7 the people of the United States—for such a people, in the very bloom of their prime, to yield up their national unity at the arrogant demand of a few thousand slave-masters, would be such an ineffaceable stain upon free institutions, upon democratic citizenship, upon Christian civilization, upon human nature itself, as is not to be paralleled in the history of the world. The ignominious delinquency and partition of Poland would be a national glory compared with it. And yet to day, even here in the North, not to speak of. the abettors of the great treason—the genuine spawn of the Tories of 1776—there are men calling themselves loyal, who begin to-quail and to hint at a possible time for surrender—at a possible time to defile the graves and desecrate the memories of Washington, of Adams, of Jefferson, of Hamilton and their great compeers. I know that the Supreme Ruler of the Ages, has always “the stones” out of which he can “raise up children unto Abraham”—new and faithful nations. Are we to have no other significance in the history of the race, but to illustrate these portentous words of the Divine Master of these Christian centuries ? How many years of almost hopeless toil and bloody sweat did the fathers devote to the acquisition of the great inheritance, to maintain which we have given but less than two, of bewildered and oftentimes aimless preparation ? From the meeting of that first Congress of the American people, in this city of New York, in 1765, in which “ the brave and noble-hearted” Gadsden, of South Carolina, gave utterance to the first grand formula of American nationality—“ Away with your royal charters, and let us stand on the broad, common ground of those natural rights that we all feel and know as men ; no more New Englanders, no more New Yorkers on this continent; but all of us Americans”—from that hour onward until 1789, when the people of the United States^ in their own common name, estab-
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