the Rebel Slavemongers themselves, who, in Satanic audacity, openly avow that Slavery is the end and aim of the government they seek to establish, so that the whole bloody war they wage is all in the name of Slavery. Therefore, in battling against the Rebellion, we battle against Slavery. Freedom is the growing inspiration of our armies and the just inscription of our banners. Such a war is not a war of subjugation, but a war of liberation, to save the Republic from a petty oligarchy of taskmasters, and to rescue four millions of human beings from cruel oppression. Not to subjugate, but to liberate, is the object of our Holy War. And yet British statesmen, forgetting for the moment all moral distinctions, forgetting God, who will not be forgotten, gravely announce that our cause must fail. Alas! individual wickedness is too often successful; but a pretended nation, suckled in wickedness and boasting its wickedness, a new Sodom, with all the guilt of the old, waiting to be blasted, and yet, in barefaced effrontery, openly seeking the fellowship of Christian powers, is doomed to defeat. Toleration of such a pretension is practical atheism. Chronology and geography are both offended. Piety stands aghast. In this age of light, and in countries boasting civilization, there can be no place for its barbarous plenipotentiaries. As well expect crocodiles crawling on the pavements of London and Paris, or the carnivorous idols of Africa installed for worship in Westminster Abbey and Notre Dame. Even if the Republic were less strong, yet I am glad to believe that the Rebellion must fail from the essential impossibility of any such wicked success. The responsibilities of the Christian powers would be increased by our weakness. Behind our blockade there would be _a moral blockade_; behind our armies there would be the aroused judgment of the civilized world. But not on that account can we hesitate. This is no time to pause. Thus do I, who formerly pleaded so often for Peace, now insist upon Liberty as its indispensable condition,[160]--clearly because, in this terrible moment, there is no other way to that sincere and solid peace without which is endless war. Even on economic grounds, it were better that this war should proceed rather than recognize any partition, which, beginning with humiliation, must involve the perpetuation of armaments and break out again in blood. But there is something worse than waste of money; it is waste of character. Give me any peace but a liberticide peace. In other days the immense eloquence of Burke was stirred against a regicide peace. But a peace founded on the killing of a king is not so bad as a peace founded on the killing of Liberty; nor can the saddest scenes of such a peace be so sad as the daily life legalized by Slavery. A queen on the scaffold is not so pitiful a sight as a woman on the auction-block.