our recruits. Have we not faith enough in our cause to believe that it will lift all to its own level of patriotism and devotion? Let us, then, welcome all allies, from whatever quarter, and not inquire into their past history as minutely as if we were the assignees of the Recording Angel and could search his books at pleasure. When Soult was operating in the South of France, the defection of two German regiments crippled all his combinations and gave the advantage to Wellington. Ought Wellington to have refused their aid? For our own part, if Mr. Douglas be the best tactician, the best master of political combination, we are willing to forget all past differences and serve under him cheerfully, rather than lose the battle under a general who has agreed with us all his life. When we remember, that, of the two great cathedrals of Europe, one is dedicated to Saint Peter who denied his Lord under temptation, and the other to Saint Paul who spent his early manhood in persecuting true believers, and that both these patrons of the Church, differing as they did in many points of doctrine, were united in martyrdom for their belief, we cannot but think that there is room even for repentant renegades in the camp of the faithful.
While we insist that Morals should govern the motives of political action, and that no party can be permanently strong which has not the reserve of a great principle behind it, we affirm with no less strength of conviction that the details of our National Housekeeping should be managed by practical sense and worldly forethought. The policy of states moves along the beaten highways of experience, and, where terrestrial guideposts are plenty, we need not ask our way of the stars. The advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a water-spout, into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles, before the compact bullet of political audacity. While our legislatures have been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality. A siege, if uninterrupted, is a mere matter of time, and must end in capitulation. Our only safety is in assuming the offensive. Are we to be terrified any longer by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of Disunion, — a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as the spoiled child’s refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We will not allow it; we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis; the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato-patch shall not go along with it. But we have no apprehension. The sweet attraction which knits the sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force. We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the Union, and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the vindication of an elder doom;— it is for us to assert and to secure the claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the sentence, “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.” We are to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion,
