ligion to shame, and your traditional creeds to school. I show you Inspiration again; the Living God felt once more closer than life, in the touch of Liberty, and this by the children of the Night, the little one among the Races. Our faith in institutions, our dependence on majorities, public opinion, established traditions, are abased before strong souls, in whom even slavery and utter friendlessness have not suppressed such innate loyalties and capacities. Man is not the creature of institutions. The private soul is greatest. It is for the citizen to accept this lesson of lessons, though it comes from a despised quarter. And the more because his own past experience has enforced it. He has been paying the penalty for slighting his individual insights and dignities, and for his moral and religious servitudes. Let no new generation of youths learn to serve the old gods of creed, tradition, moneyed interests, political organizations, or ecclesiastical institutions. If these idols are not already broken under the judgment wheels that have gone over us, it is plain that they are yet to be, when those wheels return to perfect their work. Let the young man refuse henceforth to merge his personality in any mass of men or things. To let his live ductilities and intensities be flattened out under the old triphammers of the political, mercantile or theological rolling mills, cut into strips of the market size, branded with the current names, and flung dead-cold into the warehouses for sale, is tenfold the shame and ruin it ever was before. The soul of the citizen is baptized in sacred blood. It is solemnized by holiest duties and And the children of the people must be prophets, or we perish, suffocated in the high pure air of liberty we have dared to enter in our pride.

trusts.

Travellers in Africa tell us of the amazing size and vitality of the Mokwana Tree, lasting sometimes for thousands of years. No fire outside, no decay at the centre can destroy it. The bark is "stripped off again and again, only to be renewed. It may be boldly backed against a dozen floods. Cut it down, it will grow as it lies prone and bleeding. Every rootlet fifty yards from the trunk maintains its vigor. It would seem that the only way to exterminate it, is to destroy every layer by itself. For each has separate vitality, and is it self a genuine tree."

It is the symbol of Democracy; of what the ages have been preparing; of what we are commissioned, as rapidly as inay be, to inaugurate, if we are to live at all. Every individual a vital rootlet — a self-sustaining layer of the Republican Tree.

The best cements are made by finest pulverization. The most fertile soils result from such comminution that every atom is freed to

enter into the processes of organic life. Only such free atoms can cement the Republic, only such individualities fertilize its soil. Its Politics deal in numbers. But every politician must be a free moral unit. Its Worship is social; but alas for the Church, whose members know not that Religion is neither traditional, nor ecclesiastical, nor denominational-that it is more than Judaism or Christianity, even inspiration and intuition. What independence, self-reliance, selfrespect, become the citizen, to whom all knowledge, power, stewardship are gravitating! "Every young man," says Jean Paul, "has a fine epoch in his life, when he will accept no office; when he says, I will rise on the sea of this world, like a living man, by swimming, not like a drowned one, by corruption." "When God," said Algernon Sidney, "has cast me in such a condition that I cannot save my life but by doing an unmanly thing in face of my country, He shows me the time has come when I should resign it. I live by just means, or not at all." Of such quality is the "experience of religion" that the Republic wants. The old justifications and sanctifications may go, if we have this. To come into this, out of lackeying and paltering, and scheming for self alone, is the "conversion" and "new birth" this age and land wants to hear of. It repudiates the old mythology of a corrupt human nature to be got rid of, and insists that Human Nature shall be justified in its children. The baptism it wants is the vow to be what the dignity of a conscience and the equities of a republic demand. And its "perseverance of saints" is to hold to the spirit of that vow in public duties and private temptations. And the saving faith of the citizen is nothing else than to believe that all things are practicable that are becoming. Pure atheism will be to doubt the moral brotherhood of man.

Moral Enthusiasm is the natural first fruit of democratic institutions. What shall not he believe possible, who inherits all the promises of time? Of what should he despair, whose daily conversation is with men whose love and reason are free to hear and follow the best? Where an immediate appeal to the popular instincts is easy, what a sublime audacity Truth acquires! Thus the advocate Berryer in his defence of Montalembert before the Star-Chamber Court of Louis Napoleon, dared reaffirm in plain terms the very declarations for which his client had been brought to trial on a charge of high treason. The act will be remembered as the last sign that France yet believed herself free. How much better that unflinching criticism and prophetic insistance of Wendell Phillips during the war became a Republic than the moral timidity of a President and Congress that waited for popular impulse, forgetting that they were under the

necessity of controlling public opinion, and did not abdicate that function by refusing to lead on!

But if moral enthusiasm is the natural virtue of free citizens, what degree thereof should be unreasonable for us! For us, to whom fanaticism has been the bread of life and the path of salvation! For us, whose great triumphs run back to Washington at Valley Forge, to the solitary Printer in the upper room in Boston, to the Martyr at Harper's Ferry! For us who have been swept on our upward way against all probabilities, past all prophecies, by these days of God that are each as a thousand years! Surely nothing so becomes us as a divine passion for the right, an inability to feel doubt or dismay, a scorn of timid calculations, a lofty optimism that sees whatever is noble not as possibility, but as destiny, — yet burns up the chaff of present resistance with unquenchable fire. We have been borne on God's wings, not by human feet. We ought to fly over pitfalls without touching them. We ought to pierce barriers without seeing them. Has it taken so long to venture on impeaching a President? I am not sure but we ought to be bold enough to abolish the Presidency itself. Hesitate to give the negro the ballot? We ought to have courage to render it him on bended knees, and with dust on our foreheads! Argue whether it will do to let woman have equal political rights with man? Drop the word "male" out of your statute books rather, as silently as you can, and with a blush of manly shame!

To doubt the moral resources of the people, the adequacy of immediate supply to all demand, is to reject the whole meaning of these times. The human continent we are quarrying yields far richer re. turns than the mineral regions that so dazzle us. How much heroism we have had for the asking! It may be a question whether we should believe all men in a condition to be immediately trusted with the highest responsibility of the citizen. Universal franchise, on the instant, is perhaps little better than universal office-holding. But it is at least the necessity of the Republic to fit all its members for such duty. And I would ask those who begin with doubting the present capacity even of black loyalists who comprehend the crisis. as well as themselves, and who are eagerly greeting the teacher, — what hopes they can possibly entertain concerning the wretched mass of poor whites and demoralized rebels, whom peace is restoring to this Union. Is then the Republic committed beforehand to despair of the material it must work on? If there is anything that becomes us, and that our experience should inspire, it is to greet every chance for every race as a Godspeed for all.

The Englishman has a sense of actual barriers and slow secular growths which makes enthusiasm in progress look to him ridiculous and childish. The Frenchman is enthusiastic, but his ideals end in passion and explode in the air. But to the ardor of the American are. added abundant tenacity also, and free practical sweep. And all things are possible to him. The Republic has a virtue that makes all it does ideal: turns every political aim into a moral: a struggle for Nationality into a crusade of Universal Brotherhood: a Civil War into a school of Mercy and Magnanimity. Never before could Woman do more than mitigate tyranny. Now she institutes freedom. A Civil War for the Republic has been the Angel that rolled the stone from her sepulchre. Out of the battle-field has arisen a New Church; if the old is effete, the new blood of sainthood and messiahship is at least there,- pity, sacrifice, the healing of the wounded, the opening of the blind eyes. The Sanitary Commission, the Freedmen's Aid Society, the Educational Commission, whatsoever we had to inaugurate was gigantic. Mind cannot compass, nor faith foresee what we have undertaken to do. Yet the whole community quietly resolved itself into committee of Ways and Means, as if we had only to put our hands to the work, the treasures of the Universe being

ours.

This ideality and vastness of reach marks the whole thought and life of the Nation, as it does more or less that of the whole time. What theories of progress, what breadth of claim for every race, for every person! Yet as the lightning to its mark, so every dream to deed and institution. It is the most practical of races which is also the most ideal. Democracy is nothing less than the struggle to make of every individual, Church, State and School in one. It is no vain vision that so intoxicates our faith. And the stress of these vast duties and demands will discipline us till it cures the faults that are rightly enough alleged against us as a people; the egotism, the aggressiveness, the fierce pursuit of material gains. Carlyle may sneer at the fine experiment: as if it only meant that brass and pinchbeck were trying to be justified of their children like wisdom: -as if the war for the liberties of Man were nothing but "a foul chimney burning itself out." But let us not forget it—the great eyes that have kindled so many souls were not always so bleared, scowling at the blessed light. Hear him even; and Heaven purge and soften the great eyes again! "Hardly entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent-fighting our battles wert thou so marred. Alas! that there should one man die ignorant, who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy were it to happen more than twenty times a minute,

as by some computations it does! If the poor toil that we may have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have Light, Freedom, Guidance, Immortality?"

So toils the Spirit of Democracy, emancipating itself from subservience to Things and subservience to Persons, into the service of Principles, which is the service of Man. In their name it abolishes the monarchical element alike in politics and religion. Even for the Presidency it will scarcely fail to substitute some form of Executive that shall offer a less tempting bait to private ambition, and concentrate fewer powers that should be diffused among the people. And by a deeper necessity it must supplant the religious fiction of one 'Lord and Master' of the Human Soul by the worship of that Spirit, whose Truth, Beauty, and Love, are an inspiration no man can exhaust or foreclose. Just as little does it comport with Democracy that men should rest in subservience to Things; that we should be the slaves of tool and time-piece; or think quantity better than quality, and the close packing of material results the highest achievement. Our last struggle was with the selfishness of Slavery; the next is with the selfishness of Trade, and the logic of events will prove as convincing in the one case as it was in the other. An industrial People has inherited all art and science, that it may lay them all on the shrine of a Universal Gospel - the Dignity of Man. The tasks before us will never suffer our ambitions to degenerate into content with those effects in which the lower creatures forever surpass us. For what machinery can condense and multiply power like an insect's eye? Point its lenses at a man, they show a host of pigmies. A gnat's wing flaps at least fifty times in a second. Animalcules reproduce at the rate of twenty millions a day. But the dignity of the Citizen is to concentrate Moral Power. The space between two tickings of the clock is large enough to hold the acceptance of these consecrations of head and heart and hand the life of the Republic demands, and henceforward will not cease to demand. Not more was needed for the resolves of that hero-astronomer, who threw by his calculations of orbits and eclipses, at the thought of the sublimer orbit and darker eclipse of his country, and hastened to the field crying, 'I care not what it is, but for God's sake give me something here to do!' - and who crowned his military laurels when he undertook the charge of the poor freedmen at Port Royal, saying 'Good colored friends, God help you to help yourselves and help us to help you. It shall be mine to deal justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly.' There may go into one moment, as a microscope shows us there are star-spaces between pores, a heroism that would fill centuries as well,