Look at it as you will, and it is always the scab, the canker, the “barebones,” and the shame of the country,--wrong, not merely in the abstract, as is often admitted by its apologist, but wrong in the concrete also, and possessing no single element of right.
He describes slavery as a deep moral and societal shame for the country, fundamentally wrong in every aspect.
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Nay, more,--if it would be criminal in these several clusters of States to reëstablish the Institution of War as Arbiter of Justice, then is it criminal in the Commonwealth of Nations to continue it.
It is larger than the entire profit of all the commerce and manufactures of the world.
As the Brotherhood of Man is practically recognized, it becomes impossible to restrict the feeling within any exclusive circle of country, and to set up an unchristian distinction of honor between civil war and international war.
They belong to a system so essentially irrational, that all the admitted virtues of many of its agents cannot save it from judgment.
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