If I were to propose a plan to meet the duties and perils of this tremendous emergency that presses upon us, I would engage the whole power of this nation, the willing co-operation of the North and the South, if it were possible, to prepare this people for freedom; and then I would give them a country beyond the mountains,--say the Californias,--where they might be a nation by themselves. Ah! if the millions upon millions spent upon a Mexican war could be devoted to this purpose,--if all the energies of this country could be employed for such an end,--what a noble spectacle were it for all the world to behold, of help and redemption to an enslaved people! What a purifying and ennobling ministration for ourselves! The intimacy with Dr. Charming re-inforced the conclusions which were native to Dr. Dewey's temperament. The moderate view, the dread of overstatement, the fear of fanaticism, the faith in reason, the love of tranquillity, the desire after truth, were rooted in his mind. His constitutional conservatism was confirmed. Then he was a Unitarian, and therefore rational in his methods, inclined to judge by arguments, to sift opinions by the understanding. The abolitionists were, for the most part, either Calvinists or transcendentalists, people who followed an inward voice, who placed interior conviction before ratiocination, and encouraged moral sentiment to take the lead in action, blowing coals into a flame, and not content unless they saw a blaze. The Unitarians, as a class, were not ardent disciples of any moral cause, and took pride in being reasoners, believers in education, and in general social influence, in the progress of knowledge, and the uplifting of humanity by means of ideas. The habit of discountenancing passion may have been fostered in a school like this. Perhaps if young Dewey had continued in his old belief he would have been a more vehement reformer than he was. His natural glow was softened down into a mild effulgence, communicating warmth to his convictions, but not producing a burning zeal for any substance of doctrine. His power of emotion made him a powerful preacher but prevented his being a great philosopher. Dr. Bellows, who was his close friend for many years, described him as a man of "massive intellectual power," and then went on to impute to him the gifts that belong to the pulpit orator: "poetic imagination," a "rare dramatic faculty of representation." Perhaps by "massive" Dr. Bellows meant the power to throw thoughts in a mass, with cumulative effect. This power Dr. Dewey certainly possessed in an extraordinary degree. But of philosophical talent he had little. Indeed, he seemed to be conscious of this himself. At the end of his first lecture before the Lowell Institute he said: