He showed that compromise was a desperate shift of cowardice, begotten in deceit and ending in anger. "Compromises bury troubles, but cannot keep down their ghosts. They rise, and walk, and haunt, and gibber. We must bury our evils without resurrection. Let come what will,-secession, disunion, revolted States, and a ragamuffin empire of bankrupt States, confederated in the name of liberty for oppression or whatever other monstrosity malignant fortune may have in store,-nothing can be worse than this endless recurring threat and fear-this arrogant dragooning of the South-this mercantile cringing in the North."

"Shall every quadrennial election take place in the full fury of Southern threats? Is the plantationwhip to control our ballot-boxes? Shall Northern sentiment express itself by constitutional means, at the peril of punishment? Must panic follow election? And bankruptcy follow every expression of liberty?" "The North must accept its own principles, and take the consequences. Manliness

demands this-Honor demands it. But if we will not heed worthier motives, then Interest demands it. If even this is not strong enough for commercial pusillanimity, then Necessity, inevitable and irresistible, will drive and scourge us to it!"1

"Let every good man arouse, and speak the truth for liberty. Let us have an invincible courage for liberty. Let us have moderation in passions, zeal in moral sentiments, a spirit of conciliation and concession in mere material interests, but unmovable firm

"Patriotic Addresses," p. 244.

ness for principles; and-foremost of all political principles-for Liberty!"

What upheld and inspired Mr. Beecher during the terrible and unparalleled crisis of the winter of 18601861, was a strong, unfaltering faith in God, an undoubting confidence that the Union was "not going to be broken and shivered like a crystal vase that can never be put together again," because he realized the presence of God in the National life, because he felt that America embodied in her ideal the principles of the Christian Gospel. Without expecting any satisfactory results from compromise, or from the careful explanations which Mr. Lincoln made to the South, he did expect that the Nation's institutions, even though it might be through concussions, and garments rolled in blood, would be settled on right and permanent foundations.

1" Patriotic Addresses,” p. 245.

CHAPTER XXV.

BEFORE THE GREAT STORM.

THE winter preceding the war was the period during which the best life of the great American Republic touched in places its lowest ebb. President Buchanan argued before the Congress which convened in December that the National Government possessed no power to coerce a State. The North was prolific of compromises, some of them unspeakably base, offered to the South. Mr. Charles Francis Adams, one of the founders of the Republican party, and one who gained just celebrity as the Minister of the United States at the Court of St. James during the war, even proposed that the National Constitution be so changed that there should be no subsequent amendment made to it, which had for its object any interference with slavery, unless such amendment originated with a slave State. and secured the assent of every State in the Union! It seems to-day utterly incredible that one of the founders of the party whose purpose was to resist the aggressions of slavery, should offer, in the teeth of Southern threats, to bind liberty with indissoluble bands, and fling her helpless at the feet of her age-long and cruel foe! "No Southern man, during the long agitation of the slavery question extending from

1820 to 1860, had ever submitted so extreme a proposition as that of Mr. Adams."1

Wendell Phillips, standing like a prophet before the Boston mobs of that winter, and arguing for disunion, was an infinitely nobler spectacle than Northern politicans offering to sell conscience, humanity, and justice in order to keep Treason from striking the blow which was to launch her slave empire!

President Buchanan issued a proclamation, appointing January 4, 1861, as a day for fasting and prayer. That fast marks, it has been well said, "the lowest point of degradation the Government of the United States ever reached." The sermon which Mr. Beecher uttered on that day is one of the most striking and stirring pulpit addresses of the century. It deserves to take rank with the greatest sermons of all time, from the vigor of its thought, the comprehensiveness of its perception of the Nation's blameworthiness, the moral sublimity of its tone and its magnificent denunciation of the cowardice that was plunging the Republic into ruin.

He pictured the Nation rolling helplessly in a great tempest, and the crew, who had brought the ship into danger by pusillanimity and treachery, calling on God for deliverance. He showed that the authorities who had appointed the fast had given sufficient reasons by their own deeds for observing it. Even to-day Mr. Beecher's words make the reader fairly feel the darkness and swirling tornado, thick with thunderbolts of war, sweeping from the treacherous Caribbean Sea, to overwhelm the Government in dis

'Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress," p. 260.

aster, and irremediable destruction. He makes the blood hot, even now, to recall that the Government was in peril because Liberty had grown strong, that the wildest fanaticism was rampant in the South, turning cities into camps, threatening civil war, and hideous murder and revenges, perpetrating gigantic dishonesties, because the South had lost control of the National Government, and had determined on independence and slave empire, even if the continent had to be swept, and desolated by the furies of civil strife. 土

With solemn earnestness Mr. Beecher called upon the people to confess their real sins, to turn from all passions, from all thoughts and feelings which could. not bear the searching inquest of God's awful Judgment Day, to take solemn account of the vice and crime, the perversion of justice, and the great public wickedness, the luxury, extravagance, ostentation, and corruption of morals for which Northern cities were as guilty before God as were the Southern States for the gigantic evils of slavery. No Hebrew prophet ever flamed with more heat and splendor against the horrible wantonness of wide-spread avarice and all the bad uses of money, and against all the corruptions which, like sea-worms, ocean-bred and swarming innumerably, were piercing and destroying the stout Ship of State.

With no disposition to spare the North, he portrayed the national blameworthiness toward the Indian, on whom every crime in the calendar of wrong had been committed; the wickedness of a Christian Nation swindling, chastising, wasting, destroying a heathen people, was never made more