Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/299

Rh a qualified form, but I renewed it in the December following in an address that I delivered before the Emancipation League. This address gave rise to similar or even to severer criticisms from the same classes. They were never a majority in Massachusetts, but they had sufficient power to impair the strength of the State, and in 1862 under the style of the People’s Party, they endangered the election of Governor Andrew.

These criticisms made no impression upon me, for my confidence was unbounded that emancipation was inevitable and I was willing to wait for an improved public opinion.

I quote a portion of my remarks at Cambridge, which gave rise to criticism in some quarters, and provoked hostility among those whose sympathies were with the South:

“The settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth did not merely found towns or counties or colonies, or States even; they also founded a great nation, and upon the idea of its unity.

“Their colonial charters extended from sea to sea. Their origin, their language, their laws, their civilization, their ideas, and now their history, constitute us one nation. In the geological structure of this continent, Nature seems to have prepared it for the occupation of a single people. I cannot doubt, then, that continental unity is the great, the supreme law of our public life.

“A division such as is sought and demanded by those who carry on this war would do violence to our traditions, to our history, to those ideas that our people, South and North have entertained for more than two centuries, and to the laws of Nature herself. An agreement such as is desired by the discontented would only intensify our alienations, embitter the strife, and protract the war upon subordinate and insignificant issues. Separation does not settle one difficulty at present existing in the country; while it furnishes occasion, and