The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 6, December 1863 | Page 6

on the subject of Slavery! Think of the end!
Nay, all enactments which accord with these deep decisions of the
National Conscience, which help them to better expression and clearer
acknowledgment, are the real Laws of the Land. All that oppose these
decisions, though passed by triumphant majorities, with loud jubilation,
and fastened on the Nation as its sense of right, are mere rubbish, sure
to be swept away as the waves of the National life roll on.
We, by no means, hold that even the best nation, in its most living laws,
always declares perfect truth and perfect right. Human errors and
weaknesses enter into all things with which men deal. And the Nation
is ordered and guided by men. Nevertheless the Nation is an authorized
teacher of morals, and these errors are the accidents of the institution.
They are not of its essence. So far as they exist, they block its working,
they stand in its way. Pure, clear Justice is the perfect ideal toward
which a living, advancing Nation aims. That it daily come nearer this
ideal is the basis of its permanence. And, meanwhile, though the result
be far from attained, we none the less hold that the Law of the Nation is,
to every man within it, the Law of God. His business, as a wise man, is
to accept it, obey it, help it to amendment where he believes there is
error, with all patience and loyalty.
For the first disorder in the makeup of man is wilfulness. The child
kicks and scratches in his cradle. It wants to have its own small will.

The first lesson it has to learn is the lesson of submission, that the
untried world, into which it is thrust, is not a place of self-pleasing but
of law. It takes parents and teachers years to get that fact through the
stubborn youngster's head. It will burn its fingers, it will tumble down
stairs, it will pitch head first over fences, because it will not learn to
forego its own small, ignorant will, and submit to wiser and larger wills.
In the good old days they used to think that matter ought to be learned
in childhood once for all, and they labored faithfully to convince us
urchins, by the unsparing logic of the rod, that the law of life is not
self-will. Some of us, possibly, remember those emphatic lessons yet.
It is hard, however, to learn this thing perfectly. And so after the
Mother, Father, and Teacher get through, the Nation takes up the lesson.
A wise, wide, unselfish will takes command, and puts down the narrow,
conceited, selfish will of the individual. The individual will may think
itself very wise and very right. But the large will, the broad, strong,
wise will of the Nation, comes and says: 'Here is the Law, the
embodiment of the great, wide, wise will, to which the wisest and the
strongest must submit and bow.'
That is the law of human position. Not self-will but obedience, not
anarchy but order, not mad uncontrolledness, but calm submission,
even to temporary error and wrong, is the road to ultimate perfection.
Therefore, we can say nothing too reverential of Law. We cannot guard
too jealously the clear trumpet-tongued preacher of everlasting right,
sounding out a great Nation's convictions of obligation and duty. Hedge
its sanctity with a ring wall of fire. Reverence the voice of the land for
right and order. We have exploded forever, let us trust, the notion of
'the right divine of kings to govern wrong.' We must cling, therefore,
with tenfold tenacity to the right divine of Law, the Sacred Majesty of
the Nation's settled Order.
But the Written Law is only one way in which the Nation brings its
teachings home to the individual. It is not the strongest way. The
Nation's most powerful formative influence lies in its traditions, its
unwritten law, its sense and feeling about the questions of human life
and conduct, handed down from father to son in the continuity of the

national life. And the power to hand these down depends on the fact
that the Nation is a living organism.
For examine, and you will find every nation has a power to mould men
after a certain model. We are Americans because we have been made
so by the national influence. Rome, in old time, moulded men after a
certain type, and, with infinite small diversities, made them all Romans.
Greece took them, and, on another model, made them Greeks. England
has the artistic power, and kneads the clay of childhood into the grown
up creature the world knows as an Englishman. France has the same
power, and manufactures the Frenchman.
Now this moulding power, which every nation has, and the greatest
nations the