THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN
continue together permanently for ever half slave and half free? The problem is too mighty for me." Three years later he had found the answer. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other[1]."
Many of those to whom human freedom was of paramount importance were willing to sacrifice the integrity of the nation for it. To them the abolition of slavery was a new religion "based upon the Bible and carried out with a millennial fervour." Garrison took as his motto "No union with slaveholders," declared the constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" and publicly burnt a copy of it at a meeting of Abolitionists. Advocated thus, the anti-slavery movement set the feeling of the
- ↑ Nicolay and Hay, i. 391; ii. 137, 150.
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