election of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle was
disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the
position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great
effects do not follow from small causes,--that is, disproportionately
small,--but from adequate causes acting under certain required
conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent
acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-
box, may serve for a child's wonder; but the real miracle lies in that
divine league which bound all the forces of nature to the service of
the tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything has been at work
for the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery, but Garrison and
Phillips have been far less successful propagandists than the
slaveholders themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance of
their pretensions and encroachments. They have forced the
question upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, by
defiantly putting freedom and democracy on the defensive. But,
even after the Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread desire on
the part of the North to commit aggressions, though there was a
growing determination to resist them. The popular unanimity in
favor of the war three years ago was but in small measure the result
of anti-slavery sentiment, far less of any zeal for abolition. But
every month of the war, every movement of the allies of slavery in
the Free States, has been making Abolitionists by the thousand.
The masses of any people, however intelligent, are very little moved
by abstract principles of humanity and justice, until those principles
are interpreted for them by the stinging commentary of some
infringement upon their own rights, and then their instincts and
passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable
reinforcement of impulse and intensity from those higher ideas,
those sublime traditions, which have no motive political force till