Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/77

Rh scarcely have lead to a corresponding conflict of parties in this country. Being a struggle for great principles and objects most vital to humanity, it did lead to such a conflict. And that conflict gave birth to the Society the existence of which terminates to-day. We will not dwell long on this part of our theme. Among the papers of Mr. Lincoln was found, I am told, one which showed that he intended, as a part of his policy of reconstruction, to destroy all the trophies and monuments of the civil war. The parts of men have for the most part been cast for them by antecedent circumstances; and all, except minds of remarkable independence, must play their allotted part. That the territorial aristocracy of this country and the clergy of the Established Church should vehemently sympathise, even with the Slave Power, against a community which though, as I have said, not propagandist, was still the chief embodiment and the hope of the principles most opposed to their own, was natural; and we ought rather to dwell with gratitude on the exceptions, than to blame those who obeyed the prevailing impulse, and followed the general rule. Although, could these friends of order and religion but have seen it, all order, all religion, all conservatism even, in the only rational and moral sense of the word, were on the side of those who were defending against violence the established constitution and the established principles of the United States. Conservatives must not think that they can sanction violence till the law is settled in their own favour, and thenceforth permit it no more. They will find that violence, once let in, subverts all law, and that the party which, in the long run, has most reason to dread the inroads of physical force is that which, in the long run, has not physical force upon its side. This is no