Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/241

Rh noble and the tender, who embrace the young generation in order to elevate them, and bring them nearer to the father of love and perfection? Was it not surrounded by fatherless and motherless children, who looked up to your Majesty as to a mother, that I first saw your Majesty, that Christmas-eve, when the Christmas candles burned in the northern pine, for the joy of the children, and in honour of the heavenly friend of childhood! And have not I, more than once, heard your Majesty express the wish and the hope for “a community on earth in which all the members should have equal opportunity for the attainment of virtue, knowledge, a life of activity and prosperity: a community in which goodness and capacity should constitute the highest aristocracy, and in which the highest rank should depend upon the highest human worth?”

And, however far the United States of America may be from having attained to this ideal of social life, still it cannot be denied that it is at this that they are aiming, towards this to which they are daily more and more advancing, more perhaps than any other nation on the earth. This refers especially to the Northern and the Free States of the Union, which are peopled principally by descendants of the oldest Pilgrims, and whence the Quaker State has everywhere sent abroad its messengers of “the inward light,” of freedom, peace, and universal brotherhood. These Northern States are founded on enthusiasm for religion and human rights. And upon this foundation have they grown great and powerful, and still grow day by day, extending their dominion more and more.

The Southern States acknowledge, it is true, the same principles of freedom, human rights, and human well-being as their aim also; but they bear a fetter which impedes their progress on the path of human and social development, and which they in part will not, and in part cannot, now throw off, namely, the institution of slavery. They have bound the negro as a slave, and the negro-slave