Standard Selections Part 33

Now let me ask you, what is this people about which so many men in England at this moment are writing and speaking and thinking with harshness? Two centuries ago mult.i.tudes of the people of this country found a refuge on the North American Continent, escaping from the tyranny of the Stuarts, and from the bigotry of Laud. Many n.o.ble spirits from our country made great experiments in favor of human freedom on that continent. Bancroft, the great historian of his country, has said, "The history of the colonization of America is the history of the crimes of Europe."

From that time down to our own period America has admitted the wanderers from every clime. Since 1815, a time which many here remember, and which is within my lifetime, more than three millions of persons have emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States. During the fifteen years from 1845 to 1860 more than two million persons left the sh.o.r.es of the United Kingdom as emigrants to North America.

At this very moment, then, there are millions in the United States who personally have been citizens of this country. They found a home in the far West, they subdued the wilderness, they met with plenty there and became a great people. There may be men in England who dislike democracy and who hate a republic. But of this I am certain that only misrepresentation the most gross or calumny the most wicked can sever the tie which unites the great ma.s.s of the people of this country with their friends and relatives beyond the Atlantic.

Now whether the Union will be restored I know not. But this I think I know, that in a few years, a very few years, the twenty millions of freemen in the North will be thirty or even fifty millions, a population equal to that of this kingdom. When that time comes I pray that it may not be said amongst them that, in the darkest hour of their country's trials, England, the land of their fathers, looked on with icy coldness and saw unmoved the perils and calamities of their children. As for me I have but this to say, if all other tongues are silent, mine shall speak for that policy which gives hope to the bondsmen of the South and which tends to generous thoughts and generous words and generous deeds between the two great nations who speak the English language, and from their origin are alike ent.i.tled to the English name.

AMERICA'S RELATION TO MISSIONS

JAMES B. ANGELL

The government which breaks treaties with respect to missionaries and takes no steps to protect them will easily yield to the temptation to infringe on the rights of other citizens. Is it not possible that because our government has allowed outrages against our missionaries to go on since 1883 in Turkey,--highway robbery, brutal a.s.sault, destruction of buildings,--without any demonstration beyond peaceful and patient argument, the Ottoman government is now proceeding in so highhanded a manner to prevent by false allegations the importation of our flour and our pork? A nation which allows one cla.s.s of citizens, who are of the purest character and most unselfish spirit, to be insulted and outraged with impunity in a foreign land must not be surprised if other cla.s.ses of its citizens are also imposed upon and wronged in that land, wherever selfish interests are invoked against them.

Careful observation will show that our large mercantile interests are likely to be imperiled by our neglect to insist on the rights which citizens of any honorable calling are ent.i.tled to under treaties of international law. A display of force does not necessarily mean war. It is certainly an emphatic mode of making a demand. It often insures a prompt settlement of difficulties, which, if allowed to drag on and acc.u.mulate, would end in war. Therefore, wisely and opportunely made, a proper demonstration in support of a just demand may obviate the ultimate necessity of war.

The problem is not a simple one for the government. If it does nothing but register requests for justice, injustice may be done, not only to missionaries, but also to other citizens. Those dilatory, oriental governments, embarra.s.sed by so many difficult problems of internal administration, do not willingly act except under some pressure. And pressure which is not war and which will probably not lead to war, can be brought to bear by diplomatic and naval agencies.

Our government was never in so good a condition to pursue such a policy.

It has a prestige among oriental nations before unknown. Its voice, when it speaks with an imperative tone, will now be heard. The question for it is far larger than a missionary question. An influential American citizen has lately written me from an oriental country where our requests have received little attention, saying: "If our government proposes to do nothing for American citizens they should say so and turn us over to the care of the British emba.s.sy."

Such language as that makes one's blood tingle and stirs us to ask afresh, not alone as friends of missionaries, but as American citizens, what policy will our nation adopt to secure the rights of all our countrymen of whatever pursuit who are dwelling under treaty guarantees in China and Turkey? The friends of missions ask no exceptional favors from the government. They simply seek for such protection as their fellow-citizens need.

It is, of course, for our government to say at what time and by what methods it shall act. It is sometimes wise and even necessary for a government to postpone seeking a settlement of difficulties with a foreign power, even when it is clear that a settlement is highly desirable. Great exigencies may require delays. We must exercise the patience which patriotism calls for. But we may be permitted without impropriety to express our desire and our opinion that our government should find some way to make it absolutely clear to oriental countries that it intends to secure the protection for all our citizens, including missionaries, to which they are ent.i.tled by treaties and by international law.

AMERICAN SLAVERY

JOHN BRIGHT

Slavery has been as we all know the huge, foul blot upon the fame of the American Republic. It is an outrage against human right and against divine law, but the pride, the pa.s.sion of man, will not permit its peaceable extinction. Is not this war the penalty which inexorable justice exacts from America, North and South, for the enormous guilt of cherishing that frightful iniquity of slavery for the last eighty years?

The leaders of this revolt propose this monstrous thing,--that over a territory forty times as large as England the blight and curse of slavery shall be forever perpetuated.

I cannot believe that such a fate can befall that fair land, stricken as it now is with the ravages of war. I cannot believe that civilization in its journey with the sun will sink into endless night to gratify the ambition of leaders of this revolt, who seek to

"Wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind."

I have a far other and brighter vision before my gaze. It may be but a vision, but I will cherish it. I see one vast confederation stretching from the frozen North in unbroken line to the glowing South, and from the wild billows of the Atlantic, westward to the calmer waters of the Pacific main,--and I see one people, and one law, and one language, and one faith, and over all that wide continent the home of freedom and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and of every clime.

THE ARMENIAN Ma.s.sACRES

WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE

Ladies and Gentlemen, Before I come to the resolution which I have undertaken to move, there are certain subjects which I wish to clear out of the way. There are most important distinctions to be drawn on the ground that the sufferers under the present misrule and the horribly acc.u.mulated outrages of the last two years are our own fellow-Christians. But we do not prosecute the cause we have in hand upon the ground that they are our fellow-Christians. This is no crusade against Mohammedanism. This is no declaration of an altered policy or sentiment as regards our Mohammedan fellow-subjects in India. Nay, more; I will say that it is no declaration of universal condemnation of the Mohammedans of the Turkish Empire. On the contrary, amid the dismal and heartrending reports of which we have had to read and hear so much, one of the rare touches of comfort and relief has been that in spite of the perpetration of ma.s.sacres by the agents of the Government, in spite of the countenance given to ma.s.sacre by the highest authority, there have been good and generous Mohammedans who have resisted these misdeeds to the uttermost of their power, who have established for themselves a claim to our sympathy and our admiration.

Although it is true that those persons are Christians on whose behalf we move, I confidently affirm, and you will back me in my affirmation, that if instead of being Christians they were themselves Mohammedans, Hindus, Buddhists, or Confucianists--they would have precisely the same claims upon our support; and the motives which have brought us here to-day would be inc.u.mbent upon us with the same force and with the same sacredness that we recognize at the present moment.

There is another distinction, gentlemen, less conspicuous, that I would wish to draw your attention to. You have been discouraged by the att.i.tude or by the tone of several of the Continental Governments. Do not too hastily a.s.sume that in that att.i.tude and tone they are faithful representatives of the people whom they rule. The ground on which we stand here is not British nor European, but human. Nothing narrower than humanity could pretend for a moment justly to represent it.

It may have occurred to some that atrocities which it is hardly possible to exaggerate have been boldly denied; and we are told by the Government of Turkey that the destruction of life which has taken place is not the work of either the Sultan or his agents, but is the work of revolutionaries and agitators.

In answer to this we may say that we do not rely upon the reports of revolutionaries or agitators. We rely upon the responsible reports of our public men. Nay, more; while we know that there are those among the six Powers who have shown every disposition to treat the case of the Sultan with all the leniency, with all the friendship that they could, yet every one of them concurs in the statements upon which we stand, and in giving an entire denial to counter-statements of the Turkish Government. The guilt of ma.s.sacre, and not of ma.s.sacre only but of every other horror that has been transacted, rests upon that Government. And to the guilt of ma.s.sacre is added the impudence of denial, and this process will continue--how long? Just as long as you, as Europe, are contented to hear it. Recollect that eighteen months or more have pa.s.sed since the first of those gigantic ma.s.sacres was perpetrated, and when that occurrence took place it was thought to be so extraordinary that it was without precedent in the past; for Bulgaria becomes pale by the side of Armenia. But alas! that ma.s.sacre, gigantic as it was, has been followed up so that one has grown into a series. To the work of murder was added the work of l.u.s.t, the work of torture, the work of pillage, the work of starvation, and every accessory that it was possible for human wickedness to devise. To all other manifestations which had formerly been displayed in the face of the world there was added consummate insolence.

Come what may, let us extract ourselves from an ambiguous position. Let us have nothing to do with countenance of, and so renounce and condemn, neutrality; and let us present ourselves to Her Majesty's Ministers, promising them in good faith our ungrudging and our enthusiastic support in every effort which they may make to express by word and by deed their detestation of acts, not yet perhaps having reached their consummation, but which already have come to such a magnitude and such a depth of atrocity that they const.i.tute the most terrible and most monstrous series of proceedings that have ever been recorded in the dismal and deplorable history of human crime.

BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC[37]

JULIA WARD HOWE

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal, Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel, Since G.o.d is marching on."

He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat, He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat.

Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our G.o.d is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me; As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free, While G.o.d is marching on.

FOOTNOTE:

[37] By special permission of the author.

THE BLUE AND THE GRAY

HENRY CABOT LODGE