10 wounds incomputable, but to bring that rebellious aristocracy, to whose bad cause this distress is incidental, before the tribunal of our grateful thoughts. Men of New England never had such a reason for returning thanks as to-day, when they can perceive so clearly that the whole history of their country has inevitably led to this deathstruggle between two ideas as incompatible in the same civil society as deceit and sincerity in the same heart; an Aristocracy founded upon depriving men of natural rights, and a Democracy founded upon securing them to men. We are thankful that the issue is honestly and squarely made at last, and lurks no longer behind politics and compromises, and that every measure of the past which expected to stifle it has distinctly led, by the logic of a God who cannot bear iniquity, to a great historical situation, which tears the mask from the evil tendency, and bids a good tendency assume its grand proportions. The first Revolution of ’76 was only a graft upon the rugged American stock, which blossomed in these lattei’ years, and is now maturing its fruit. It will be the task of some future pen to show how the divine thought has picked its way through the political confusion and disgraces of a generation, to finish its work of founding a Republic. How premature were all our notions that we were citizens of an America. We have been in our minority all the time —a lusty, passionate and unsettled one, out of which we are stepping now, to the rights and privileges of an honest democratic manhood. To show how we grew to this, will one day be the task of some man who will devote to it the flower and prudence of his life. He will have to divide it into three epochs—the first comprising the establishment of the Constitution, and the subsequent years to the abolition of the slave- trade. This was the epoch when the rights of man were the accepted theory of the country, slavery was supposed to be a self-limited disease, and the Revolution slumbered after resisting one aristocracy, till it was awakened by another. The second epoch will tell the great material and political story of the growth of slavery, in a generation which forgot the feeling of the fathers from interest and ambition. It will show how adroitly the new aristocratic ideas helped themselves to power
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