grief, that just as peace was dawning, and the whole east was radiant with the coming sun of prosperity and joy, the sky is suddenly darkened with the blackness of this guilt and this tempest of a nation's tears!

I thought to speak to you to-day, my friends, of the glory of Petersburg and Richmond; of the overthrow and surrender of the great army of the rebellion, and of the old flag raised again by brave Anderson's hands over Fort Sumter,- of the open door and auspicious harbingers of peace. But "we looked for peace, and behold trouble." We looked for peace, and behold a sword.

Four years ago this crime would not have shocked us as it does now. Then we almost expected it, and it was almost a miracle that it did not come. But now, after being saved through the hazards of four years of open war and stealthy treachery, that this precious blood should be spilled, by the dastardly assassin's hand, on the very threshold of final victory,-it is for this that our hearts weep and almost refuse to be comforted, and our shocked, staggering faith asks, “Why, O why, was this consecration, and this baptism needed, before we could enter again the holy temple of peace?"

We weep not for him. His career is finished gloriously. Few public men in this, or any, land will have so honorable a record in history. The people's president-not the president of politicians, or of a party, but the president of the people and the country,-coming from the people, respected, honored, trusted, beloved, chosen and re-chosen by the people, he aimed always with upright and manly purpose to serve the people, and advance their interests and

their rights. The most magnanimous and tender-hearted and forgiving of magistrates, he has almost fallen a victim to his own generous nature. Standing in presence of the open grave which violence has prepared for him, we forget even the few faults of his character. His life rounds before us in majestic fulness and completion; and whether for the sober pen of the future historian, or for the dramatic demands of some coming Shakspeare, he could hardly have himself asked for a longer continuance of life. For him,—for his fame, for a sure place in his country's gratitude, for his immortality in history or in dramatic story, his life is finished with rare and æsthetic felicity. It received its crown when, a few days ago, he made that modest but triumphant entry into Richmond, hailed, not by the rich and the powerful, but by the poor blacks, whose chains by his command had just fallen from their limbs, and who crowded the way and followed him through the streets, showering their blessings upon him as their deliverer and saviour. That was the crown of his presidency and his life. After that there was no honor which the country or the world could give him. We weep not, then, for him. He is henceforth our hero as well as our martyr-president.

Nor do we mourn for our country's cause, as if that were lost. In thus completing and crowning his own life, he had conducted the nation to the point of assured triumph and safety. Not for our country's cause can we now grieve or fear. That, thanks to our dead president, thanks to our generals and their armies, thanks to the Lord of Hosts, is now beyond the power of any one man's life or death either to save or to destroy.

Not for our country's cause do we mourn; but we do weep for our country's loss and dishonor. We weep for the State, bereaved of an honest, faithful, unselfish ruler. We weep for philanthropy, bereaved of a sagacious counsellor and helper. We weep for humanity, bereaved of the tenderest and most compassionate of hearts. We weep for the whole world of mankind, bereaved of a statesman who had faith, without regard to race, or color, or country, in the laws of divine justice, and in a government of equal rights and equal chances for all. But most of all do we weep for the enormity of this crime,- that the assassin, at home under despotism, but a stranger to our free government, has been permitted to put his brand of infamy upon the Republic, and to stain forever its hitherto fair escutcheon with more precious than imperial blood. Flow, tears of this people, till you wash out in expiation the "damned spot" of this guilt! Drop your tears in floods, O clouds, to cover our shame! Let the sun and the moon and the pure heavens be darkened, that they see not our sin! Oh, humanity, that thou couldst have borne this dreadful crime in thy bosom! In all the world there is but one that equals it. We must go back eighteen hundred years, to Gethsemane and Mount Calvary, to find its fitting mate in atrocity.

Yet not upon the skirts of the Republic, not upon the sceptre or royal robes of freedom, rests this stain. It is the exotic spirit of despotism that has committed this horror. Slavery has done this deed. Slavery, which has educated a whole community in barbarism, which has corrupted all sense of honor and right and truth in its upholders, which gave birth to the monstrous theory of

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secession, and fomented treason and conspiracy and this wicked rebellion,-slavery, which has scattered families, and desolated homes, and starved prisoners, and shot down men and women in cold blood,-slavery, which has eaten up the wealth of the country, and murdered your sons, or sent them to you as living skeletons,-slavery, this fiend, has now slain your president. Slavery is the assassin. It is the same spirit that has ruled the rebellion from the beginning. It began with the hanging of John Brown, and it has gone on demanding ever fresh and greater horrors to feed upon, until it ends with the murder of Abraham Lincoln. The awful laws of dramatic unity, stricter in the actual than in any fictitious tragedy, could not spare it this result, even though itself may have begun to shrink from the horror of it. It could not be permitted that this war, originated and fed by such a spirit, could end, and leave even a tradition of chivalry or honor or heroism on the side of slavery. All Southern valor and skill and self-sacrifice and devotion, which might otherwise have challenged and won the admiration of the world and posterity, are now swept from human memory by the infamy of this transcendent crime. Henceforth, through all history, the rebellion is branded as assassin. And slavery, which instigated and sustained the rebellion, has, by the law of its own necessities, brought it helplessly bound to this infamous end; and so it is forever proclaimed before all the world how purely evil and inhuman and diabolical a thing slavery is. It is the divine law by which evil works its own destruction, and, in attempting to undermine the good, digs its own grave. "Their sword shall enter into their own heart.”

B

And is not this, my friends, a hint of the moral of this tragedy? Whether we needed the lesson or not, is it not clear to us now, that we cannot safely leave in the soil, anywhere in all the land, the smallest seed or root or filament or atom of that wrong against God and man out of which all this crime and curse of treason and war and assassination have grown? This may have been the last, desperate struggle of the monstrous wrong in its mortal agony, but it shows us that, until dead and utterly exterminated, it carries with it satanic stealth and violence and murder. And secondly, is it not plainly taught us that, if we cannot trust the spirit of this evil so long as the evil is anywhere above the ground, so we cannot safely trust, in any efforts at reconstructing the Republic, the men who have been conspirators for the defence and extension of this evil,— that we cannot trust them in any offices of the nation or the states? They must be outlawed. They challenged and defied the federal government, they threw down the gauntlet against justice and for slavery: they have failed, and now let them abide the issue. Let justice be done: pardon and freedom and suffrage for the mass of the people, for white and for black; the penalty of treason or the outlaw's fate for the leaders. Not alone justice, but gratitude and honor and a true magnanimity and mercy demand, that, in our reconstructed Union, we shall not hold off at arm's length those who have been our firmest and most faithful friends in the South, and refuse to them the equal rights of the government which they have helped to maintain, while we take to our compassionate bosoms the men who, so long as they were able, stood against us as our enemies, and who