Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/78

72 superfluous or irrelevant remark, when that strange and fearful epilogue to the civil war in America, the Jamaica Massacre, is about, apparently, to become the subject of a party contest. Of course, though persons may be held blameless for having played their natural parts, inferences will be drawn from what has passed as to the character of institutions. Men cannot be forbidden to ask whether a nobility, which casts in its lot with slave-owners, is a nobility indeed, really transcending in nobleness the natures of ordinary men, so that the world still needs it, and ought to make great sacrifices to maintain it as a type of exalted humanity and a cynosure of honour, or whether the day is not approaching when society must let chivalry rest with the dust of the Crusaders, and take up with homely justice. Men cannot be forbidden to ask whether it is really well to let political power impose upon us spiritual guides, when the guides it imposes have, in this the most manifest conflict, as it seems to those who think as we do, between Good and Evil which has been waged in our days, almost unanimously taken the side of Evil; when they have gone up into their pulpits to preach a religion of purity and mercy, and come down from the pulpit to stand side by side with atheist sciolism in defence of Slavery and the Jamaica Massacre. Patient confidence in progress and in the future of Humanity, not impatient desire of sudden change, much less of revolution, is the sentiment which this great victory ought to inspire; but we have had an experience which will be remembered in the day when great political issues are tried, and when the nation wavers between its hopes of the future and its fear of breaking with the consecrated institutions of the past. The conduct of these classes, however, I repeat, was natural,