by a people divided at home, unnerved by fifty years of peace,
under a chief magistrate without experience and without reputation,
whose every measure was sure to be cunningly hampered by a
jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing with
unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a hostile neutrality
abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. All this was to be
done without warning and without preparation, while at the same
time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the political
condition of four millions of people, by softening the prejudices,
allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the cooperation, of their
unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion when
the heightened imagination of the historian might see Destiny visibly
intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of her shears.
Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three
years; never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that
strength be so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the
people,--to that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of
public opinion possible only under the influence of a political
framework like our own. We find it hard to understand how even a
foreigner should be blind to the grandeur of the combat of ideas
that has been going on here,--to the heroic energy, persistency, and
self-reliance of a nation proving that it knows how much dearer
greatness is than mere power; and we own that it is impossible for
us to conceive the mental and moral condition of the American who
does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by being even a
spectator of such qualities and achievements. That a steady
purpose and a definite aim have been given to the jarring forces
which, at the beginning of the war, spent themselves in the
discussion of schemes which could only become operative, if at all,