Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 20.djvu/294

 288 Southern Historical Society Papers.

universal subjection, but universal emancipation is the dream. The great transition of the latter centuries is the transition from the feudal to the Federal age, and from force to compact that is, from force to freedom, which is the free dominion of the law the coercion of ideas instead of the coercion of arms. To convince is to conquer. The flower of hope, which springs eternally, is the hope to change the law of power into the power of law ; and in this strife of opposites the first-born son of mediation is Federal Union ; the union of choice and affinity in place of constraint; the union of force in place of the union by force. As the tie is willing it is real ; as it is real it is strong. It is through federation, not through centralization, that the true synthesis of the people comes.

A FEDERATION OF THE WORLD.

If the day ever comes " when the war-drum shall throb no longer " it will be ushered in, not by the empire, not by the imperial consoli- dation, but by "the federation of the world." The mighty import of this heaving and throbbing time is that by its constitutions, re- arrangements and resources, by the grace of its swift light and ready movement, for man's coerced and driven obedience, there may now be inaugurated his spontaneous energies in willing union. It was for the exalted idea of self governed freedom, which Virginia had been foremost to proclaim s that she now took up arms and suffered mar- tyrdom.

But if a hostile criticism urge, " Your own involuntary servitude at home was at war with all this fine preachment of willing union," the answer is :

1. It was the condition with which you deliberately made your bargain and received your redundant consideration, which was and still is redundantly retained.

2. The institution of slavery was fastened upon us by others, and very largely by those who seized it as a pretext for war against us. It is not for them to revile us for not solving in a day the tremendous problem which, on a scale so diminutive, consumed more than half a century of their own time. Slavery was the flail in their hand where- with to beat down freedom. It was constitutional government and the rights of the States; it was the reality of a Federal Union, which they sought " to put in course of ultimate extinction."

They were guilty of what Jefferson called " treason against human hope." Slavery was our mode of dealing with a problem, for whose