The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 74, December, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 74, December, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
We are astonished to find a liar in the lightning of heaven over the
telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human
altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to
carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself
flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military
movements and fortified posts and the numbers of dead and wounded on
either side. Kinglake calls the telegraph a device by which a clerk
dictates to a nation. Who but the nation, or some part of it, dictates
to the clerk? He does not control, but records, the sentiment of the
community in all his invented facts; and when we hear the click or read
the strange dots, we want some trustworthy voucher or responsible human
auditor even of these electric accounts.
But, creatures of sympathy, needy dependants on approbation, as we are,
shall we surrender to all or any of these lies? No,--there is a sympathy
of truth, to whose higher court and supreme verdict we must appeal.
Before it let us stand ourselves, perpetual witnesses of the very truth
of God in our breast. Said the lion-hearted Andrew Jackson, "When I
decide on my course, I do not ask what people will think, but look into
my own heart for guidance, believing that all brave men will agree with
me."
"As the minister began on the subject of Slavery, I left the church,"
said a respectable citizen to a modest woman, of whose consent with him
he felt sure.
"And did the minister go on?" she gently inquired.
"Yes, he went on," the mistaken citizen replied.
So, in this land, let us go on in the way of justice and truth we have
at last begun. Let us have no more sympathetic, however once legal, lies
for oppression and wrong. We shall be as good as a thousand years old,
when we are through our struggle. For the respect of Europe let us have
no anxiety. It will come cordially or by constraint, upon the victory of
the right and the reinstating of our manhood by the divine law, to the
discouragement of all iniquity at home or abroad. Our success will be a
signal for all the tyrannies, in which the proud and strong have been
falsely banded together to crush the ignorant and lowly, to come down.
The domineering political and ecclesiastical usurpers of exclusive
privilege will no longer give and take reciprocal support against the
rising of mankind than the Roman augurs could at last keep one another
in countenance. Let us go on, through dark omens as well as bright, and
suffer ourselves to have no doubting day. Let us show that something
besides a monarchy in this world can stand. On disbelievers and
obstructers let us have companion. They cannot live contented, and it is
not quite safe for them to die. The path of our progress opens clear.
Let us not admit the idea of failure. To think of failing is to fail. As
it was with the sick before their Saviour of old, only our faith can
make us whole.
* * * * *
SOMETHING ABOUT BRIDGES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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