influence against the Abolitionists. Not to go over the whole list of denominations, it is sufficient to mention that the ministers generally are understood to be opposed to abolition, from the circumstances of their silence in the pulpit, their conversation in society, and the conduct of those who are most under their influence. I pass on to the Unitarians, the religious body with which I am best acquainted, from my being a Unitarian myself. The Unitarians believe that they are not liable to many superstitions which cramp the minds and actions of other religionists. They profess a religion of greater freedom; and declare that Christianity, as they see it, has an affinity with all that is free, genial, intrepid, and true in the human mind; and that it is meant to be carried out into every social arrangement, every speculation of thought, every act of the life. Clergymen who preach this live in a crisis when a tremendous conflict of principles is taking place. On one side is the oppressor, struggling to keep his power for the sake of his gold; and with him the mercenary, the faithlessly timid, the ambitious, and the weak. On the other side are the friends of the slave; and with them those who, without possibility of recompense, are sacrificing their reputations, their fortunes, their quiet, and risking their lives, for the principle of freedom. What are the Unitarian clergy doing amidst this war which admits of neither peace nor truce, but which must end in the subjugation of the principle of freedom, or of oppression?
I believe Mr. May had the honour of being the first Unitarian pastor who sided with the right. Whether he has sacrificed to his intrepidity one christian grace; whether he has lost one charm of his piety, gentleness, and charity, amidst the trials of insult which he has had to undergo, I dare appeal to his worst enemy. Instead of this, his devotion to a most difficult duty has called forth in him a force of character, a strength of reason, of which his best friends were before unaware. It filled me with shame for the weakness of men, in their noblest offices, to hear the insolent compassion with which some of his priestly brethren spoke of a man whom they have not light and courage enough to follow through the thickets and deserts of duty, and upon whom they therefore bestow their scornful pity from out of their shady bowers of complacency.--Dr. Follen came next: and there is nothing in his power that he has not done and sacrificed in identifying himself with the cause of emancipation. I heard him, in a perilous time, pray in church for the "miserable, degraded, insulted slave; in chains of iron, and chains of gold." This is not the place in which to exhibit what his sacrifices have really been.--Dr. Channing's later services are well known. I know of two more of the Unitarian clergy who have made an open and dangerous avowal of the right: and of one or two who have in private resisted wrong in the cause. But this is all. As a body they must, though disapproving slavery, be ranked as the enemies of the abolitionists. Some have pleaded to me that it is a distasteful subject.
Some think it sufficient that they can see faults in individual abolitionists. Some say that their pulpits are the property of their people, who are not therefore to have their minds disturbed by what they hear thence. Some say that the question is no business of theirs. Some urge that they should be turned out of their pulpits before the next Sunday, if they touched upon Human Rights. Some think the subject not spiritual enough. The greater number excuse themselves on the ground of a doctrine which, I cannot but think, has grown out of the circumstances; that the duty of the clergy is to decide on how much truth the people can bear, and to administer it accordingly.--So, while society is going through the greatest of moral revolutions, casting out its most vicious anomaly, and bringing its Christianity into its politics and its social conduct, the clergy, even the Unitarian clergy, are some pitying and some ridiculing the apostles of the revolution; preaching spiritualism, learning, speculation; advocating third and fourth-rate objects of human exertion and amelioration, and leaving it to the laity to carry out the first and pressing moral reform of the age. They are blind to their noble mission of enlightening and guiding the moral sentiment of society in its greatest crisis. They not only decline aiding the cause in weekdays by deed or pen, or spoken words; but they agree in private to avoid the subject of Human Rights in the pulpit till the crisis be past. No one asks them to harrow the feelings of their hearers by sermons on slavery: but they avoid offering those christian principles of faith and liberty with which slavery cannot co-exist.
Seeing what I have seen, I can come to no other conclusion than that the most guilty class of the community in regard to the slavery question at present is, not the slave-holding, nor even the mercantile, but the clerical: the most guilty, because not only are they not blinded by life-long custom and prejudice, nor by pecuniary interest, but they profess to spend their lives in the study of moral relations, and have pledged themselves to declare the whole counsel of God.--Whenever the day comes for the right principle to be established, let them not dare to glory in the glory of their country. Now, in its martyr-age, they shrink from being confessors. It will not be for them to march in to the triumph with the "glorious army." Yet, if the clergy of America follow the example of other rear-guards of society, they will be the first to glory in the reformation which they have done their utmost to retard.
The fearful and disgraceful mistake about the true nature of the clerical office,--the supposition that it consists in adapting the truth to the minds of the hearers,--is already producing its effect in thinning the churches, and impelling the people to find an administration of religion better suited to their need. The want of faith in other men and in principles, and the superabundant faith in themselves, shown in this notion of pastoral duty, (which has been actually preached, as well as pleaded in private,) are so conspicuous, as to need no further exposure. The history of priesthoods may be referred to as an exhibition of its consequences. I was struck at first with an advocacy of Ordinances among some of the Unitarian clergy, which I was confident must go beyond their own belief. I was told that a great point was made of them, (not as observances but as ordinances,) because the public mind required them. I saw a minister using vehement and unaccustomed action, (of course wholly inappropriate,) in a pulpit not his own; and was told that that set of people required plenty of action to be assured the preacher was in earnest. I was told that when prejudices and interests have gathered round any point of morals, truth ceases to be truth, and it becomes a minister's duty to avoid the topic altogether. The consequences may be anticipated.--"What do you think, sir, the people will do, as they discover the backwardness of their clergy?" I heard a minister of one sect say to a minister of another.--"I think, sir, they will soon require a better clergy," was the reply. The people are requiring a better clergy. Even in Boston, so far behind the country as that city is, a notable change has already taken place. A strong man, full of enlarged sympathies, has not only discerned the wants of the time, but set himself to do what one man may to supply them. He invites to worship those who think and feel with him, as to what their communion with the Father must be, to sustain their principles and their cheer in this trying time. A multitude flocks round him; the earnest spirits of the city and the day, whose full hearts and worn spirits can find little ease and refreshment amidst the abstract and inappropriate services of ministers who give them truth as they judge they can receive it. Nothing but the whole truth will satisfy those who are living and dying for it. The rising up of this new church in Boston is an eloquent sign of the times.[35] An extraordinary revelation of the state of the case between the clergy and the people was made to me, most unconsciously, by a minister who, by the way, acknowledges that he avoids, on principle, preaching on the subjects which interest him most: he thinks he serves his people best, by carrying into the pulpit subjects of secondary interest to himself.
This gentleman, shocked with the tidings of some social tyranny on the anti-slavery question, exclaimed, "Such a revelation of the state of people's minds as this, is enough to make one leave one's pulpit, and set to work to mend society." What a volume do these few words disclose, as to the relation of the clergy to the people and the time!
What the effect would be of the clergy carrying religion into what is most practically important, and therefore most interesting, is shown as often as opportunity occurs; which is all too seldom. When Dr. Channing dropped, in a sermon last winter, that legislatures as well as individuals were bound to do the will of God, every head in the church was raised or turned; every eye waited upon him. When another minister preached on being 'alone,' and showed how the noblest benefactors of the race, the truest servants of God, must, in striking out into new regions of thought and action, pass beyond the circle of common human sympathies, and suffer accordingly, many a stout heart melted into tears; many a rigid face crimsoned with emotion; and the sermon was repeated and referred to, far and near, under the name of "the Garrison sermon;" a name given to it, not by the preacher, but by the consciences of some and the sympathies of others. Contrast with such an effect as this the influence of preaching, irrelevant to minds and seasons. If such sayings are admired or admitted at the moment, they are soon forgotten, or remembered only in the general. "Don't you think," said a gentleman to me, "that sermons are sadly useless things for the most part? admonitions strung like bird's eggs on a string; so that they tell pretty much the same, backwards or forwards, one way or another."
It appears to me that the one thing in which the clergy of every kind are fatally deficient is faith: that faith which would lead them, first, to appropriate all truth, fearlessly and unconditionally; and then to give it as freely as they have received it. They are fond of apostolic authority. What would Paul's ministry have been if he had preached on everything but idolatry at Ephesus, and licentiousness at Corinth? There were people whose silver shrines, whose prejudices, whose false moral principles were in danger. There were people who were as unconscious of the depth of their sin as the oppressors of the negro at the present day. How would Paul have then finished his course? If he had stopped short from the expediency of not dividing a household against itself, in case such should be the consequence of giving true principles to the air; if, dreading to break up the false peace of successful lucre and overbearing profligacy, he had confined himself to speculations like those with which he won the ear of the Athenians, carefully avoiding all allusions to Diana at Ephesus, and to temperance and judgment to come at Corinth, what kind of an apostle would he have been? Very like the American christian clergy of the nineteenth century.
The next great mischief that arises from the fear of opinion which makes the clergy keep aloof from the stirring questions of the time, is that they are deprived of that influence, (the highest kind of all,) that men exert by their individual characters and convictions. Their character is comparatively uninfluential from its being supposed professional; and their convictions, because they are concluded to be formed from imperfect materials. A clergyman's opinions on politics, and on other affairs of active life in which morals are most implicated, are attended to precisely in proportion as he is secular in his habits and pursuits.
A minister preached, a few years ago, against discount, and high prices in times of scarcity. The merchants of his flock went away laughing: and the pastor has never got over it. The merchants speak of him as a very holy man, and esteem his services highly for keeping their wives, children, and domestics in strict religious order: but in preaching to themselves he has been preaching to the winds ever since that day. A liberal-minded, religious father of a family said to me, "Take care how you receive the uncorroborated statements of clergymen about that;" (a matter of social fact;) "they know nothing about it. They are not likely to know anything about it." "Why?" "Because there is nobody to tell them. You know the clergy are looked upon by all grown men as a sort of people between men and women." In a republic, where politics afford the discipline and means of expression of every man's morals, the clergy withdraw from, not only all party movements, but all political interests. Some barely vote: others do not even do this. Their plea is, as usual, that public opinion will not bear that the clergy should be upon the same footing as to worldly affairs as others. If this be true, public opinion should not be allowed to dictate their private duty to the moral teachers of society. A clergyman should discharge the duties of a citizen all the more faithfully for the need which the public thus show themselves to be in of his example. But, if it be true, whence arises the objection of the public to the clergy discharging the responsibilities of citizens, but from the popular belief that they are unfitted for it? If the democracy see that the clergy are almost all federalists, and the federalist merchants and lawyers consider the clergy so little fit for common affairs as to call them a set of people between men and women, it is easy to see whence arises the dislike to their taking part in politics; if indeed the dislike really exists. The statement should not, however, be taken on the word of the clergy alone; for they are very apt to think that the people cannot yet bear many things in which the flocks have already outstripped their pastors.
A third great mischief from the isolation of the clergy is that, while it deprives them of the highest kind of influence which is the prerogative of manhood, it gives them a lower kind:--an influence as strong as it is pernicious to others, and dangerous to themselves;--an influence confined to the weak members of society; women and superstitious men. By such they are called "faithful guardians."
Guardians of what? A healthy person may guard a sick one: a sane man may guard a lunatic: a grown person may guard a child: and, for social purposes, an appointed watch may guard a criminal. But how can any man guard his equal in spiritual matters, the most absolutely individual of all? How can any man come between another's soul and the infinite to which it tends? If it is said that they are guardians of truth, and not of conscience, they may be asked for their warrant. God has given his truth for all. Each is to lay hold of what he can receive of it; and he sins if he devolves upon another the guardianship of what is given him for himself. As to the fitness of the clergy to be guardians, it is enough to mention what I know: that there is infidelity within the walls of their churches of which they do not dream; and profligacy among their flocks of which they will be the last to hear. Even in matters which are esteemed their peculiar business, the state of faith and morals, they are more in the dark than any other persons in society. Some of the most religious and moral persons in the community are among those who never enter their churches; while among the company who sit at the feet of the pastor while he refines upon abstractions, and builds a moral structure upon imperfect principles, or upon metaphysical impossibilities, there are some in whom the very capacity of stedfast belief has been cruelly destroyed; some who hide loose morals under a strict profession of religion; and some if possible more lost still, who have arrived at making their religion co-exist with their profligacy. Is there not here something like the blind leading the blind?
Over those who consider the clergy "faithful guardians," their influence, as far as it is professional, is bad; as far as it is that of friendship or acquaintanceship, it is according to the characters of the men. I am disposed to think ill of the effects of the practice of parochial visiting, except in cases of poor and afflicted persons, who have little other resource of human sympathy. I cannot enlarge upon the disagreeable subject of the devotion of the ladies to the clergy. I believe there is no liberal-minded minister who does not see, and too sensibly feel, the evil of women being driven back upon religion as a resource against vacuity; and of there being a professional class to administer it. Some of the most sensible and religious elderly women I know in America speak, with a strength which evinces strong conviction, of the mischief to their sex of ministers entering the profession young and poor, and with a great enthusiasm for parochial visiting. There is no very wide difference between the auricular confession of the catholic church, and the spiritual confidence reposed in ministers the most devoted to visiting their flocks. Enough may be seen in the religious periodicals of America about the help women give to young ministers by the needle, by raising subscriptions, and by more toilsome labours than they should be allowed to undergo in such a cause. If young men cannot earn with their own hands the means of finishing their education, and providing themselves with food and clothing, without the help of women, they may safely conclude that their vocation is to get their bread first; whether or not it may be to preach afterwards.[36] But this kind of dependence is wholly unnecessary. There is more provision made for the clergy than there are clergy to use it.
A young clergyman came home, one day, and complained to me that some of his parochial visiting afflicted him much. He had been visiting and exhorting a mother who had lost her infant; a sorrow which he always found he could not reach. The mourner had sat still, and heard all he had to say: but his impression was that he had not met any of her feelings; that he had done nothing but harm. How should it be otherwise?
What should he know of the grief of a mother for her infant? He was sent for, as a kind of charmer, to charm away the heart's pain. Such pain is not sent to be charmed away. It could be made more endurable only by sympathy, of all outward aids: and sympathy, of necessity, he had none; but only a timid pain with which to aggravate hers. It was natural that he should do nothing but harm.
My final impression is, that religion is best administered in America by the personal character of the most virtuous members of society, out of the theological profession: and next, by the acts and preachings of the members of that profession who are the most secular in their habits of mind and life. The exclusively clerical are the worst enemies of Christianity, except the vicious.
The fault is not in the Voluntary System; for the case is equally bad on both sides the Atlantic: and an Establishment like the English does little more than superadd the danger of a careless, ambitious, worldly clergy,[37] in the richer priests of the church, and an overworked and ill-recompensed set of working clergy. The evil lies in a superstition which no establishment can ever obviate; in the superstition, to use the words of an American clergyman, "of believing that religion is something else than goodness." From this it arises that an ecclesiastical profession still exists; not for the study of theological science, (which is quite reasonable,) but for the dispensing of goodness. From this it arises that ecclesiastical goodness is practically separated from active personal and social goodness. From this it arises that the yeomanry of America, those who are ever in the presence of God's high priest, Nature, and out of the worldly competitions of a society sophisticated with superstition, are perpetually in advance of the rest of the community on the great moral questions of the time, while the clergy are in the rear.
What must be done? The machinery of administration must be changed. The people have been brought up to suppose that they saw Christianity in their ministers. The first consequence of this mistake was, that Christianity was extensively misunderstood; as it still is. The trying moral conflicts of the time are acting as a test. The people are rapidly discovering that the supposed faithful mirror is a grossly refracting medium; and the blessed consequence will be, that they will look at the object for themselves, declining any medium at all. The clerical profession is too hard and too perilous a one, too little justifiable on the ground of principle, too much opposed to the spirit of the gospel, to outlive long the individual research into religion, to which the faults of the clergy are daily impelling the people.
To what then must we meantime trust for religion?--To the administration of God, and the heart of man. Has not God his own ways, unlike our ways, of teaching when man misteaches? It is worth travelling in the wild west, away from churches and priests, to see how religion springs up in the pleasant woods, and is nourished by the winds and the star-light.
The child on the grass is not alone in listening for God's tramp on the floor of his creation. We are all children, ever so listening. Impulses of religion arise wherever there is life and society; whenever hope is rebuked, and fear relieved; wherever there is love to be cherished, and age and childhood to be guarded. If it be true, as my friend and I speculated, that religious sensibility is best awakened by the spectacle of the beauty of holiness, religion is everywhere safe; for this beauty is as prevalent, more or less perceptibly, as the light of human eyes.
It is safe as long as the gospel history is extant. The beauty of holiness is there so resplendent, that, to those who look upon it with their own eyes, it seems inconceivable that, if it were once brought unveiled before the minds of men, every one would not adopt it into his reason and his affections from that hour. It has been reorganising and vivifying society from the day of its advent. It is carrying on this very work now in the New World. The institutions of America are, as I have said, planted down deep into Christianity. Its spirit must make an effectual pilgrimage through a society, of which it may be called a native; and no mistrust of its influences can for ever intercept that spirit in its mission of denouncing anomalies, exposing hypocrisy, rebuking faithlessness, raising and communing with the outcast, and driving out sordidness from the circuit of this, the most glorious temple of society that has ever yet been reared. The community will be christian as sure as democracy is christian.
FOOTNOTES: [33] This summary does not pretend to be complete, but it is the nearest approximation to fact that can be obtained. According to it the Episcopalian Methodists are the most numerous sect: then the Catholics, Calvinistic Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Christians, Episcopalians, and Quakers. The other denominations follow, down to the Tunkers and Shakers, which are the smallest.
[34] "It is a mortifying truth, that two men in any rank of society could hardly be found virtuous enough to give money, and to take it, as a necessary gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or both.
But so stands the fact."
[35] See Appendix E, for a part of a discourse by Orestes A. Brownson on the Wants of the Times. It is given as it fell from his lips, and not as a specimen of his practice of composition. The reader, however, will probably be no more disposed to remember anything about style in the presence of this discourse, than Mr. Brownson's hearers are wont to be.
[36] See Appendix F.
[37] It is amusing to see how our aristocratic and ecclesiastical institutions strike simple republicans. I was asked whether the English Bishops were not a necessary intermediate aristocracy between the Lords and the Commons.
CONCLUSION.
My book must come to an end; but I offer no conclusion of my subject. I do not pretend to have formed any theory about American society or prospects to which a finishing hand can be put in the last page.
American society itself constitutes but the first pages of a great book of events, into whose progress we can see but a little way; and that but dimly. It is too soon yet to theorise; much too soon to speak of conclusions even as to the present entire state of this great nation.
Meantime, some prominent facts appear to stand out from their history and condition, which it may be useful to recognise, while refusing to pronounce upon their positive or comparative virtue and happiness.
By a happy coincidence of outward plenty with liberal institutions, there is in America a smaller amount of crime, poverty, and mutual injury of every kind, than has ever been known in any society. This is not only a present blessing, but the best preparation for continued fidelity to true democratic principles.
However the Americans may fall short, in practice, of the professed principles of their association, they have realised many things for which the rest of the civilised world is still struggling; and which some portions are only beginning to intend. They are, to all intents and purposes, self-governed. They have risen above all liability to a hereditary aristocracy, a connexion between religion and the State, a vicious or excessive taxation, and the irresponsibility of any class.
Whatever evils may remain or may arise, in either the legislative or executive departments, the means of remedy are in the hands of the whole people: and those people are in possession of the glorious certainty that time and exertion will infallibly secure all wisely desired objects.
They have one tremendous anomaly to cast out; a deadly sin against their own principles to abjure. But they are doing this with an earnestness which proves that the national heart is sound. The progress of the Abolition question within three years, throughout the whole of the rural districts of the north, is a far stronger testimony to the virtue of the nation than the noisy clamour of a portion of the slave-holders of the south, and the merchant aristocracy of the north, with the silence of the clergy, are against it. The nation must not be judged of by that portion whose worldly interests are involved in the maintenance of the anomaly; nor yet by the eight hundred flourishing abolition societies of the north, with all the supporters they have in unassociated individuals. The nation must be judged of as to Slavery by neither of these parties; but by the aspect of the conflict between them. If it be found that the five abolitionists who first met in a little chamber five years ago, to measure their moral strength against this national enormity, have become a host beneath whose assaults the vicious institution is rocking to its foundations, it is time that slavery was ceasing to be a national reproach. Europe now owes to America the justice of regarding her as the country of abolitionism, quite as emphatically as the country of slavery.
The civilisation and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles. This is enough to say. It is better than contrasting or comparing them with European morals and civilisation: which contrast or comparison can answer no purpose, unless on the supposition, which I do not think a just one, that their morals and civilisation are derived from their political organisation. A host of other influences are at work, which must nullify all conclusions drawn from the politics of the Americans to their morals. Such conclusions will be somewhat less rash two centuries hence. Meantime, it will be the business of the world, as well as of America, to watch the course of republicanism and of national morals; to mark their mutual action, and humbly learn whatever the new experiment may give out. To the whole world, as well as to the Americans, it is important to ascertain whether the extraordinary mutual respect and kindness of the American people generally are attributable to their republicanism: and again, how far their republicanism is answerable for their greatest fault,--their deficiency of moral independence.
No peculiarity in them is more remarkable than their national contentment. If this were the result of apathy, it would be despicable: if it did not coexist with an active principle of progress, it would be absurd. As it is, I can regard this national attribute with no other feeling than veneration. Entertaining, as I do, little doubt of the general safety of the American Union, and none of the moral progress of its people, it is clear to me that this national contentment will live down all contempt, and even all wonder; and come at length to be regarded with the same genial and universal emotion with which men recognise in an individual the equanimity of rational self-reverence.
NOTE.
Since pp. 47-52, in the first volume, were printed, intelligence has arrived of the admission of Michigan into the Union: on what terms, I have not been able to ascertain.
APPENDIX.
A.
MR. ADAMS'S SPEECH ON TEXAS.
* * * * * * I suppose a more portentous case, certainly within the bounds of possibility--I would to God I could say not within the bounds of probability. You have been, if you are not now, at the very point of a war with Mexico--a war, I am sorry to say, so far as public rumour may be credited, stimulated by provocations on our part from the very commencement of this administration down to the recent authority given to General Gaines to invade the Mexican territory. It is said that one of the earliest acts of this administration was a proposal, made at a time when there was already much ill-humour in Mexico against the United States, that she should cede to the United States a very large portion of her territory--large enough to constitute nine States equal in extent to Kentucky. It must be confessed that a device better calculated to produce jealousy, suspicion, ill-will, and hatred, could not have been contrived. It is further affirmed that this overture, offensive in itself, was made precisely at the time when a swarm of colonists from these United States were covering the Mexican border with land-jobbing, and with slaves, introduced in defiance of the Mexican laws, by which slavery had been abolished throughout that Republic. The war now raging in Texas is a Mexican civil war, and a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished.--It is not a servile war, but a war between slavery and emancipation, and every possible effort has been made to drive us into the war, on the side of slavery.
It is, indeed, a circumstance eminently fortunate for us that this monster, Santa Ana, has been defeated and taken, though I cannot participate in that exquisite joy with which we have been told that every one having Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins must have been delighted on hearing that this ruffian has been shot, in cold blood, when a prisoner of war, by the Anglo-Saxon leader of the victorious Texan army.
Sir, I hope there is no member of this house, of other than Anglo-Saxon origin, who will deem it uncourteous that I, being myself in part Anglo-Saxon, must, of course, hold that for the best blood that ever circulated in human veins. Oh! yes, sir! far be it from me to depreciate the glories of the Anglo-Saxon race; although there have been times when they bowed their necks and submitted to the law of conquest, beneath the ascendency of the Norman race. But, sir, it has struck me as no inconsiderable evidence of the spirit which is spurring us into this war of aggression, of conquest, and of slave-making, that all the fires of ancient, hereditary national hatred are to be kindled, to familiarise us with the ferocious spirit of rejoicing at the massacre of prisoners in cold blood. Sir, is there not yet hatred enough between the races which compose your Southern population and the population of Mexico, their next neighbour, but you must go back eight hundred or a thousand years, and to another hemisphere, for the fountains of bitterness between you and them? What is the temper of feeling between the component parts of our own Southern population, between your Anglo-Saxon, Norman, French, and Moorish Spanish inhabitants of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri? between them all and the Indian savage, the original possessor of the land from which you are scourging him already back to the foot of the Rocky Mountains? What between them all and the native American negro, of African origin, whom they are holding in cruel bondage? Are these elements of harmony, concord, and patriotism between the component parts of a nation starting upon a crusade of conquest? And what are the feelings of all this motley compound of your Southern population towards the compound equally heterogeneous of the Mexican population? Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian, emancipator of slaves and abolisher of slavery? And do you think that your hatred is not with equal cordiality returned? Go to the city of Mexico, ask any of your fellow-citizens who have been there for the last three or four years, whether they scarcely dare show their faces, as Anglo-Americans, in the streets. Be assured, sir, that, however heartily you detest the Mexican, his bosom burns with an equally deep-seated detestation of you.
And this is the nation with which, at the instigation of your Executive Government, you are now rushing into war--into a war of conquest; commenced by aggression on your part, and for the re-establishment of slavery, where it has been abolished, throughout the Mexican Republic.
For your war will be with Mexico--with a Republic of twenty-four States, and a population of eight or nine millions of souls. It seems to be considered that this victory over twelve hundred men, with the capture of their commander, the President of the Mexican Republic, has already achieved the conquest of the whole Republic. That it may have achieved the independence of Texas, is not impossible. But Texas is to the Mexican Republic not more nor so much as the State of Michigan is to yours. That State of Michigan, the people of which are in vain claiming of you the performance of that sacred promise you made them, of admitting her as a State into the Union; that State of Michigan, which has greater grievances and heavier wrongs to allege against you for a