Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/32

26 be superseded by the social. You cannot preserve in a modern community the domestic exclusiveness of the patriarch’s tent.

The morality of a nation, in the restricted sense of the term, is a point on which it is extremely difficult to speak with accuracy in the case of any nation. The difficulty is enhanced in the case of America, by the confusion of emigrant morality with that of the natives; the blending of which two elements renders it also peculiarly hard to read aright the statistics of crime. In a great commercial city such as New York there is sure to be plenty of vice, though the outward decency of that city, as you pass through its streets by night, strongly contrasts with the indecency of London. In no country, however, I believe, is the marriage-tie, on the whole, more reverenced or more strictly kept. Early marriage, which the circumstances of the people permit, and which appears to be almost universal, must in itself be a great safeguard against the evils of which moralists and social reformers are complaining here. Infanticide, that hideous ulcer of our society, to the existence of which we have been terribly awakened, but which we scarcely dare to probe, could hardly be very prevalent in a land where children are almost an unmixed blessing. There being no primogeniture, there are no younger sons brought up in habits of luxury, and without the means of marriage. All human virtue is comparative, and it appears that the sanitary records of the American army denote comparative virtue. Of this I feel sure, that vice which shows a bold front in the high places of society here, would shrink abashed from public opinion in the United States.

In a country where all the people have, from the rate