Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/72

66 human nature. If this conflict could be painted to the life, in all its details, the picture would no doubt teem, even on the Federal side, with things shocking and vile: with violence, rapine, depravity, and corruption. But it may truly be said that taken as a whole, and compared with other civil wars, it has displayed the growing ascendancy of influences which will at last banish all civil war, and all war, from the earth.

The power put forth by the American Commonwealth has secured another object most valuable to humanity. The Monroe doctrine, properly understood, and as Canning, who was really its first propounder, understood it, means not the aggrandisement of the United States, but the independence of America. It means that the Powers of the Past may work their will in their own Europe for a season; but that they shall not be allowed to mar the hopes of man in the New World. The American Republic is not propagandist. Neither by violence nor by intrigue does it threaten any established government with subversion. Its citizens indeed are almost too regardless of the fate of the old nations, and too much inclined to treat freedom as a privilege of their own, not as the heritage of mankind. In this they are true to the example of their race which, in its revolutions, has always been content with asserting English rights. But they are warranted in defending, they are even bound to the extent of their power to defend, from the intrusion of propagandist despotism and aristocracy a hemisphere destined for other things. French Imperialism, which is as little capable of enduring the reproachful existence of freedom as Slavery was, took advantage of the distress of the American Republic to propagate itself, with its ecclesiastical and social