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قراءة كتاب A Discourse for the Time, delivered January 4, 1852 in the First Congregational Unitarian Church
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A Discourse for the Time, delivered January 4, 1852 in the First Congregational Unitarian Church
how mighty and extensive its influence is in deadening our hearts, and controlling our national action. Although he is a man of profound sagacity, yet, with all the information that may have been furnished him, it can only be by degrees, and by actual observation, that his mind will win its way to a true and terrible conviction of the actual state of the case. But he will—he must see how the matter stands; and he will declare, most fervently do I trust, what he cannot help seeing. The fact must become as plain to him as noonday, that there is no one thing in which the oppressed nations of Europe have a deeper interest, than in the abolition of American Slavery; because this is the one thing which prevents the full expression of our sympathy in their behalf, and neutralizes that moral aid, which, if we rendered it to the full extent of our power, would make all material aid entirely superfluous. Some of his words the other evening were very significant. Having said that he had done nothing, and would do nothing to interfere with our domestic affairs, he added that remarkable declaration:—'I more and more perceive, in the words of Hamlet, that there are more things in heaven and earth, than were dreamed of in my philosophy.'
How could he have dreamed that a people who had made such a solemn declaration of human rights before all the world, a people so lavish in the praise of Liberty, were clinging with such desperation to Oppression, as if it were the very life and soul of their Union and their Power. No matter how much he may have been told, and he is in nothing more remarkable than in the extent of his information, he has not yet known—he cannot know—it could not have entered into his generous heart to imagine, that this Domestic Institution of ours is the one thing that exerts the most marked and predominating influence on our domestic and our foreign policy. He does not see, but he must, that it is the one thing that will make his appeal to our National Government utterly in vain, and that his silence in regard to it will avail him nothing. It must become plain to him that we are ready enough to intervene when the Slave Power requires it for the increase and extension of its own strength. For that we are ready to go to war with our neighbors, and rob them of their territory. In that behalf our statesmen have sought to enlist the interests and sympathies of foreign nations. And that it is, whose interests will prevent us from a full and generous expression of our interest in the downtrodden of other lands. We are interfering with human rights at home, we are constitutionally bound to interfere with them, and we hold it for our advantage to do so; and we cannot intervene to prevent interference with them abroad. On this account alone, could a man of such rare power, of such wonderful eloquence, coming among us upon such a mission, fail. Yes, this favorite domestic institution, corrupting the whole administration of our government at home and abroad,—this it is that will disappoint and defeat the Hungarian patriot's idolised hope. He has come hither as to the very temple of Freedom, and he finds coiled up under her very altar, as its guardian, the serpent of Oppression, and already its deadly hiss has rung in his surprised ear.
American Slavery has much to answer for; but if it adds this to the mountain of its iniquities, if it is the cause why the hope of bleeding and fettered Europe is blasted, if it break the noble heart of Hungary's devoted servant and chief, and more than all, if it cause him to falter in the cause of universal humanity, what tongue now silent will not join in execrating it? what heart, hitherto cold, will not consecrate itself to the work of its abolition?
The nations of the old world, degraded, trampled upon, and bleeding under the relentless feet of arbitrary power, long and pray for emancipation. The glorious vision of Liberty flits