to any compromise of his freedom or the suppression of his conviction. I regard, no longer those names that so tingled in my ear. This is a baron of a better nobility and a stouter stomach.

The cause of peace is not the cause of coward ice. If peace is sought to be defended or pret served for the safety of the luxurious and the timid, it is a sham, and the peace will be base. War is better, and the peace will be broken. If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man's life; -men who have, by their intellectual insight or else by their moral elevation, attained such a perception of their own intrinsic worth that they do not think property or their own body a sufficient good to be saved by such dereliction of principle as treating a man like a sheep. imi

1

If the universal cry for reform of so many inveterate abuses, with which society rings, — if the desire of a large class of young men for a faith and hope, intellectual and religious, such as they have not yet found, be an omen to be trusted;

if the disposition to rely more, in study and in action, on the unexplored riches of the human constitution, if the search of the sublime laws of morals and the sources of hope and trust, in man, and not in books, in the present, and not in the past, proceed; if the rising generation can be provoked to think it unworthy to nestle into every abomination of the past, and shall feel the generous darings of austerity and virtue, then war has a short day, and human blood will cease to flow.

It is of little consequence in what manner, through what organs, this purpose of mercy and holiness is effected. The proposition of the Congress of Nations is undoubtedly that at which the present fabric of our society and the present course of events do point. But the mind, once prepared for the reign of principles, will easily find modes of expressing its will. There is the highest fitness in the place and time in which this enterprise is begun. Not in an obscure corner, not in a feudal Europe, not in an antiquated. appanage where no onward step can be taken without rebellion, is this seed of benevolence laid in the furrow, with tears of hope; but in this broad America of God and man, where the forest is only now falling, or yet to fall, and

the green earth opened to the inundation of emigrant men from all quarters of oppression and guilt; here, where not a family, not a few men, but mankind, shall say what shall be; here, we ask, Shall it be War, or shall it be Peace?

VI

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW

ADDRESS TO CITIZENS OF CONCORD 2 MAY, 1851

THE Eternal Rights,

Victors over daily wrongs:
Awful victors, they guide

Whom they will destroy,

And their coming triumph hide

in our downfall, or our joy: Ph.

They reach no term, they never sleer
In equal strength through space abide;

Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and ca
The strong they slay, the swift outstride;
Fate's grass grows rank in valley clods,
And rankly on the castled steep,

Speak it firmly, these are gods,

Are all ghosts beside.