to the blessings of his impartial providence. 
 The inequalities under which men are born, or 
 which they inherit from their forefathers, are the 
 needful condition of their individuality, of their 
 various personal identity. The framers of the 
 Declaration saw this as well as anybody, but they 
 also saw, and so in effect said, that however much 
 men may differ among themselves, it was yet not 
 these personal differences which commend them to 
 each other's true respect, but rather that common 
 human want which identifies them all in the Divine 
 regard by making them all equal retainers of His 
 sovereign bounty. No man not a fool can gainsay 
 this, and no man not a fool, consequently, can 
 pretend that when I urge this constitutional doc- 
 trine of human equality I have anythin-g whatever 
 to say of myself personally regarded, or as discrimi- 
 nated from other persons, but only as socially regard- 
 ed, — that is, as united with all other jDcrsons. In 
 short, it is not a claim urged on my own behalf 
 alone, but in behalf of every other man who is 
 too ignorant or too debased by convention to assert 
 it for himself 
 
 Our political Constitution, like every other great 
 providential stride in human affairs, was intention- 
 ally educative ; was designed to gather us together 
 under the discipline of well-disposed but often sore- 
 ly tried and disheartened political guides, in order 
 finally to draw us fully forth out of the land of dark- 
 
22 
 
 ness and the house of bondage. The sole great aim 
 of our poUtical Constitution has been gradually to 
 induct us out of errors and evils, which no Pagan 
 Jew was ever more slow and reluctant to susj)ect 
 than we are, into a new and far more grandly 
 human consciousness, into a land of everlasting 
 righteousness and peace. Not one of its literal 
 framers ever had the faintest foresight of its ulti- 
 mate scientific destination, any more than Moses had 
 of the Messiah whom he prefigured ; any more than 
 Isaiah or Jeremiah had of the tremendous spiritual 
 scope of the prophecies which uttered themselves 
 through their rapt and dizzy imaginations. The 
 scientific promise of our polity is only to be under- 
 stood by watching its practical unfolding, by observ- 
 ing the expansive influence it has hitherto exerted, 
 and is now more than ever exerting, upon the pop- 
 ular mind and upon the popular heart. View it 
 either positively or negatively, its influence is the 
 same. In its negative aspect, — its aspect toward 
 Egypt, which is the European conception of man's 
 true state on earth, — it denies all absoluteness both 
 to persons and institutions, by boldly resolving what 
 is the highest of personalities, namely, the king, 
 and what is the most sacred of institutions, namely, 
 the Church, both alike from a power into the 
 servant of a power, from a righteousness into the 
 symbol of a righteousness, from a substance into 
 the shadow of a substance ; this substance itself 
 being those great disregarded instincts of human 
 unity or fraternity which all along the course of 
 
23 
 
 history have been patiently soliciting scientific rec- 
 ognition, in order to put on organic form and cover 
 the earth with holiness and peace. In its positive 
 aspect, — the aspect it bears toward Canaan, — 
 which means the supremacy of man's associated 
 life over his individual one, it makes my private 
 righteousness, or that which inwardly relates me 
 to God, utterly posterior to, and dependent upon, 
 my public righteousness, or that which relates me 
 to my fellow-man. How is it possible, therefore, 
 that its practical effect should be otherwise than 
 educative, — educative, too, in the very profoundest 
 manner, that is, out of all evil into all good ? Its 
 direct influence is to modify or enlarge my private 
 conscience, the consciousness I have of myself as a 
 moral being, a being independent of my kind and 
 capable of all manner of arrogant presumptuous 
 private hope toward God, into a public conscience, 
 into a consciousness of myself as above all things 
 a social being most intimately and indissolubly one 
 with my kind, and incapable therefore of any 
 blessing which they do not legitimately share. It 
 laughs at the pretensions of any person however 
 reputable, and of any institution however vener- 
 able, to claim an absolute divine sanctity, — that 
 is, a sanctity irrespective of his or its unaftected 
 human worth ; and it gradually so inflames the mind 
 with its own august spiritual meaning, so quickens 
 it with its own vivid and palpitating divine sub- 
 stance, that the conscience which is governed by it 
 of necessity finds itself regenerating, finds itself 
 
24 
 
 expanding from a petty drivelling and squeaking 
 witness of one's own righteousness, into the clear 
 and ringing and melodious testimony of God's sole 
 righteousness in universal man. 
 
 The European priest and king were at best only 
 theoretically perfect, both alike having always been 
 actually below the spirit of their great office. Their 
 office was purely ministerial and typical, while they 
 themselves had always the stupidity to regard it 
 as magisterial and final, as constituting in fact its 
 own end. The office of the Christian priesthood 
 has always been to typify the spotless inward pu- 
 rity, the office of the Christian royalty to typify 
 the boundless outward power, which, by virtue of 
 the Incarnation, or of God's personal indwelling in 
 human nature, shall one day characterize universal 
 man. Every man's heart and mind, by reason of 
 their infinite source, insatiably crave, the one that 
 perfect righteousness which is peace towards God, 
 the other that perfect knowledge which is com- 
 mand over Nature. And the priest and the king 
 have existed only to authenticate this insatiate 
 longing, and formally prefigure its eventual exact 
 fulfilment. European culture accordingly was estab- 
 lished upon this typical and transitory basis of 
 Church and State, the one representing the infi- 
 nite Divine righteousness which is incarnated in 
 universal man ; the other the infinite Divine power 
 which is engendered of such righteousness.''' But 
 no actual churchman and no actual statesman ever 
 
 * See Appendix B. 
 
25 
 
 grasped the grand humanitary prophecy of his 
 office. Each supposed his office to be absolutely, 
 not representatively, sacred ; supposed it to be valid 
 in itself, and not solely for its uses to the social 
 development of the race. The priest claimed for 
 the Church an absolute divine sanctity, a sanctity 
 irrespective of the education it ministered to the 
 popular heart ; and the king claimed for the State 
 an absolute divine authority, an authority unde- 
 rived from the elevation it afforded to the popular 
 thought : so that the sum of European culture in a 
 religious way has scarcely amounted to anything 
 more than a practical desecration of the priestly 
 office, or a secularizing of the Church by a diffu- 
 sion of the priestly prerogative among the laity ; 
 as the sum of its political progress has consisted 
 in limiting the royal prerogative, or democratizing 
 the government, by diffusing it among the people. 
 In short, Protestantism and constitutional liberty 
 are the topmost waves of European progress, the 
 bound beyond which European thought cannot le- 
 gitimately go, — the one denying the Church as an 
 absolute Divine substance, the other denying the 
 State as an absolute Divine form. No overt aim is 
 there practised towards a positive realization of the 
 idea embodied in our institutions, which is that of a 
 perfect human society or fellowship, in which every 
 member shall be alike sacred before God and alike 
 privileged before man. The ingrained inveterate 
 Pharisaism of the English mind is so frankly obtuse 
 to the conception of a Divine or universal righteous- 
 
26 
 
 nfess on the earth, and the complacent Sadduceeism 
 of Continental thought begets such an indifference 
 to that great expectation, that one can see no hope 
 for Europe socially but in the absorption of her 
 effete nationalities by a new Northern invasion, and 
 the consequent infusion of a ruddier blood into the 
 veins of her languid populations. 
 
 But however this may be, we in this hemi- 
 sphere, at all events, have no European j)roblems 
 to solve, and are not called upon in any manner to 
 repeat the European experience. We inherit the so- 
 lution which Europe has already given to her own 
 peculiar problems, and start upon our distinctive 
 career from the basis of her most approved expe- 
 rience. Europe has made religion an affair of the 
 laity as much as of the clergy ; government, an 
 affair of the people as much as of the aristocracy. 
 ' We inherit her ripest culture in both of these farticulars. 
 We inherit Protestantism and constitutional liber- 
 ty ; but there is this vast difference between us and 
 them, loe begin tvhere they leave off. Like all heirs, we 
 enter upon a full fruition of the estate which it 
 cost them their best blood to found and mature. 
 Thus Protestantism is not to us the bright expan- 
 sive heaven to which all thdr religious aspiration 
 ascends. It is rather the solid, compact, somewhat 
 dingy and disagreeable earth upon which our 
 feet are planted, only in order to survey entirely 
 new and infinitely more inviting heavens. And 
 constitutional liberty is not the welcome haven to 
 us it has ever been to them, is not to us the same 
 
27 
 
 broad protective anchorage to which, over weary 
 wastes of ocean and through alternate sickening 
 calm and driving tempest, their political bark has 
 been always steering. It is, on the contrary, our 
 port of departure, whence with swelling sails we 
 confidently voyage forth to tempt unknown seas, 
 and lay open lands as yet untrodden by human 
 feet. Protestantism vacates the priestly pretension, 
 by turning religion into an affair of the congrega- 
 tion. We applaud this, but go further, in mak- 
 ing religion an affair of the individual conscience 
 exclusively, with which neither priest nor congre- 
 gation has the least right to intermeddle. So con- 
 stitutional liberty, which is the European ideal of 
 liberty, vacates the divine right of kings, by com- 
 plicating the royal power with numerous cunning 
 constitutional checks and balances. But the liber- 
 ty we assert, or which constitutes our ideal, does 
 not flow from any man-made constitution under 
 heaven, but is one on the contrary which all such 
 constitutions are bound under fatal penalties sim- 
 ply and servilely to reflect, being the liberty which 
 is identical with the God-made constitution of the 
 human mind itself, and which consists in the in- 
 alienable right of every man to believe according 
 to the unbribed inspiration of his own heart, and 
 to act according to the unperverted dictates of his 
 own understanding. In short, they affirm the in- 
 alienable sanctity and freedom of the nation as 
 against other nations ; we, the inalienable sanctity 
 and freedom of the subject as against the nation. 
 
28 
 
 They say that every nation is sacred by virtue of 
 its nationahty, or has an inviolable title to the 
 respect and homage of all other nations. We say 
 that every man is similarly sacred by virtue of his 
 humanity, and has an inviolable title to the love 
 and respect of all other men. Thus they truly 
 assert the Divine Incarnation in humanity ; but 
 they limit it to the public sphere of life, to the 
 national will and the national intelligence. We 
 do this, but we do much more also, for we prac- 
 tically ratify the Incarnation as a private no less 
 than a public truth, as sanctifying the individual 
 life indeed far more profoundly than the common 
 one. They laugh at us because we set the pulpit 
 to the tune of the streets, and expect our gover- 
 nors to reflect the wisdom of the farm-yard and 
 the factory. But this is because they do not know 
 that we, unlike themselves, are without ecclesias- 
 tical and political conscience, our very Church and 
 State being themselves exclusively human and so- 
 cial. We are no mere civil polity, designed, like 
 those of the Old World, to lead men out of bar- 
 barism into civilization. On the contrary, we find 
 them citizens, and out of citizens aspire to make 
 them men. We are at bottom nothing more and 
 nothing less than a broad human society or broth- 
 erhood, of which every man is in full membership 
 by right of manhood alone ; and what we seek to 
 do is to turn our nominal Church and State into 
 the unlimited service of this society. In fact, we 
 declare the childhood of the race forever fairly past, 
 
29 
 
 and its manhood at least entered upon. We deny 
 the abihtj of any church, Cathohc or Protestant, 
 to sanctify any human being, or even enhance the 
 sanctity he derives from his creative source. We 
 deny the abihty of any government, arbitrary or 
 constitutional, to enfranchise the human mind, or 
 even enhance the freedom which inheres in its 
 God-given constitution. We maintain, on the con- 
 trary, that the Church can only and at best de- 
 velop the righteousness which every man derives 
 in infinite measure from God ; and that the State 
 can only and at best promote the freedom which 
 Divinely inheres in his very form as man : so 
 leaving every man's religion to the sole inspiration 
 of the Divine Good in his own heart, every man's 
 freedom to the sole arbitrament of the Divine 
 Truth in his own understanding. In short, we 
 practically affirm the literal verity of the Divine 
 Incarnation in every form of human nature, the 
 unlimited indwelling of the infinite Godhead in 
 every man of woman born ; so turning every man 
 by the sheer pith of his manhood into mitred 
 priest and crowned king, or avouching ourselves 
 finally to our own consciousness and the world's 
 willing recognition as a faultless human society, 
 instinct with God's unspeakable delight and appro- 
 bation.* 
 
 Such, my friends, I conceive to be our undeniable 
 inward siornificance as a nation. Such the bright 
 consummate flower of manhood, which is spiritually 
 
 * See Appendix C 
 
30 
 
 disengaging itself from the coarse obscuring husks 
 of our literal Democracy, consisting in the gradual 
 but complete subjugation of the selfish instinct in 
 our bosoms to the service of the social instinct. 
 Such is the great and righteous temper of mind 
 to which we are Divinely begotten ; such the pa- 
 ternal animating spirit that shapes our constitu- 
 tional polity, that originally gave us birth as a na- 
 tion, and that even now, in this day of seeming 
 adversity, gives us a conscience of rectitude and 
 invincible might which is itself incomparably richer 
 than all prosperity. It is idle to talk, — as silly 
 people, however, will talk, as all people will talk 
 whose gross grovelling hearts go back to the flesh-pots 
 of Egypt, when they eat bread to the full, — it is idle to 
 talk of our political troubles as springing up out 
 of the ground, as having no graver origin than 
 party fanaticism or folly. These troubles, on the 
 contrary, are the inevitable fruit of our very best 
 growth, the sure harbingers, I am persuaded, of 
 that rising Sun of Righteousness whose beams shall 
 never again know eclipse. They are merely an 
 evidence, on a larger scale and in a public sphere, 
 of the discord which every righteous man perceives 
 at some time or other to exist between his essen- 
 tial human spirit and his perishable animal flesh. 
 For every nation is in human form, is in foct but an 
 aggregate or composite form of manhood, greatly 
 grander and more complex than the simple forms 
 of which it is made up, but having precisely the 
 same intense unity within itself, and claiming, like 
 
31 
 
 each of them, a quickening controUing spirit, and 
 an obedient servile body. This animating control- 
 hng spirit of our national polity, like that of our 
 own private souls, is Divine, comes from God ex- 
 clusively, and is only revealed never exhausted, 
 only embodied or empowered never belittled or 
 enfeebled, by the literal symbols in which human 
 wisdom contrives to house it. That part of the 
 letter of our Constitution which best reveals the 
 majestic human spirit that animates our polity is 
 of course its preamble. But the real divinity of 
 the nation, its vital imperishable holiness, resides 
 not in any dead parchment, but only in the right- 
 eous unselfish lives of those who see in any con- 
 stitution but the luminous letter of their inward 
 spiritual faith, but the visible altar of their invisible 
 worship, and rally around it therefore w^ith the 
 joyous unshrinking devotion not of slaves but of 
 men. 
 
 Now, such being the undoubted spirit of our 
 polity, what taint was there in its material consti- 
 tution, in our literal maternal inheritance, to affront 
 this righteous paternal spirit and balk its rich prom- 
 ise, by turning us its children from an erect sincere 
 hopeful and loving brotherhood of men intent upon 
 universal aims, into a herd of greedy luxurious 
 swine, into a band of unscrupulous political adven- 
 turers and sharpers, the stink of whose corruption 
 pervades the blue spaces of ocean, penetrates Eu- 
 rope, and sickens every struggling nascent human 
 hope with despair? 
 
32 
 
 The answer leaps at the ears ; it is Slavery, and 
 Slavery only. This is the poison which lurked al- 
 most harmless at first in our body politic, and to 
 which its rio;hteous soul is an utter stransrer : this 
 is the curse we inherited from the maternal Eng- 
 lish Eve out of whose somewhat loose lascivious 
 lap we sprung. But of late years the poison has 
 grown so rank and pervasive, making its citadel, 
 indeed, the very heart of the commonwealth, or 
 those judicial and legislative chambers whence all 
 the tides of its activity proceed, that each succes- 
 sive political administration of the .country j^roves 
 more recreant to humanity than its predecessor, 
 until at last we find shameless God-forsaken men, 
 holding high place in the government, become so 
 rabid with its virus as to mistake its slimy purulent 
 ooze for the ruddy tide of life, and commend its 
 foul and fetid miasm to us as the fragrant breath 
 of assured health. It is easy enough to falsify the 
 divinity which is shaping our constitutional action, 
 wherever a will exists to do so. Men whose most 
 cherished treasure can be buttoned up in their 
 breeches pocket, and whose heart, of course, is with 
 their treasure, are doubtless panting to convince 
 the country that we have already done enough 
 for honor, and the sooner a sham peace is hurried 
 up the better. It only needs a wily wolf of this 
 sort to endue himself here and there in sheep's 
 clothing, and bleat forth a cunning pathetic lament 
 over the causeless misfortunes which have befallen 
 our bread-and-butter interests, to see dozens of 
 
33 
 
 stupid sheep taking up in their turn the sneaking 
 hypocritical bleat, and prej)aring their innocent 
 fleece for his dishonest remorseless shears. The 
 friends of Mammon, are numerous in every commu- 
 nity ; but, blessed be God, they nowhere rule in the 
 long run. They are numerous enough to give an 
 odious flavor to the broth; but they never consti- 
 tute its body. It is impossible that we should err 
 in this great crisis of our destiny, a crisis to which 
 that of our national birth or independence yields 
 in dignity and importance, as much as body yields 
 to soul, flesh to spirit, childhood to manhood. For 
 this is the exact crisis we are in ; the transition 
 from youth to manhood, from appearance to reality, 
 from passing shadow to deathless substance. Every 
 man and every nation of men encounters some- 
 where in its progress a critical hour, big with all 
 its future fate; and woe be to the man, woe be 
 to the nation, who believes that this sacred re- 
 sponsibility can be trifled with. To every man- 
 and to every nation it means eternal life or eter- 
 nal death ; eternal liberty or eternal law ; the 
 heaven of free spontaneous order, or the hell of 
 enforced prudential obedience. There is no man 
 who hears me who does not know somethinsr of 
 
 o 
 
 this bitter sweat and agony ; whose petty trivial 
 cares have not been dignified and exalted by some 
 glimpse of this hidden inward fight ; who has not 
 at times heard the still small voice of truth on 
 the one hand counselling him to do the right 
 thing though ruin yawn upon his hopes, — coun- 
 
 5 
 
34 
 
 selling him to force himself to do the honest thing 
 though it cost him tears of blood, — and the earth- 
 quake voice of hell on the other, or the fiery 
 breath of passion infuriated by long starvation, 
 doing its best to drown and devour it. Our na- 
 tional life, believe me, is at that exact pass in 
 this awful moment, and nowhere else. It is the 
 hour of our endless rise into all beautiful human 
 proportions, into all celestial vigor and beatitude, 
 or of our endless decline into all infernality and 
 uncleanness, and into the inevitable torments which 
 alone discipline such uncleanness. And we must 
 not hesitate for a moment to fight it manfully 
 out to its smiling blissful end, feeling that it is 
 not our own battle alone, that we are not fight- 
 ing for our own country only, for our own altars 
 and firesides as men have fought hitherto, but for 
 the altars and firesides of universal man, for the 
 ineradicable riorhts of human nature itself Let 
 bloated European aristocracies rejoice in our calam- 
 ities ; let the mutton-headed hereditary legislators 
 of Eno:land raise a shout of insult and exultation 
 over our anticipated downfall \ the honest, unso- 
 phisticated masses everywhere will do us justice, 
 for they will soon see, spite of all efforts to blind 
 them, that we occupy in this supreme moment no 
 petty Thermopylae guarding some paltry Greece, 
 but the broad majestic pass that commands the 
 deathless wealth and worth of human nature itself, 
 the ThermopyliB of the human mind ; they will 
 soon see, in fact, that our flags are waving, our 
 
35 
 
 trumpets sounding, our cannon showering their 
 deathful hail, not merely to avenge men's out- 
 raged political faith and honor, but to vindicate 
 the inviolable sanctity of the human form itself, 
 which for the first time in history is Divinely 
 bound up with that faith and honor. 
 
 This is the exact truth of the case. The political 
 tumble-down we have met with is no accident, 
 as unprincipled politicians would represent it. It 
 is the fruit of an inevitable expansion of the human 
 mind itself, of an advancing social consciousness 
 in the race, an ever-widening sense of human unity, 
 which will no long-er be content with the old chan- 
 nels of thought, the old used-up clothes of the 
 mind, but irresistibly demands larger fields of spec- 
 ulation, freer bonds of intercourse and fellowship). 
 We have only frankly to acknowledge this great 
 truth in order to find the perturbation and anxi- 
 ety which now invade our unbelieving bosoms dis- 
 pelled ; in order to hear henceforth, in every tone 
 of the swelling turbulence that fills our borders, 
 no longer forebodings of disease, despair, and death, 
 but prophecies of the highest health, of kindling 
 hope, of exuberant righteousness, and endless feli- 
 city for every man of woman born. " I was once," 
 says an old writer, "I was once in a numerous 
 crowd of spirits, in which everything appeared at 
 sixes and sevens : they complained, saying that 
 now a total destruction was at hand, for in that 
 crowd nothing appeared in consociation, but every- 
 thing loose and confused, and this made them fear 
 
36 
 
 destruction, which they supposed also would be 
 total. But in the midst of their confusion and 
 disquiet, I perceived a soft sound, angelically sweet, 
 in which was nothing but what was orderly. The 
 angelic choirs thus present were within or at the 
 centre, and the crowd of persons to whom ap- 
 pertained what was disorderly were without or at 
 the circumference. This flowing angelic melody 
 continued a long time, and it was told me that 
 hereby was signified how the Lord rules confused 
 and disorderly things which are upon the surface, 
 namely, hy virtue of a 'pacific iwinciple in the deptJis 
 or at the centre ; ivhereby the disorderly things upon the 
 surface are reduced to order, each being restored from 
 the error of its nature!' The pacific and restorative 
 principle which in the same way underlies all our 
 political confusion and disorder, and which will 
 irresistibly shape our national life to its own right- 
 eous and orderly issues, is the rising sentiment of 
 human society or fellowshij), the grand, invincible 
 faith of man's essential unity and brotherhood. 
 The social conscience, the conscience of what is 
 due to every man as man, having the same divine 
 origin and the same divine destiny with all other 
 men, is becoming preternaturally quicTcened in our 
 bosoms, and woe betide the church, woe betide 
 the state, that ventures to say to that conscience, 
 Thus far shalt thou go, and no further ! 
 
 Slavery has this incredible audacity. Slavery, 
 which is the only institution of our European in- 
 heritance we have left unmodified, conh'onts and 
 
37 
 
 spits upon this rising tide of God's righteousness 
 in the soul of man. Slavery boldly denies what 
 all our specific culture affirms, namely, the invio- 
 lable sanctity of human affection in every form, 
 the inviolable freedom of human thought in every 
 direction. The cultivated intelligence of the race 
 abhors the claim of any human being to possess 
 an aUolute property in any other being, that is, a 
 property unvivified by the other's unforced, spon- 
 taneous gift. Slavery affirms this diabohc preten- 
 sion, — affirms the unqualified title of the master to 
 outrage, if need be, the sacredest instincts of nat- 
 ural affection in the slave, and to stifle at need 
 his feeblest intellectual expansion. Accordingly, the 
 heart of man, inspired by God and undepraved by 
 Mammon, pronounces slavery with no misgiving an 
 unmitigated infamy; and the intelligence of man, 
 thence enhghtened, declares that its empire shall 
 not be extended. We have no right to say that 
 evil shall not exist where it already does exist 
 without our privity ; but we have not only all 
 manner of right, both human and divine, to say 
 that its existence shall not be promoted by our 
 active connivance; it is our paramount wisdom as 
 men, and our paramount obligation as citizens, to 
 say so. Such, at all events, is our exact social 
 attitude with respect to slavery. Every unsophis- 
 ticated soul of man feels it to be what it actually 
 is, namely, the ultimate or most general form and 
 hence the king of all the evil pent up in human 
 nature; so that when it once disappears by the 
 
38 
 
 clear indignant refusal of the human mind any 
 longer actively to co-operate with it, all those inte- 
 rior and subtler shapes of evil which now infest 
 us, and are held together by it as the viscera of 
 the body are held together by the skin, will be 
 dissipated along with it. We know not when the 
 hour of this great salvation shall strike. We only 
 know that as God is just and sovereign it must 
 strike erelong, and that when it does strike the 
 morning stars of a richer creation than has yet 
 been seen on earth will sing together, and all the 
 sons of God in every subtlest ineffable realm of his 
 dominion shout for joy. Our government itself is 
 waking up from its long trance ; is beginning to 
 perceive that there is something sacreder than com- 
 merce on earth, — that the interests of this very 
 commerce, in fact, will best be promoted by first 
 of all recognizing that there are depths in the hu- 
 man soul, demands of immaculate righteousness and 
 assured peace, which all the pecuniary prosperity 
 . of the world can never satisfy. In short, the gov- 
 ernment is fast coming, let us hope, to a conscious- 
 ness of its distinctively social or human function, 
 by practically confessing that its supreme respon- 
 sibility is due only to man, and no longer to per- 
 sons, or infuriated sectional exactions. Of course, 
 in pursuing this career, it will become gradually 
 converted from the mere tool it has hitherto been 
 for adroit political knaves to do what they please 
 with, into a grandly social force, reflecting every 
 honest human want, fulfilling every upright human 
 
39 
 
 aspiration. What matters it, then, if we forfeit the 
 empty poHtical prestige we have hitherto enjoyed 
 with European statesmen ? Let us only go on overt- 
 ly to inaugurate that promised perfect society on 
 earth, all whose officers shall be peace, and its sole 
 exactors righteousness, by practically acknowledging 
 on all occasions the infinite Divine Good enshrined 
 in man's heart, the infinite Divine Truth enthroned 
 in his understanding, and we shall fast attain to 
 a social standing in the eyes of European peoj)les 
 which shall grandly compensate our mere political 
 disasters, and do more to modify the practice of 
 European statesmen themselves than anything else 
 we could possibly do. 
 
 In this state of things, how jealously should we 
 watch the Congress to-day assembling at Washing- 
 ton ! How clear should be the watchword we 
 telegraph to guide their deliberations! Have we 
 indeed no higher monition for our legislature than 
 old heathen Rome supplied to hers, namely, to see 
 that the RepuUic svfer no damage? The body is 
 much, but it is not the soul. The Republic is 
 much, but it is not all. It is much as a means, 
 but nothing as an end. It is much as a means 
 to human advancement, but nothing as its con- 
 summation. It is much as an onward march of 
 the race, it is nothing whatever as its final victory 
 and rest. Let us be sure that, so far as we are 
 concerned, our legislators understand this. Let 
 them know that we value the Republic so much, 
 only because we value man more; that we value 
 
40 
 
 peace, prosperity, and wealth not as ends, but as 
 means to an end, which is justice, truth, and mer- 
 cy, in which alone man's real peace, his true pros- 
 perity, and his abiding wealth reside, and which 
 will be ours only so long as we are faithful to the 
 gospel of human freedom and equality. For my 
 part, if I thought that our rulers were going to 
 betray in this agonizing hour the deathless interest 
 confided to them, — if I thought that Mr. Lincoln 
 and Mr. Seward were going at last to palter with 
 the sublime instincts of peace and righteousness 
 that elevated them to power and give them all their 
 personal prestige, by making the least conceivable 
 further concession to the obscene demon of Slavery, 
 — then I could joyfully see Mr. Lincoln and Mr. 
 Seward scourged from the sacred eminence they 
 defile, yea more, could joyfully see our boasted 
 political house itself laid low in the dust forever, 
 because in that case its stainless stars and stripes 
 w^ould have sunk from a banner of freemen into a 
 dishonored badge of the most contemptible people 
 on earth ; a people that bartered away the fairest 
 spiritual birthright any people ever yet were born 
 to, for the foulest mess of material pottage ever 
 concocted of shameless lust and triumphant fraud. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 A. — Page 10. 
 
 This able but unscrupulous paper is an involuntary and therefore 
 most reliable witness of the utter worthlessness, for all social purposes, of 
 the extremest culture of the head, which is moral culture, when weighed 
 against the slenderest culture of the heart, which alone is spiritual culture. 
 It seems to have had no more genuine mission than to show the rank and 
 festering selfishness which has eaten out the vitals of the old European 
 decency, coming now at last to the surface to corrode and consume every 
 traditional usage of humane and sympathetic literary art which has hith- 
 erto masked its presence and limited its activity. If the Saturday Eeview 
 fairly represent the scholarly animus of England, — if its flippant, trans- 
 parent Pharisaism, its puerile self-complacency, its wanton insolence, its 
 truculent arrogance, exhibited toward every form of intellectual indepen- 
 dence, — except, as in the case of John Mill, where a great reputation sanc- 
 tifies it, — and toward every the most honest suggestion of social advance, 
 fitly represent the academical consciousness of that country, — one can 
 only exclaim, Alas ! how changed fi-om its former self ! A land (in an intel- 
 lectual sense) of deserts and pits, a land of drought and the shadow of death, 
 a land no man passes through, and where no man dwells. Certainly honest 
 John Bull was never before so sophisticated,— degraded from a fat savory 
 succulent juicy beef, to a lean stringy sinewy tendinous veal, — from the 
 superb contented disdainful monarch of broad meadows and ghttering 
 streams, to the blatant and menacing and butting challenger of every in- 
 nocent scarlet rag that flutters along private lane or pubUc highway. It 
 is English middle-class manners made conscious of their own inmost snob- 
 bery, and trying to cover it up under an affectation of coarse and vulgar 
 effrontery towards superior people. 
 6 
 
42 
 
 B. — Page 24. 
 
 The State as a civil polity is wholly contingent upon the Church as 
 an ecclesiasticism. Thus, throughout European history you see the Chris- 
 tian priest uniformly consecrating the Christian king. In the earlier in- 
 fantile or Catholic centuries this beautiful ritual had some tender human 
 significance ; but it is now a senseless ceremonial. In modern Europe, 
 just as in old Judaja, the Church no longer preserves its spiritual priority 
 to the State, but has fallen contentedly behind it ; the pure feminine 
 heart of the world succumbing everywhere to the needs of its corrupt 
 lordly head. The great Napoleon, animated with the spirit and armed 
 with the prestige of the Revolution, felt so sheer a contempt for this friv- 
 olous European priesthood and its lapsed prerogative, that he did not hes- 
 itate at his coronation to snatch the coronet of the Empress Josephine from 
 the hands of the officiating priest and place it himself on her brow ; thus 
 clearly proclaiming, by a great symbolic act infinitely beyond his own be- 
 sotted thought, two things : — 1. That the veil of the temple, which had 
 hitherto shut out the people from the holy of holies, was now actually as 
 well as typically rent ; thus, that the age of types and shadows had ex- 
 pired by its own limitation, and that man stood henceforth face to face 
 with spiritual substance, with eternal realities : 2. That upon whomsoever 
 the people should confer sovereignty, they conferred sanctity as well, or 
 that in the elect of the people, as he claimed to be, priest and king, good- 
 ness and truth, right and might, should be indlssolubly blent. And 
 you now see the present Najioleon diligently finishing up what his prede- 
 cessor began, that is to say, depriving the first clergyman in Europe of 
 all right to his slenderest remaining foothold upon her soil ; so that the 
 Papacy will erelong come as near as possible to justifying the theologic 
 fiction of disembodied existences, and sink, like those curious remains of 
 the early Jiora and fauna of the earth which we treasure in museums, 
 into a mere fossil memorial to future ages of the giant size to which, in 
 the infancy of society, men's imbecility and presumption in respect to 
 Divine things had attained. 
 
 The Church with us is of course exposed to no such coarse imperial 
 insult, as the State is exposed to no such brutal revolutionarj- invasion. 
 Wliy ? Simply because our Church and State are both of them purely 
 social institutions, or have no proju^r life apart from the uses they promote 
 to the great society which maintains thorn. Our Church admits of all 
 manner of sectarian diversity ; our State is the fusion of all manner of na- 
 tional oppugnancles : because the only altar of God we recognize are the 
 
Lle/?flpy Qp. 
 
 CONGRESS 
 
 011 
 
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