Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/28

22 so charitable to those in need, and so unwilling to inflict cruel punishments on the guilty, are often criminally reckless of human life in the pursuit of gain. But it is thus that human virtue finds its feet, propped by circumstance, before it learns to stand by moral force alone.

Americans are supposed to be slaves to money. It is true that many Americans are slaves to money, and are hurried by the eagerness with which they pursue it through lives of unrest into early graves. It could scarcely be otherwise when human covetousness was excited by the opening wealth of a new world. It is not wonderful that the looks of the throng should be keener, and their steps more hurried in the mart of New York than in the mart of London. Nor is it wonderful that such immense opportunities for speculation should lead to commercial gambling, and this again to a looseness of commercial morality in certain circles—to what extent I must leave it to commercial men to say, though it cannot be to so great an extent as is often asserted, otherwise credit, and with credit trade, would cease. The evil, I believe, is at least as rife in our colonies as in the United States. But as among the merchants of Florence, in old times, so in America, the wealth which is eagerly and laboriously made is generously spent, and often on public objects. A successful trader in an aristocratic country buys a great estate, and founds a noble family: a successful trader in America founds a public institution. The great Italian republic never poured out her wealth more freely in her gallant struggles for the independence of Italy against the tyrants of Milan, than did the merchants of the North in struggling against the slave-owner for American freedom. That commerce must be mean is a feudal superstition;