with the evils that are devouring it, should question itself, examine its own conscience, and fix the responsibility of a catastrophe which involves not alone its direct abettors. The ancient sibyl, to whom Rome shut her ears, comes to us in the form of this great calamity. She gives us warning; it is, perhaps, the last page in the volume of wisdom, but it is the page that I would read to my country in order that modern Democracy may learn therefrom the lesson which the events of these days should cultivate."

So writes Edmund de Pressense, a true friend of enlightened liberty, of scenes of horror which passed before his own eyes, who could say of them, if not quorum pars magna fui, at least quæ ipse misserrima vidi. Let us remember that a brilliant devotee of the Commune in our own country has said of Henry Delacluze, one of the high priests who prepared this terrible holocaust, that he was a man after his own heart, and that that branch of the Internationals that followed Woodhull through the streets of New York a few Sabbaths ago, recalling the ancient myth of Circe and her swine, was organized by one of the chief actors in these scenes of blood, who, not satisfied with banishing God from the earth, said if he were to go to heaven and find Him there, he would immediately throw up barricades.

The oriental nations are often pointed to as examples of stable government. The facts do not accord to the theory; but their repose, such as it is, is the repose of death, the calm of the Dead Sea, the quietness of the extinct volcano. There are no States, in the true sense of the term, in oriental countries. They have no progress, and consequently no real national life. They do not advance, and play no part in the world's history. India, China, Japan-what are they? Hordes, multitudes, masses, but not nations; nor can they be in their present moral degradation. Persia is a country peopled by a few millions, more or less, of human beings; all the physical conditions favorable for a great nation are there, but the moral are all wanting. There are Persian people, but no Persian nation-none possible, because, as one who knows them well recently said: "There is not a single man in Persia that is not an arrant liar, nor a single woman that has any correct idea of true virtue." A few European adventurers conquered India, two hundred British soldiers quelled a rising war of ten millions, and in the great rebellion of a few years since thirtysix thousand Europeans, all told, soldiers and civilians, men and women, crushed in an incredibly short period the rising revolt of more than one hundred and fifty millions!

Why is France to-day like a ship driven of the wind and tossed? Or, to come nearer home, what is the character of the masses on whose shoulders the Tammany robbers were borne to power? Who does not see that our country would go down at once in a sea of fire, mingled with blood, if the moral character of the New York voters was spread all over the land? But what is the State? Not a mass of men, nor an organization of men, but an organization composed of moral beings, subsisting in moral relations, a tree, but a tree whose particles are moral entities, and which must partake of the life and character of the substance of which it is composed; a tree like the fabled Igdrasil of the North, "every leaf a biography, every fibre an act or a word. The rustle of it the noise of human existence onward from of old. It grows there, the breath of human passion rustling through it. Its true figure is that of a colossal man, his consciousness the resultant of the consciousness of the millions that compose this gigantic entity, this body corporate, his power their power, his will their will, his purpose their purpose, his goal the end to which they are moving; a

being created in the sphere of moral law, and therefore both moral and accountable." "A nation," says Milton, "ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth or stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body."

What is government but a system of laws? But what is law? To be binding, law must be founded in justice, but what is justice? An attribute of God and having relation in this sense only to moral beings. "Law hath its seat in the bosom of God, and its voice is the harmony of the world,” a saying too sublime ever to become trite. Freedom regulated by law is the path along which the nation moves, and the goal which it seeks to attain; freedom removed from the lawless licentiousness that is the worst of despotisms, on the one hand, and from that despotic authority which results, ultimately, in anarchy upon the other. But, although law comes from God, it gets its practical expression and exerts its real power only through the will of the political organism of the State And in this sense it is well described:

"Sovereign law, the State's collected will,

O'er thrones and globes elate,

Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill."

Every government, by equitable laws, is a government of God; a republic thus governed is of Him, through the people, and is as truly and really a theocracy as the Commonwealth of Israel. The refusal to acknowledge this fact is as much a piece of foolish impiety as that of the man who persists in refusing to acknowledge that God is the author of his existence. When good and wholesome laws become inoperative, or evil ones are enacted, a blow is struck at the very life of the State, its vital constitution is attacked in the very citadel of life, and its strength weakened. A strong government is one in which the moral power among the citizens is strong; that is, where there is a conviction of the majesty and moral obligations of just and wholesome laws-such laws as immoral legislators will never enact, and as an immoral people will not obey. The State is the law-enacting power; but can any conception be more preposterous than that of a power enacting laws, which must themselves rest on moral principles, or rather be the form or expression of moral principles, while the power is itself destitute of all moral character? It is singular that any man who has once arrived at the true conception of law as an expression not of human will but of the Divine Justice, should hesitate for a moment to endorse the fundamental principle of this reform. I believe it is one of the fundamental principles laid down by Blackstone, that no law which controverts the law of God is binding.

But, still further, the moral character of a nation is seen in the legitimate functions of government. "Government is for the protection of property," is a favorite expression of a certain school. Certainly, true, although in their mouths the greatest of falsehoods, because put forward as the whole truth; for, as Tennyson says, "a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies." I remember that I was startled with this declaration of an eminent publicist: "Man holds communion with God in property." Yet it is a great truth. The earth is the Lord's, for He made it. The gold and the silver are His, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. The right of property is, therefore, divine, and only a State recognizing its own can lawfully regulate its acquisition and tenure. can be taken of government, moral character is Where the rights of property are most carefully

divine character and origin Even on the lowest view which essential to its administration. guarded, and each individual

secured in the fruits of his own industry, there wealth flows as the rivers to the sea. Hence the utter folly, to say nothing of the wickedness, of all communistic theories which propose the annihilation of the rights of property. Let this nation begin seriously to entertain such theories and her wealth will vanish as surely, and little less rapidly, than those of our sister city in the melting fires of her awful conflagration. These theorists connect with the protection of property also that of the person. What a field demanding careful study and application of moral principles opens before us in this function of government! What a range of punishments, from the petty fine to the awful death penalty upon the gallows! Each day, I pass the frowning walls of a gloomy prison in which some hundreds of human beings are confined, some of them for the term of their natural life, on behalf of the safety of society, that they may not endanger the rights of property or the life or limb of their fellow-men, and yet we are told that the power which thus isolates these persons, cuts them off from all that makes life desirable, even endurable, and consigns them to separation and solitude, no more to bless or be blessed by the influences of society, derives its power from the people, is accountable only to them, has no soul, has no moral character, and is responsible to no higher tribunal than the majority of citizens! If the theory claimed to be thus embodied in the present preamble of our Constitution in the words " We, the people of the United States do ordain this Constitution" is true, then has society no right to put the murderer to death, no right to punish crime as such, and, indeed, is ultimately without right to protect itself against ignorance, intemperance or any other evil which threatens its destruction.

Again, let us consider the subject of education—what a field for the exercise of moral influence! Why must the State educate? Not alone that men may be wiser, but that they may be better, that the feelings of moral obligation may be widened and deepened, and thereby the citizens be fitted to render that conscientious obedience to the State without which all laws are inoperative. No system of education divested of a moral character is conceivable. If we teach our children simply to read, we must teach them in the writings either of the good or the bad, of the moral or the immoral-indeed, you can not teach them even the meaning of the words moral and immoral without adopting some system of morality. Here is a mighty question on which we cannot enter, but which, started in this city, must be discussed until a final settlement is reached. God grant that its final settlement may be such as to increase the moral power of the nation, and not so tend to weaken those elements which are even already all too feeble in our national life. Permit me here to say that in this question of the Bible in the schools it is not the infatuated men whom we call infidels and Romanists, that are the most dangerous, but the enemies within the camp, the men who profess to believe the Scripture, and who yet unite with their foes in the attempt to displace them from our system of national education. For the former I feel a measure of pity, for the latter contempt for their folly and all the loathing of which I am capable for their sycophancy, cowardice, and inconsistency. The lawyer who stands forth the legal champion of the robberies of a Fisk or a Tammany ring is angel white in my estimation compared with him who, professing the faith of Christ, lends himself to an attempt to drive the Scriptures from the schools. The one strikes a blow which may be parried and weakened by a thousand influences; the other aims at the heart.

A still more practical view of this subject is taken when we consider the moral obligations of a nation as such; like an individual, it is held bound in the judgment of mankind to the fulfillment of its obligations.

Great Britain, France, and Italy owe enormous debts. The same is true of our own country. Shall the obligations of these debts be met? May the nation repudiate? If not, why not? If a nation has no moral character, and is accountable to no higher tribunal, if law is the determination of a mass of men, what is to prevent it from taking the shortest road to a release from these obligations? Or does the law, "Thou shalt not steal" bind a nation as well as an individual? Are there not such things as noble nations, magnanimous nations, mean nations, and arrogant nations? Do we not apply to nations the same adjectives expressing moral qualities which we apply to men? Has not Great Britain a national character as well defined in the minds of men as her Queen or Prime Minister a character into which her physical character and resources scarcely enter, but which is determined by moral qualities? Is not the United States a personality as distinct in the eyes of men as Gen. Grant or Mr. Colfax?

The Conference of Geneva is to decide a question of difficulty between Great Britain and the United States, not between the people of the two countries as such, but between them as moral persons. It is Mr. John Bull against Mr. Brother Jonathan, the American eagle and the British lion who are at variance, two moral persons who are seeking the moral decision of a moral question. What law is to rule in this arbitrament, and whence come the principles by which the tribunal which is to make the decision is to be guided? This opens up the great question of international law, which, like all laws, can bind only moral entities, and must itself rest on moral grounds. Wheaton says: 'Every State has certain sovereign rights to which it is entitled as a moral being, in other words, because it is a State."

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When two States, two colossal men, who strike with the force of a million armed soldiers, meet face to face in the bloody duel of war, is there no law to control them but that of brute force, the will of the stronger? Is there no question of right or justice between these two giants? Are right and justice necessarily on the side of the strongest battalions, and when one falls beneath the superior strength of his antagonist, is there no further account? Is there no ultimate tribunal? Is there no possibility of a wrong which the avenging Nemesis may requite, on a nation as on an individual? Then is human nature a lie, then history was never written, then morality is a dream, and the throne of divine justice is the baseless fabric of a vision that melts away more suddenly than the morning clouds that gather about the rising of the sun.

With that oldest of divine institutions, the family, the parent both of Church and nation, the State must, does interfere, that lawless lust may not return from the bestial herds to bring back the reign of barbarism. Prior in origin, it is yet subordinate in order, and must be regulated by the supreme authority. The State establishes monogamy, the marriage of one man and one woman, as the form of the institution essential to its own existence and welfare, determines the age at which it may be entered, and requires its consent and seal to the contract before admitting its validity. Laws inflicting penalties for violations of the marriage covenant are enacted by all Christian States; failure to execute such laws indicates the decay of moral sentiments in the community, and is the certain sign of the approaching decadence of the nation. The State determines what shall be the education of the children of the family, at what period its claims on the members of the family begin, when the child may assert its freedom from the family restraints, and acknowledge no authority but that of the State itself. It regulates the inheritance, assumes the guardianship of minors, on the death of one or both of the parents—becomes itself the parent in the absence or failure

of parents to fulfill their obligations. It is, not only as violations of the purity of the human heart, as destructive of all the happiness of which the family is the source, but as direct attacks upon the State as dependent upon the family, that we are bound to oppose all theories that interfere with the sanctity of the family, and to restrain by the severest penalties of the law any attempt to carry them out into overt act, either by the advocates of polygamy, or the still baser advocates of free love. I say baser. Polygamy is heathenish; free love is simply brutal.

But does the State touch upon the sphere of religion? This also falls to be discussed by another during the sittings of this convention. Shall we have the Bible in the schools? The Supreme Court of the State of Ohio must now decide, and perhaps the Supreme Court of the United States ultimately. Shall we have a quiet Sabbath in which to worship God, free from the rush, tumult, and confusion of business? This has been decided in the negative. Sabbath business and Sabbath processions have carried the day thus far over the Christian sentiment of the community-over the rights of worship. Step by step the enemy gains, and the Christian sentiment is overbalanced by a contemptible minority of the people, because, in an unfortunate hour, they accepted a Constitution which has no clause recognizing the great moral power which has made and preserves the nation. The State composed of Christian men, the State in which Christianity is the controlling power, the State which would crumble to atoms in a moment if this influence were withdrawn, must urge its claims in a thousand points, and might as well attempt to escape from the blue canopy above us as from the questions which its presence necessarily requires.

This is but an imperfect outline of the character and some of the functions of the power which we call a nation, but sufficient to show that it is a moral personality, created in the moral sphere of God's government, and controlling by its continual presence and power the destiny of the millions of which it is composed, and whose interests are committed to its guardianship. If this being has no moral character, then the word has no significance; man walks in a vain show, his loftiest aspirations are the dream of a vagrant imagination, his spirit is that of the brute that goeth downward, and he may as well conclude that his moral convictions are, perhaps, deeper, but as vain as the religion of Mr. Darwin's dog barking on a summer day at a parasol shaken by the wind on the lawn. Our appeal, however, is not to the devotees of a degrading philosophy, but to the Christian people of the United States, who believe in God, in Christianity, and in the Bible. By all such, if they are consistent with themselves, the fundamental principles of this reform must be accepted; the arrangements of details and expressions may be safely left to the wisdom of the future.

But to whom is the nation accountable? To its own citizens? But they are the State. To other nations? Only in its relations to them, and just as each individual person has the right to pursue the end of his own being, without giving account to his fellow-men individually or collectively, so the nation has a right to pursue its own independent path, accountable not to one nor to all the nations of the earth for its conduct, unless it so endanger the common welfare of mankind as to require its suppression. The nation is accountable to God alone. Before His bar it ever stands, is continually undergoing its judgments, and receiving its sentence, and lives or dies according to its deeds. A great scholar of our age asserts that no nation has ever existed in one form for a thousand years. Neither Assyria, Babylon, or Rome, could boast of a millenium. Why have they perished? Not because of any law that de