Time is ample. Let the victors come after us. Not for
nothing does evil play its part among us. Judging from the main
portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in
jeopardy, peace walks amid hourly pitfalls, and of slavery, misery,
meanness, the craft of tyrants and the credulity of the populace, in
some of their protean forms, no voice can at any time say, They are
not. The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out--but soon and
certain the lowering darkness falls again, as if to last forever. Yet
is there an immortal courage and prophecy in every sane soul that
cannot, must not, under any circumstances, capitulate. _Vive_, the
attack--the perennial assault! _Vive_, the unpopular cause--the spirit
that audaciously aims--the never-abandon'd efforts, pursued the same
amid opposing proofs and precedents.
Once, before the war, (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood
has come!) I, too, was fill'd with doubt and gloom. A foreigner, an
acute and good man, had impressively said to me, that day--putting in
form, indeed, my own observations: "I have travel'd much in the United
States, and watch'd their politicians, and listen'd to the speeches
of the candidates, and read the journals, and gone into the public
houses, and heard the unguarded talk of men. And I have found your
vaunted America honeycomb'd from top to toe with infidelism, even to
itself and its own programme. I have mark'd the brazen hell-faces
of secession and slavery gazing defiantly from all the windows and
doorways.
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