Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/90

72 1. To preserve slavery unharmed, without so much as the smell of fire upon its garments, when it shall emerge from the ordeal of war.

2. To gratuitously establish slavery forever, by solemn and unchanging guarantees.

3. To leave slavery to perish slowly and ingloriously, as it must when unprotected.

4. To cripple and destroy slavery by a long guerrilla warfare against its special manifestations.

5. To kill slavery at a blow, by right of an imperious and undoubted military necessity.

6. To exterminate slavery without compromise or weighing of consequences, because it is a gross moral wrong.

These are a few of the many platforms upon which husbands, brothers and sons are fighting to-day. No two opposing armies ever wearied heaven with asking more impossible cross-purposes than does this fraternal, Union army of ours. The bread and fish of these, are stones and scorpions to those. We are a practical people, but we are fighting for practical paradoxes. Do we expect any massive concentration of results? Our wavering, anaconda system of warfare is typical of our moral status as a people. It is the spontaneous and legitimate exponent of our aims and motives. Many or decisive victories I despair of, till we are better educated in the early lesson of the fathers. But from the President—God bless him that he seems to be more teachable than many others—down to the youngest drummer-boy of the army, the severe discipline of this war is schooling us into a better appreciation of our heritage as a peculiar people.

All governments, said the fathers, are subordinate to the people, not the people to their governments. The distinct enunciation of that principle was the net result of the war of the Revolution. Born of the long-suffering and anguish of bleeding nations, its worth is yet incomparably greater than the cost, for it is the sublimest principle which has ever entered into the governmental relations of men. It must turn and overturn till, as rightful sovereign it is placed securely upon the throne of all nations, for, from the inherent nature of things, it is destined to become the mightiest revolutionist of the ages. The reinstating of that principle in the chair of our Republic will be the net result of this war of the Rebellion!

When the statesmen of '76 sought to embody this principle in the complicated machinery of a vast government, there they partially failed—there they designedly failed. The minority seceded from it in that day as in this, and then they compromised. The antagonism which they engrafted on the young Republic assuming, as it does, that power, not humanity, is statute-maker, could not be more diametrically opposed to the axiom which asserts, that humanity, not power, is lawful arbiter of its own rights. The man, unwashed, unmended, unlearned, is yet a safer judge of his own interests, than is all the rank, the wealth, or the wisdom of men or angels. Thomas Simms is a better witness as to his own need of freedom than the combined wisdom of all the Boston lawyers, judges, and statesmen. We can keep ice and fire upon the