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and shot ministers of the Gospel of the Golden Rule, and set a price on Channing's head; we thought the scholar's gown a shield, but they drove away, with terrible threats, every scholar who would not prostitute his learning to the enslavement of mankind; we supposed the Senate was an ark of safety, but they came in and half slew the foremost of American scholars and philanthropists on the floor of the Senate.

Yet all this did not open our eyes. Then they tried their hand on a higher thing, and resolved to drown the nation herself in the blood of her freedom-loving citizens. Four years ago last Friday they opened war, and for four years they have waged a conffict that has not been so much a war as a Saturnalia of all crimes within the record of man. They knew that if they would destroy this great republic they must wade through oceans of blood, and do such deeds, accursed of God and man, as would astonish mankind; but they did not hold back.

Oh, what things they have done, my friends, during these years! They have caused to be slain in battle, or to be wounded, or to die of sickness, or to be prostrated by anxiety and excitement, and the terrible bewilderment of revolution, not less than a million human beings. They have caused to be destroyed enough property to educate every child on the globe into a Christian man or woman. They have killed men in every variety of ways. When the Union men and women and children of the South shall stand up in evidence against these enemies, no one of us will have the heart to read their story. They have redoubled their cruelty to their slaves, and forced them, at the bayonet's point, to work, yea, to fight, for their own enslavement. They have slaughtered women, murdered little children, butchered prisoners of war; they have deliberately starved to death thousands of white men taken captive in fair battle; they have insulted the remains of our slain. They mutilated the dead body of Dahlgren, and their best man, Robert Lee, sent to the father of the boy, as an excuse for the bloody deed, a pretended document of most barbaric import, said to have been found upon him, but deliberately forged and photographed, and then they hid his body for a whole year. They have enrolled bands of assassins, to steal upon border villages, five hundred miles from the seat of war, and shoot our citizens at mid-day. They have lighted up every ocean with the glare of our unarmed merchant ships. They have tried to burn our great cities, and involve thousands

of every age and sex in wholesale destruction. Under the name of guerrilla operations, legalized by their sham government, they have disorganized human society itself over vast regions of our territory, and rendered life a daily peril and curse not fifty miles from our own doors. Sons murdering fathers, and brothers their brothers, and neighbors shedding one another's blood, even women betraying men to the assassin; all these things have become so common that we think of them as every day affairs.

But in spite of all this they did not prosper. Their cause waxed weaker as their wrath increased. The more freemen they killed the more men became freemen. They slaughtered our soldiers, but our ranks filled up and stood more firmly. They murdered Union men, but the Union grew, watered by their blood. They starved their prisoners, but our cause waxed full and mighty. Stung to very madness, they solemnly resolved at last that their black slaves should be made soldiers, to gain their unholy ends; and before the ink was dry on that godless statute, their sham President and their sham Congress, their General-inChief and his powerful army, had disappeared by one blow of divine justice, so that they shall no more be known as a power on the earth, while the negro slave marched in, a conqueror and a freeman, under the Union, and occupied Richmond and Charleston, the Sodom and Gomorroh of their land of blood!

And then we thought the end of wrath had come. We said: these men must now see that there is no longer any hope in war, they know their despotism is dead forever; will they not come in and be our brethren once more? I have, during the last two weeks, travelled through seven free States, and in all their chief cities seen great crowds of people rejoicing over our victories, and the grandest thing I saw was the magnanimity of the people towards these, their mortal foes. Oh, if this Southern aristocracy, this prodigal son of the nation, this wanderer from the flock, would now come back to us, not in abject humiliation, but repentant, willing to be forgiven, willing to unite with us in building up the Republic, how gladly would this people, on its last great day of rejoicing, have gone out, like the Father, and taken the stricken one in to the great feast of love to God and man!

But no, it was not so to be. Wicked men upon earth always go on to the last result, and that result is to slay their truest

friends, and quench their blind rage in the blood of the noblest who would die to save them.

There were two men in these United States, who were, under Providence, the most noted representatives of Human Liberty in all the land. The elder of the two was the greatest philosophic statesman that this or any republic has produced-a man whose vast mind beheld the regular onward march of Liberty from age to age, and who, in the midst of the apparent success of tyranny always percieved the coming deliverance of man. For forty years has this great and good man, gentle as a woman, genial as a little child, forgiving and kind and magnanimous to a fault, calmly uttered, in words that never purposely wounded a human being, or uttered one thought of private malignity or personal spite, the lofty prophecy, of the passing away of the despotism of the land. Accused of the worst motives and frailties, and intrigues, his real power has been in his wondrous glance over the field of our national life, so that like a watchman from a lofty tower, he has told off the passing hours of slavery, and called the people to welcome the morn of freedom. He never made a public mistake that was not the weakness of a heart too benevolent to credit what his reason told him was true of the enemies of man. He trusted so much in great ideas-he saw so clearly the inevitable conquest of the wroug by the right— that he was apparently careless what special measures should be enacted, or what special offenders put to shame. He once said to me: "We talk of vengeance upon the aristocracy of the South; let us only protect Liberty in the Union, and that aristocracy will at last come to us to be kept from starvation; and we, of the free States, will be obliged to nurse the South back to life like a sick child."

Among all the statesmen of the world, there was no man who, last Friday at sundown was at once so true a friend to the South, so true a friend to Union and Liberty, so firm a believer in the progress of man, so willing and eager to receive every repentant enemy of the Republic, and rejoice over his conversion, as WM. HENRY SEWARD, Secretary of State. He was born in the Empire State. He came on one side, of a Welsh ancestry, and for forty years of public life has been as inflexible in what h believed the cause of Freedom as the rocks and mountains, and noble people of that land. On the other side he was of Irish lineage, and no son of that afflicted race was ever more genial,

more gracious, more winning, to friend and foe. And what American ever had a vision of the Union so lofty as his-a Union from which even her rebellious children should not always be cast out, which should lift up the lowliest to liberty, and teach the proudest monarchs on earth to rejoice in the prosperity of man?

And along with him I always saw his best-beloved son-a young man who seemed the perfect embodiment of his father's sweetness. He was so good, and simple-hearted and conscientious and gentle, that all men loved him as he walked the streets.

But there was one other in the land, greater than this statesman-because manhood is grander than genius, and silent and patient power nobler than the most gracious courtesy. ABRAHAM LINCOLN was the most faithful representative of the whole people, in public affairs, this world has yet seen. He came of a Northern Quaker paternity, and his maternity was out of the common people of old Virginia. He had worked through every kind of experience the people knew, up to the Presidency of the Republic. He was neither quick, nor brilliant, nor demonstrative; but his broad soul touched every class and race of our strangely mingled nationality. He felt in his blood what they were feeling and thinking; he knew what they could do, and bear, and achieve. He knew every kind of American men better than they knew themselves. He loved truth, and he loved man as well. Contemporaneously with Seward he saw and declared that the republic must be all free or all slave. Like Seward, he did not agitate for freedom so fiercely as some, for he saw its mighty coming afar off, and saved his strength to organize the new Republic. Apparently by the intrigues of policy, but really by the Providence of God, he was preferred to his great associate as candidate for President. The people knew by instinct whom they could trust, and chose him. He journeyed to Washington, so unpretendingly, so carefully, saying no harsh word; full of love for all the people of his vast domain. How he has carried the people through four years of frightful war, so that the republic is now triumphant, and slavery abolished, and the class that tried to destroy us going to its own place, history will say. And oh, how compassionate, how just, how like a father he has been to these mad children of the household. Has he said one word in bitterness of them? Has he pushed one measure in wrath? Has he knowingly done one deed that should prevent

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any rebellious man from coming to him as to a father? Read over again that last address of his-so broad, so practical, so wise, so magnanimous. Who ever went through such a four years so purely, so successfully, so lovingly, as he? As he awoke last Friday morning, he could have felt that his work was done; the army and navy of the Union everywhere triumphant; the people united in their rulers; slavery wounded to death; the nation ready to start anew on her glorious career of power and freedom. Had the deadliest rebel tyrant in all America so true a friend in the whole world that day as ABRAHAM LINCOLN ?

So, here was the opportunity for this slave power to fill up the measure of its iniquity by striking at the life of the two men, of all others, who could have rescued it from its barbarity. And it did not hesitate a moment. Alas! the wretch who aimed at the father of his people did his work too well, and ABRAHAM LINCOLN has died, a blessed martyr, that his country might live! May God spare SEWARD to take one more observation of the political heavens and hells, and, in his own simple and majestic language, tell us what becomes of a power that signalizes its last occasion for repentance by the last crime of the assassination of the only men that could save it from perdition! May that blameless young man be spared to forgive the poor creature that tried to kill him because he would save his sick father's life! And now-what?

Nothing new. Only the same old thing that has been going on since the foundation of the world; all known to and approved by the Providence that never was beaten by any enemy of God

or man.

One more martyr to Human Liberty. One more great and good man exalted by bloody death to the most sacred name in this new time. Is this a mistake of Providence? We have carelessly babbled that we could not choose a great man for President; the people did not know whom to trust. God has condescended to meet and dispose of that falsehood, once and forever. Never was ruler so instinctively recognized, so generously obeyed, so completely approved in his life as ABRAHAM LINCOLN by the Freemen of this Republic. And now that his great work is done, he has fitly put on the martyr's crown. WASHINGTON was Father of his County; our country owes to him her independent life. ABRAHAM LINCOLN was the Father of the American people: first

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