In that hour men remembered what their fathers had endured to found the Republic and free institutions. When the news came of the attack upon Fort Sumter, the better angels of men's natures did touch "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land," and the tones swelled the chorus of the Union. What other land offered poor men an opportunity for office, wealth and honours, with full liberty of thought and speech? Had not the fathers lived and died to make education democratic through the public schools? Had not the fathers given life itself to establish the freedom of the printing-press and freedom of discussion? Had not the fathers bought at great price their political liberty, and the rights of the ballot? Was not the land dedicated to toleration and charity in religion? Was the work of Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton to go down in ruin and nothingness? While the old world, with her tyrannies, scoffed at the failure of the Republic, men thought of Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. They thought of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They recalled the tribute of one of the greatest of English statesmen, who characterized the American Constitution as "the greatest political instrument ever struck off by the unaided genius of man." And now the Republic was to be destroyed, the Constitution torn into shreds and stamped under foot, the Declaration of Independence made a thing of jibes and scorn in the palaces of Madrid and Constantinople, while slavery, with black fingers, was to knit its claws into the throat of the angel of liberty and choke the life out. Suddenly men saw that the only way to insure liberty for the white race was to destroy slavery for the black races. Men determined that the majority had their rights, and that these rights should not be wrested away by the minority, fighting in the interests of slavery. Democracy, the "last, best hope of earth," should not fail! In that moment Liberty stretched forth her sceptre of justice, "red with insufferable wrath," and her clarion voice rang to the outermost corners of the land. Three millions of men assembled to swear fealty to God and country. Then they marched away, through the towns and across the prairies, into thickets and swamps, to be pierced by bullets, torn by shells, to eat crusts, wear rags, shiver in the cold, burn in the heat, famish in the prison, welter in the bloody trench, above them a fiery hail, beside them their dying comrades falling into the arms of death. It is a strange, wild, chivalrous, divine story of the world's greatest enthusiasm, our fathers' enthusiasm for liberty and democracy! What God thinks of freedom, is written in the price that people paid for it! What God thinks of slavery is in the woe and sorrow and wreckage it has always brought upon those who have sought to live on the sweat of other men's faces!