Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/57

Rh endure this, notoriously the severest test which can be applied to the character of a nation? The answer to this question is as important as the actual issue of the war.

There was to be an anarchy. So said that wisdom which is wise by precedents, and which, in choosing its precedents, is guided by its passions. Never, through the whole of the conflict—fiercely as the passions of parties were inflamed at the North—was public order seriously disturbed, except by the savage Irish at New York; and on that occasion it was quickly seen that there was force enough upon the side of order, and that the belief in the omnipotence of the New York mob, however time-honoured, was not true. I witnessed myself the last Presidential election. No occasion could be imagined more trying to the self control of the people. I said at the time, and I repeat now, that the day passed off like an English Sabbath. There was not, I believe, in all the States, as much disturbance as, at the previous general election in England, there had been in the rotten borough of Calne. At New York only was there any apprehension even of a breach of the peace: and there again it was the Irish only that gave occasion for the fear. Some troops were brought into the harbour; but I believe they were not landed: certainly they were not called upon to act. The minority, even in the places where it was at once weakest and most odious, was allowed to express its sentiments on the the platform and through the press, to hold its party meetings, to celebrate its torchlight processions, to hang its banners across the public way unmolested and unrebuked. I saw friendly greetings pass between men of opposite parties, as they went to the