it, ami which alojie, to such men, " make it life to live," tlieeie
cannot expire ; —
198 THE 13O0K OF ELOQUENCE.
"These shall resist the empire of decay,
Wlieii time is o'er anJ worlds have passed away;
Colli in tlie dust the perished heart may lie.
But that which warmed it once can never die."
CXLVIII.— LITERARY POSITION OF AMERICA.
JOSEPH STORY.
To US, Americans, nothing, indeed, can, or ought to be in-
dilFerent, that respects the cause of science and literature.
We have taken a stand among the nations of the earth, and
have successfully asserted our claim to political equality. We
possess an enviable elevation, so far as concerns the structure
of our government, our political policy, and the moral energy
of our institutions. If we are not without rivals in these
respects, we are hardly behind any, even in the general esti-
mate of foreign nations themselves. But our claims are far
more extensive. We assert an equality of voice and vote in
the republic of letters, and assume for ourselves the right to
decide on the merits of others, as well as to vindicate our
own. These are lofty pretensions, which are never conceded
without proofs, and are severely scrutinized, and slowly ad-
mitted by the grave judges in the tribunal of letters. We
have not placed ourselves as humble aspirants, seeking our
way to higher rewards under the guardianship of experienced
guides. We ask admission into the temple of fame, a^ joint
heirs of the inheritance, capable in the manhood of our
strength of maintaining our title. We contend for prizes
with nations whose intellectual glory has received the homage
of centuries. France, Italy, Germany, England, can point to
the past for monuments of their genius and skill, and to the
present with the undismayed confidence of veterans. It is
not for us to retire from the ground which we have chosen to
occupy, nor to shut our eyes against the difficulties of main-
taining it. It is not by a few vain boasts, or vainer self-com-
placency, or rash daring, that we are to win our way to the
first literary distinction. We must do as others have done
before us. We must serve in the hard school of discipline ;
we must invigorate our powers by the studies of other times.
We must guide our footsteps by those stars which have shone,
and still continue to shine, with inextinguisliable light in the
â– WHEN WAR SHAIL BE NO MORE. 199
firmament of learning. Nor have we any reason for de-
spondencj'. There is that in American character which has
never yet been found unequal to its purpose. There is that
in American enterprise, which shrinks not, and faints not,
and fails not in its labors. We may say with honest pride,
" Man 19 the nobler growth our realms supply,
, And souls are ripened in our northern sky."
We may not then shrink from a rigorous examination of
our own deficiencies in science and literature. If we have
but a just sense of our wants, we have gaiued half the vic-
tory. If we but face our ditficulties, they will fly before us.
We have solid claims upon the atlectiou and respect of man-
kind. Let us not jeopard thein by a false shame, or an
ostentatious pride.
CXLIX.— WHEN WAR SHALL BE NO MORE.
ANONYMOUS.
Death shall hereafter work alone and single-handed, un-
aided by his most terrible auxiliary The world shall repose
in cpiiet. Far ^\of/^^ the vista of futui'ily the tribes of human
kind are seen miuglinjr in fraternal harmony, wondering and
shuddering as they read of fonner brutality, and exulting at
their own more fortunate lot. They turn their grateful eyes
upon us. Their countenances are not suffused with tears,
nor streaked with kindred blood. We hear their voices ;
they are not swelling with tones of general wailing and de-
ejiair. We look at their smiling fields, undevaslaled by the
band of rapine ; they are waving with yellow harvests, or
loaded with golden fruits ; and their sunny pastures are filled
with quiet herds, which have never known the wanton rav-
age of war. We turn to the peaceful homes where our in-
fancy has been cradled ; they stand undespciiled by the hand
o!' the de.stroyer. The semes where we indulged our cliildish
sports have never been prol'aiied by hostile feet ; and the tall
groves, where we performed our feats of school-boy dexterity,
have never b(»en desecrated to olttain tlie im[)li'meiits of hu-
man deslnictioii. Tbeii our thoughts extend and I'lubrace
the land of our birth, the institutions and laws we so much
200 THE BOOK OF ELOQUENCE.
venerate, and sonnething whispers us they shall endure for
ever ; that all time shall witness their iucreasintr perfection ,
that all nations shall copy from its example, and derive inter-
minable benefits from its influence ; for war, tlie destroyer of
every valuable institution, the great and sole cause of all
national ruin, is soon to be seen no more forever.
CL.— A riCTURE OF TERROR.
THOMAS C. UPHAM.
At the dreadful period of the French Revolution, it wgis
found that the glittering sword of war could strike upward,
as well as downward ; among the high and the iniglity, as
well as among the poor and powerless peasants. The scythe
fell upon the neck of princes ; those who had been clothed
in purple and fine linen, were arrayed in beggar's rags aiul
ate their crumbs in a dungeon ; the innocent children died
with the guilty fathers ; delicate women, the delight of their
friends and the ruling star of palaces, were smitten by the
hand of the destroyer, and bowed their heads in blood. And
tliere were beheld the hundred guillotines, the horrid inven-
tion of the fusillades, the drownings in the Loire, the dread-
ful devastations of La Vendee, the gathering of armies on the
plains of Italy, the bridge of Lodi, and the battle of Ma-
rengo.
These were the beginnings of terrors, the opening of the
incipient seal ; but the end was not yet. For twenty suc-
cessiv^e years, the apocalypse of the book of war opened itself
from one end of Europe to the other, and on the ocean as
well as on the land, in the thunders and fires which at once
shook, and enlightened, and awed the world, of the Nile and
Trafalgar, of .Jena and Austerlitz, together with the dashing
of" tlirone against throne, and of nation against nation At
length the " white horse of death" was seen taking his way
through the centre of Europe, and power was given him to
kill with the sword and with hunger; and he 'was followed
by " the beasts of the earth," an army of five hundr-ed soldiers,
and they were all oflered up as victims on the frozen fi(dds
of Russia ; and the Kremlin, and the ancient and mighty
city of Moscow, were burul upon their funeral pyre. The
1
STOPPING THE MARCH OF FREEDOM. 201
earth shook to its centre ; a howling and a lamentation went
up to heaven ; the living ate the dead, and then fed upon
their own flesh, and then went mad ; the wolves and the
vultures held their carnival, while Rachel wept for her chil-
dren, and would not be comforted. Nevertheless, the sickle
of the destroyer was again thrust among the clusters; the
wine-press of war was trodden at Dresden, and Leipsic, and
Waterloo, till tlie blood "came out of the wiue-press, even to
the horse-bridles."
CLI.— STOPPING THE MARCH OF FREEDOM.
THKODORE PARKER.
It is not for men long to hinder the march of human free-
dom. I have no fear for that ultimately ; none at all — sim-
ply for this reason : that I believe in the infinite God. You
may make your statutes ; an appeal always lies to the higher
law, and decisions adverse to that get set aside in the ages.
Your statutes cannot hold Him. You may gather all the
dried grass and all the straw in both continents ; you may
braid it into ropes to bind down the sea ; while it is calm,
you may laugh, and say, " Lo, I have chained the ocean I"
and howl down the law of Him who holds the universe as a
rose-bud in his hand — its every ocean but a drop of dew.
" How the waters suppress their agitation," you may say.
But when the winds blow their trumpets, the sea rises in his
strength, snaps asunder the bonds that had confined his
migiity limbs, and the world is littered with the idle hay !
Slop the human ra(;e in its devt;k)pment and march to Free-
dom I As well might the boys of Boston, some lustrous
night, mounting the steeples of the town, call on the stars to
stop their course ! (xently, but irresistibly, the Greater and
the Lesser Bear move round the pole ; Orion, in his mighty
mail, comes up the sky; the Bull, the Heavenly Twins, the
Crab, the Lion, the Maid, the Scales, and all that shining
company, pursue their march all night, and the ww day dis-
covers the idle urchins in their lofty places all tired, and
sleepy, and ashamed.
9*
202 THE BOOK OF ELOQUENCE.
CLIL— INVECTIVE IN" THE " WILKINSON TRIAL."
S. S. TBENTISS.
Gentlemen, althouph my clients are free from the charpfe
of shedding blood, there is a murderer, and, strange to say,
his name appears upon the indictment, not as a criminal, but
a prosecutor. His garments are wet with the blood of those
upon whose deaths you hold this solemn inquest. Yonder he
sits, allaying for a moment the hunger of that fierce vulture,
Conscience, by casting before it the food of pretended regret,
and false, but apparent eagerness for justice. He hopes to
appease the manes of his slaughtered victims— victims to
his falsehood and treachery — by sacrificing upon their graves
a hecatomb of innocent men. By base misrepresentations
of the conduct of the defendants, he induced his imprudent
friends to attempt a vindication of his pretended wrongs, by
violence and bloodshed. His clansmen gathered at his call,
and followed him for vengeance ; but when the fight began,
and the keen weapons clasiied in the sharp conflict — where
was the wordy warrior ? Aye, " where was Roderick then ?"-
No " blast upon his bugle horn" encouraged his companions
as they were laying down their lives in his quarrel ; no gleam
of his dagger indicated a desire to avenge his fail ; with
treacherous cowardiee he left them to their fate, and all his
va'uited courage ended in ignominious fli":ht.
o o r;
8ad and gloomy is the path that lies before him. You
will in a few moments dash, untasted, from his lips, the
sweet cup of revenge ; to quafi^ whose intoxicating contents
he has paid a price that would have purehased the goblet of
the Egyptian queen. I behold gathering around him, thick
and f !St, dark and cori-oding cares. That face, which looks
so ruddy, and even now is flushed with shame and conscious
guilt, will from this day grow pale, uutd the craven blood
shall refuse to visit the ha.gard cheek. In his broken and
distorted sleep his dreams will be more fearful tiian those of
tlie " false, perjured Clarence ;" and around his waking pil-
low, in the deep hour of night, will flit the ghosts of Meeks
and Rothwell, shrieking their curses in his shrinking ear.
Upon his head rests not only the blood shed in this unfor-
tunate strife, but also the soul-killing crime of perjury ; f(>r,
surely as he lives, did the words of craft and falsehood fall
from his lips, ere they were hardly loosened from the holy
THE WORLD OF BEAUTV AROUND US. 203
volume. But I dismiss liim, and do coTisipn him to the
furies, tnistinfr, iu all charity, that the terrible punishment
he must sufi'er from the scorpion-lash of a guilty consciencfa
will be considered iu his last account.
CLIIL— THE WORLD OF BEAUTY AROUND US.
HORACE MANN.
I'lT a hioflier and holier world than the world of Ideas, or
the world oi" Beauty, lies around us ; and we find ourselves
endued with susceptibilities which affiliate us to all its purity
and its perlectncss. The laws of nature are sublime, but
there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelli-
gences must kneel and adore. Tlie laws by which the winds
blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, meas-
ure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing'
time; the laws by wliich the planets roll, and the sun vivi-
fies and paints ; the laws which preside over the subtle com-
binations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electri-
city ; the laws of germination and production in the vegeta-
ble and animal worlds ; — all these, radiant with eternal
beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of
sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that ap-
parel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can
])ut on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagi-
nation of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines
in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond,
or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can
exhale no such sweetness as charity difliises. Beneficence
is jrodlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the
Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. En-
rich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit
temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love.
Inanimate vastness excites M'onder ; knowledge kindles ad-
miration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is
marvellous, but moral truth is divine ; and whoever breathes
its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
For him a new heaven and a new earth have already been
created. His home is the sanctuary of God, the Holy of
Holies.
204 THE BOOK OF ELOQUEXCE.
CLIY— DANGER OF VAST FORTUNES.
HORACE MAlfN.
Vast fortunes are a misfortune to the State. They confer
irresponsible power ; and human nature, except in the rarest
instances, has proved incapable of wieldinjr irresponsible
power, without abuse. The feudalism of Capital is not a
whit less formidable than the feudalism of Force. The mil-
lionaire is as dangerous to the welfare of the community, in
our day, as was the baronial lord of the middle ages. Both
supply the means of shelter and of raiment on the same
conditions ; both hold their retainers in service by the same
tenure — their necessity for bread ; both use their superiority
to keep themselves superior. The power of money is as im-
perial as the power of the sword ; I may as well depend upon
another for my head as for my bread. The day is sure to
come, when men will look back upon the prerogatives of
Capital, at the present time, with as severe and as just a
condemnation as w^- now look back upon the predatory
chieftains of the Dark Ages. Weighed in the balances of
th^ sanctuary, or even in the clumsy scales of human justice
there is no equity in the allotments, which assign to one
man but a dollar a day, with working, while another has an
income of a dollar a minute, without working. Under the
reign of Force, or under the reign of Money, there may be
here and there a good man who uses his power for blessing
and not lor oppressing his race ; but all their natural tenden-
cies are exclusively bad. In England, we see the feudalism
ot Capital approaching its catastrophe. In Ireland, we see
the catastrophe consummated. Unhappy Ireland ! where
the objects of human existence and the purposes of human
government have all been reversed ; where rulers, for centu-
ries, have ruled for the aggrandizement of themselves, and
not for the happiness of their subjects ; where misgovern-
ment has reigned so long, so supremely, and so atrociously,
Itiat, at the present time, the " Three Estates" of the realm
are Crime, Famine, and Death.
IXFLCEXCE OF GENEVA UPON THE PURITANS. 205
CLV^— INFLUENCE OF REPUBLICAN GEN'EVA UPOX THE
PUKITA>S.
RUFL'S CHOATE.
In the reign of Mary, from 1553 to 155S, a thousand
learned Enirlishmen fled from the stake, at home, to the hap-
pier seats of Continental Protestantism. Of tliese, great num-
bers, I know not how many, came to Geneva. They awaited
the death of the Queen ; and then, sooner or later, but in the
time of Ehzabeth, went back to England. I ascribe to that
five years in Geneva an influence that has changed the his-
tory of the world. I seem to myself to trace to it, as an in-
fluence on the English race, a new Theology, a new Polities,
another tone of character, the opening of another era of time
and of Liberty. 1 seem to myself to trace to it, a portion, at
least, of the objects of the great civil war in England, the
republican constitution framed in the cabin of the May
Flower, the divinity of Jonathan Edwards, the battle of
Bunker Hill, and the Independence of America. In that
brief season, English Puritanism was changed fundamentally
and forever. Why sliould one think this so extraordinary ?
There are times when whole years pass over the head of a
man, and work no change of mind at all. There are others,
again, when in an hour, all things pass away, and all things
become new. A verse of the Bible, a glorious line of some
old poet, dead a thousand years before, the new-made grave
of a child, a friend killed by a thunderbolt, as in the case of
Luther, some single more than tolerable pang of " despised
love," some single more intolerable act of the "oppressor's
wrong and proud man's contumely," the gleam ol rarer
beauty on the lake or in the sky, something lighter than the
fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the shore, draws tears from
him in the twinkliiiir of an eye. When, before or since, in
the history of the world, was the human character subjected
to an accumulation of agents, so fitted to create it all anew,
as those which i^icompassed the English at Geneva ?
I do not make nuich account in this of the matcrutl gran-
deur and beauty which burst on their astonished senses, as
around the solitudes of Patmos. It is of the moral agents of
chaiiire of which 1 would speak. Passing over the tlieology
which they learned there, consider the politics they learned
there. Consider that the asylum into which they had beeu
206 THE BOOK OF ELOQUENCE.
admitted, the city which had opened its arms to the pious and
learned men banished by an EnjrHsh throne, and an English
hierarchy, was a repubUc. In the giant hands ot" guardian
mountains, ascending from their "silent sea of pines," above
the thunder-clouds, and reposing there, calmly, amidst their
encircling stars, while the storm raved by below, before
which forests and cathedral-tombs of kings went down ; on
the banks of a contrasted lake, lovelier than a dream of fairy-
land, in a valley which might have been hollowed out to
enclose the last home of liberty, there smiled an independent,
peaceful, law-abiding and prosperous commonwealth. There
was a state without king or nobles ; there was a church
without a bishop ; there was a people, governed by laws of
their own making, and by rulers of their own choosin^j.
CLVL— THE SAME— CONTINUED.
RL'FUS CHOATK.
To the eye of these exiles, bruised and pierced througli, by
the accumulated oppressions of a civil and spiritual tyranny,
to whom there were coming tidings every day, out of Eng-
land, that another victim had been struck down, on whose
still dear home in the sea there fell, every day, a gloomit-r
shadow from the frowning turrets of power ; — was not tliat
republic of Geneva the brightest image in the whole trans-
cendent scene ? Do you doubt that they turned from Alpine
beauty and Alpine grandeur, to look, with a loltier emotion,
for the first time in their lives, on the serene, unveiled statue
of Classical Liberty ? Do you not think that this spectacle,
in their circumstances, and in their moods, prompted pregnant
doubts, daring hopes, new ideas, " thoughts that wake to
perish never," doubts, hopes, ideas and thoughts, of which a
new age is born ? Was it not then and there that the dream
of Republican Liberty, a dream to be realized somewhere,
perhaps in England, perhaps in some region of the western
sun, first mingled itself with the general impulses and the
general hopes of the Reformation ? Was that dream ever
let go, down to the morning of that day, when the Pilgrim
Fathers met in the cabin of their thattered bark, and then,
as she rose and fell on the stern New England sea, and the
SE 'RET OF THE MURDERER.
207
voices of the November forests rang through her torn topmost
rinriring, subscribed the first Republican Constitution of the
New World ? I couless myself to be of the opinion of those
Avho trace to that spot and that time the Republicanism of
the Puritans. I confess, too, that I love to trace the pedigree
of our transatlantic liberty, thus backward, through Switzer-
land, to its native land of Greece. I think this is the true
line of succession, down which it has descended. I agree
willi Swift, and Dryden, and Bishop Burnett, in that hypoth-
esis. There was a liberty, no doubt, which the Puritans
found, and kept, and improved, in England. They would
have chansred it, but were not able. But that was a kind of
liberty, which admitted and demanded an inequality of man,
an insubordination of ranks, a favored eldest son, the ascending
orders of a hierarchy, the vast and constant pressure of a super-
incumbent crown. It was the liberty of Feudalism. It was
the liberty of a united monarchy, overhung and shaded by
the imposing architecture of great antagonist elements of the
State. Such was not the form of liberty which our lathers
brought witli them. Allowing, of course, for that anomalous
relation to theEuslish crowti, three thousand miles off', it was
republican freedom as perfect the moment they stepped on
the rock as it is to-day. It has not all been born in the
woods of Germany, or between the Elbe and the Ider, or on
tbe level of Runnymede. It was the child of other climes
and other days. It sprang to life in Greece. It gilded, next,
the early and middle age of Italy. It then reposed in the
hollow breast of the Alps. It descended, at length, on the
iron-bound coast of New England, " and set the stars of glory
there."
CLVIL— SECRET OF THE MURDERER.
DANIEL WEBSTER.
Hk has done the murder — no eye has seen him, no ear has
hcanl him. The secret is his own, and it is safe I Ah I
gentlemen, that was a dreadful mistake. Such a secret can
be safe nowhere. The whole creation of God has neither
nook nor corner, where the guilly can bestow it, and say it is
safe. Not to speak of that eye which glancres through all
disguises, and beholds everything, as in the splendor of noon, —
208 THE BOOK OF ELOQUENCE.
such secrets of guilt are never safe from detection, even by
men. True is it, generally speaking, that " murder will out."
True it is, that Providence hath so ordained, and doth so
govern things, that those who break the great law of heaven,
by shedding man's blood, seldom succeed in avoiding dis-
covery. Es|)ecially, in a cas<^ exciting so much attention as
this, discovery nmst come, and will come, sooner or later. A
thousand eyes turn at once to explore every man, every thing,
every circumstance, connected with the time and place ; a
thousand ears catch every whisper ; a thousand excited minds
intensely dwell on the scene, shedding all their light, and
ready to kindle the slightest circumstance into a blaze of dis-
covery. Meantime, the guilty soul cannot keep its own
secret. It is false to itself; or rather it ieels an irresistible
impulse of conscience to be true to itself. It labors under its
guilty possession, and knows not what to do with it. The
human heart was not made for the residence of such an in-
habitant. It finds itself preyed on by a torment, which it
dares not acknowledge to God or man. A vulture is devour-
ing it, and it can ask no sympathy or assistance, either from
heaven or earth. The secret which the murderer possesses,
soon comes to possess him ; and, like the evil spirits of which
we read, it overcomes him, and leads him whithersoever it
will. He feels it beating at his heart, rising to his throat,
and demanding disclosure. He thinks the whole world sees
it in his face, reads it in his eyes, and almost hears its work-
ings in the very silence of his thoughts. It has become his
master. It betrays his discretion ; it breaks down his cour-
age ; it conquers his prudence. When suspicions from with-
out begin to embarrass him, and the net of circumstances to
entangle him, the fatal secret struggles with still greater
violence to burst forth. It must be confessed : it will be con-
iessed : there is no refuge from confession but suicide ; and
suicide is confession.
CLVIII.— BUNKER HILL MONUMENT.
DANIEL WEBSTER.
Let it not be supposed that our object is to perpetuate
national hostility, or even to cherish a mere military spirit.
It is higher, purer, nobler. We consecrate our work to the
MORAL POWER OF PIBLIC OPINION. 206
gpirit of national independence, and we wish that the lig:ht