nor Alabama, nor Mississippi, nor Louisiana, nor Texas, nor Arkansas, nor to most of Kentucky and of Tennessee. We have not had a government for fifty years that dared to do a thing that slavery did not wish to have done. I suppose that within the last twenty years uncounted multitudes of men have been mulcted in property, mobbed, hung, murdered, for whose wrongs and blood no government has ever made any inquisition. It is permitted, to this hour, to one man to maltreat, to murder, to rob, to strip, to destroy another man, in Nashville, in Memphis, in New Orleans, in Mobile, in Charleston, and even in Richmond, close up under the eye of government. There has never been an hour for the last twenty-five years when government would lift a voice or stretch out a hand to protect Northern men against the outrages committed upon them by men at the South. Now I demand that, when the American flag is next unfurled in South Carolina, it shall protect me there, as it protects a South Carolinian in New York. I demand that it shall protect me in Mobile, as it protects a Mobilian here. I demand that this shall be a common country, and that all men shall enjoy the imperishable rights which the Constitution guarantees to every American citizen. I demand that there shall be such a victory of this flag as shall make the whole and undivided land the common possession of all and every one of its citizens!

If any man asks me whether I will consent to a compromise, I reply, Yes. I love compromises; they are dear to me if I may make them. Give me a compromise that shall bring peace. Let me say, "Hang the ringleading traitors; suppress their armies; give

peace to their fields; lift up the banner, and make a highway in which every true American citizen, minding his own business, can walk unmolested; free the Territories, and keep them free," that is our compromise. Give to us the doctrine of the fathers, renew the Declaration of Independence, refill the Constitution with the original blood of liberty, destroy traitors and treason, make the doctrine of secession a byword and a hissing; make laws equal; let that justice for which they were ordained be the same in Maine or Carolina, to the rich and to the poor, the bond and the free, and thus we will compromise.

But as long as compromise means yokes on us and license to them, silence for liberty and openmouthed freedom to despotism, so long.compromise is a Devil's juggle; no man that is a freeman and a Christian should be caught in any such snare as that. I ask for nothing except that which the fathers meant. I ask for the fulfilment of Washington's prayer. I ask for the carrying out of the designs of those sacred men that sat in conclave at Independence Hall in "Philadelphia, and framed our immortal Constitution. I ask for liberty in New York, in Carolina, in Alabama, in every State and in every Territory. I ask for it throughout the whole land. I ask no Northern advantage. It is a mere geographical accident that liberty is in the North. It is not because it is the North, but because the North is free, that I ask for the ascendency of Northern principles.

Ah! that Daniel Webster had lived to see what we do, that strong man whose faith failed him in a fatal hour of ambition! I will read from a speech of his better days one of the noblest passages that ever

issued from the uninspired pen of man. propriate for this hour:

It is ap

"When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as What is all this worth? nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards, — but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart, — Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

You live in a civilized age. You go on a sacred mission. The prayers and sympathies of Christendom are with you. You go to open again the shut-up fountains of liberty, and to restore this disgraced banner to its honor. You go to serve your country in the cause of liberty; and if God brings you into conflict erelong with those misguided men of the South, when you see their miserable, new-vamped banner, remember what that flag means,-Treason, Slavery, Despotism; then look up and see the bright stars and the glorious stripes over your own head, and read in them Liberty, Liberty, LIBERTY!

And if you fall in that struggle, may some kind hand wrap around about you the flag of your country, and may you die with its sacred touch upon you. It shall be sweet to go to rest lying in the folds of your country's banner, meaning, as it shall mean, "Liberty and Union, now and forever."

We will not forget you. You go forth from us not to be easily and lightly passed over. The waves shall not close over the places which you have held; but when you return, not as you go, many of you inexperienced, and many of you unknown, you shall return from the conquests of liberty with a reputation and a character established forever to your children and your children's children. It shall be an honor, it shall be a legend, it shall be a historic truth; and your posterity shall say: "Our fathers stood up in the day of peril, and laid again the foundations of liberty that were shaken; and in their hands the banner of our country streamed forth like the morning star upon the night."

God bless you!

6*

VI.

THE CAMP, ITS DANGERS AND DUTIES.*

"For the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, to deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy; that he see no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee." Deut. xxiii. 14.

HAT Christian people should learn to dread the camp is not strange. The evils which have gone along with armies, the dangers of moral infection in military camps, are not imaginary, and are perhaps not less than our greatest fears would lead us to believe them to be. And yet it ought not to be forgotten that these evils are vincible, and that, though real, they may be overcome. There are no circumstances where Christian courage may not gain a victory over the sharpest temptations. It should not be forgotten that the world is indebted to camp life for institutions which have done more to infuse order and civilization among men than any legislation. God's people lived in military camps for full half a century. In camps Moses promulgated the Hebrew code. In the camp they began to practise the matchless elements of the Hebrew Commonwealth. In the camp the slavish

* Preached during May, 1861.