ment. I had supposed that it was a cardinal and fundamental principle of our system of government that the decision of the people at the ballotbox, without a fraud, according to the forms of the Constitution, was to command the explicit obedience of every good citizen. If their defeat at a Presidential election is to justify the minority, or any portion of the minority, in raising the traitorous hand of rebellion against the constituted authorities, you will find the future history of the United States written in the history of Mexico. According to my reading of Mexican history, there never has been one presidential term, from the time of the revolution of 1820 down to this day, when the candidate elected by the people ever served his four years. In every instance, either the defeated candidate has seized upon the presidential chair by the use of the bayonet, or he has turned out the only duly elected candidate before his term expired. Are we to inaugurate this Mexican system in the United States of America? The first daty of an American citizen, or of a citizen of any constitutional government, is obedience to the constitution and laws of his country. I have no apprehension that any man in Illinois or beyond the limits of our own beloved State will misconstrue or misunderstand my motive. So far as any of the partisan questions are concerned, I stand in equal, eternal, and undying opposition to the Republicans and the Secessionists. You all know that I am a good partisan fighter in partisan times. And you will find me equally as good a patriot when the country is in danger Permit me to say to the assembled Representatives and Senators of our good old State, composed of men of both political parties, that in my opinion it is your duty to lay aside your party creeds and party platforms, to lay aside your party organizations and partisan appeals, to forget that you were divided, until you have rescued the government and the country from their assailants. Then resume your partisan positions, according to your wishes. Give me a country first, that my children may live in peace; then we will have a theatre for our party organizations to operate upon.

I appeal to you, my countrymen, men of all parties, not to allow your passions to get the better of your judgments. Do not allow your vengeance upon the authors of this great iniquity to lead you into rash and cruel and desperate acts upon those who may differ from you in opinion. Let the spirit of moderation and of justice prevail. You cannot expect, within so few weeks after an excited political canvass, that every man can rise to the level of forgetting his partisan prejudices and sacrifice everything upon the altar of his country; but allow me to say to you, whom I have opposed and warred against with an energy you will respect, -allow me to say to you that you will not be true to your country if you ever attempt to manufacture partisan capital out of the miseries of your country. When calling upon Democrats to rally to the tented field,

leaving wife, child, father, and mother behind them, to rush to the rescue of the President that you elected, do not make war upon them and try to manufacture partisan capital out of a struggle in which they are engaged from the holiest and purest of motives. Then I appeal to you, my Democratic friends, do not allow the mortification growing out of a defeat in a partisan struggle, and the elevation to power of a party that we firmly believed to be dangerous to the country,-do not let that convert you from patriots to traitors to your native land. Whenever our government is assailed, when hostile armies are marching under rude and odious banners against the government of our country, the shortest way to peace is the most stupendous and unanimous preparation for war. The greater the unanimity the less blood will be shed. The more prompt and energetic is the movement, and the more important it is in numbers, the shorter will be the struggle.

I am not prepared to take up arms, or to sanction a policy of our government to take up arms, to make any war on the rights of the Southern States, on their institutions, on their rights of person or property, but, on the contrary, would rush to their defence and protect them from assault; but, while that is the case, I will never cease to urge my coun trymen to take arms to fight to the death in defence of our indefeasible rights. Hence, if a war does come, it is a war of self-defence on our part. It is a war in defence of our own just rights, in defence of the government which we have inherited as a priceless legacy from our patriotic fathers, in defence of our great rights of freedom of trade, commerce, transit, and intercourse from the centre to the circumference of this great continent. These are rights we must struggle for and never surrender.

I see no path of ambition open in a bloody struggle for triumphs over my countrymen. There is no path of ambition open to me in a divided country. Hence, whatever we do must be the result of duty, of convic tion, of patriotic duty, the duty we owe to ourselves, to our posterity, and to the friends of constitutional liberty and self-government throughout the world.

My friends, I can say no more. To discuss these topics is the most painful duty of my life. It is with a sad heart, with a grief that I have never before experienced, that I have to contemplate this fearful struggle; but I believe in my conscience that it is a duty we owe to ourselves, our children, and our God, to protect this government and that flag from every assailant, be he who he may.

Henry Ward Beecher.

BORN in Litchfield, Conn., 1813. DIED in Brooklyn, N. Y., 1887.

THE BATTLE SET IN ARRAY.

[Preached after the Bombardment of Fort Sumter.-Patriotic Addresses. Edited by John R. Howard. 1887.]

THERE

HERE are many reasons which make a good and thorough battle necessary. The Southern men are infatuated. They will not have peace. They are in arms. They have fired upon the American flag ! That glorious banner has been borne through every climate, all over the globe, and for fifty years not a land or people has been found to scorn it or dishonor it. At home, among the degenerate people of our own land, among Southern citizens, for the first time, has this glorious national flag been abased, and trampled to the ground! It is for our sons reverently to lift it, and to bear it full high again, to victory and national supremacy! Our arms, in this peculiar exigency, can lay the foundation. of future union, in mutual respect. The South firmly believes that cowardice is the universal attribute of Northern men! Until they are most thoroughly convinced to the contrary, they will never cease arrogancy and aggression. But if now it please God to crown our arms with victory, we shall have gone far toward impressing Southern men with salutary respect. Good soldiers, brave men, hard fighting, will do more toward quiet than all the compromises and empty, wagging tongues in the world. Our reluctance to break peace, our unwillingness to shed blood, our patience, have all been misinterpreted. The more we have been generous and forbearing, the more thoroughly were they sure that it was because we dared not fight!

With the North is the strength, the population, the courage. There is not elsewhere on this continent that breadth of courage-the courage of a man in distinction from the courage of a brute beast-which there is in the free States of the North. It was General Scott who said that the New Englanders were the hardest to get into a fight, and the most terrible to meet in a conflict, of any men on the globe.

We have no braggart courage; we have no courage that rushes into an affray for the love of fighting. We have that courage which comes from calm intelligence. We have that courage which comes from broad moral sentiment. We have no anger, but we have indignation. We have no irritable passion, but we have fixed will. We regard war and contest as terrible evils; but when, detesting them as we do, we are roused to enter into them, our courage will be of the measure of our

detestation. You may be sure that the cause which can stir up the feelings of the North sufficiently to bring them into such a conflict will develop in them a courage that will be terrific to the men who have to meet it. I could wish no worse punishment to those that decry the courage of the North than that they shall have to meet her when she is once brought out and fairly in the field.

Let no man, then, in this time of peril, fail to associate himself with that cause which is to be so entirely glorious. Let not your children, as they carry you to your burial, be ashamed to write upon your tombstone the truth of your history. Let every man that lives and owns himself an American take the side of true American principles;-liberty for one, and liberty for all; liberty now, and liberty forever; liberty as the foundation of government, and liberty as the basis of union; liberty as against revolution, liberty against anarchy, and liberty against slavery; liberty here, and liberty everywhere, the world through!

When the trumpet of God has sounded, and that grand procession is forming; as Italy has risen, and is wheeling into the ranks; as Hungary, though mute, is beginning to beat time, and make ready for the march; as Poland, having long slept, has dreamt of liberty again, and is waking; as the thirty million serfs are hearing the roll of the drum, and are going forward toward citizenship,-let it not be your miserable fate, nor mine, to live in a nation that shall be seen reeling and staggering and wallowing in the orgies of despotism! We, too, have a right to march in this grand procession of liberty. By the memory of the fathers; by the sufferings of the Puritan ancestry; by the teaching of our national history; by our faith and hope of religion; by every line of the Declaration of Independence, and every article of our Constitution; by what we are and what our progenitors were, we have a right to walk foremost in this procession of nations toward the bright future.

DEFENCE OF THE NORTH.

[From his Speech in Exeter Hall, London, 20 October, 1863. —From the Same.]

THE

HE religious-minded among our people feel that in the territory committed to us there is a high and solemn trust-a national trust. We are taught that in some sense the world itself is a field, and every Christian nation acknowledges a certain responsibility for the moral condition of the globe. But how much nearer does it come when it is one's own country! And the Church of America is coming to feel more and more. that God gave us this country, not merely for material aggrandizement,