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GREAT SPEECH,

DELIVERED IN NEW YORK CITY,

HENRY WARD BEECHER,

ON THE

Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories

OF MAN AND SOCIETY,

January 14, 1855.

ROCHESTER:

STEAM PRESS OF A. STRONG & CO., COR. OF STATE AND BUFFALO STREETS.

Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories OF MAN AND SOCIETY.

The Eighth Lecture of the Course before the Anti-Slavery Society, was delivered, January 14, 1855, at the Tabernacle, New York, by the Rev. HENRY WARD BEECHER. The subject, at the present time, is one of peculiar interest, as touching the questions of Slavery and Know-Nothingism, and, together with the popularity of the lecturer, drew together a house-full of auditors.

There were a number of gentlemen of distinction, occupying seats on the rostrum--among whom were the Hon. Joshua R. Giddings, James Mott, of Philadelphia, and Mr. Dudley, of Buffalo.

Mr. Beecher was introduced to the audience by Mr. OLIVER JOHNSON, who said:

MR. BEECHER, on presenting himself, was received with loud and hearty applause. He spoke as follows:

But New-England was not raised up by Divine Providence to play a mean part in the world's affairs.

Remember, that New-England brought to America those principles which every State in the Union has more or less thoroughly adopted.

New-England first formed those institutions which liberty requires for beneficient activity; and from her, both before and since the Revolution, they have been copied throughout the Land. Having given to America its ideas and its institutions, I think the North is bound to stand by them.

Then she began to recede before the rising of another power. For the last fifty years, upon the national platform have stood arrayed two champions in mortal antagonism--New-England and the near North--representing personal freedom, civil liberty, universal education, and a religious spirit which always sympathises with men more than with Governments.

The New-England theory of Government has always been in its element--first, independent men; then democratic townships; next republican States, and, in the end, a Federated Union of Republican States. All her economies, her schools, her policy, her industry, her wealth, her intelligence, have been at agreement with her theory and policy of Government. Yet, New-England, strong at home, compact, educated, right-minded; has gradually lost influence, and the whole North with her.

The Southern League of States, have been held together by the cohesive power of Common Wrong. Their industry, their policy, their whole interior, vital economy, have been at variance with the apparent principles of their own State Governments, and with the National Institutions under which they exist. They have stood upon a narrow basis, always shaking under them, without general education, without general wealth, without diversified industry. And yet since the year 1800, they have steadily prevailed against Representative New-England and the North. The South, the truest representation of Absolutism under republican forms, is mightier in our National Councils and Policy to-day than New-England, the mother and representative of true republicanism and the whole free North.

And now it has come to pass that, in the good providence of God, another opportunity has been presented to the whole North to reassert her place and her influence, and to fill the institutions of our country with their original and proper blood. I do not desire that she should arise and put on her beautiful garments, because she is my mother, and your mother; not because her hills were the first which my childhood saw, that has never since beheld any half so dear; nor from any sordid ambition, that she should be great in this world's greatness; nor from any profane wish to abstract from the rightful place and influence of any State, or any section of our whole country. But I think that God sent New-England to these shores as his own messenger of mercy to days and ages, that have yet far to come ere they are born! She has not yet told this Continent all that is in her heart. She has sat down like Bunyan's Pilgrim, and slept in the bower by the way, and where she slept she has left her roll--God grant that she hath not lost it there while she slumbered!

I wish to call your patient attention to the real nature of this contest. It is,

As a material creature, man ranks among physical forces. Rights come from his spiritual nature. The body is of the earth, and returns to earth, and is judged by earthly measures. The soul is of God, and returns to God, and is judged by Divine estimates. And this is the reason why a free, unobstructed Bible always works toward human rights. It is the only basis on which the poor, the ignorant, the weak, the laboring masses can entrench against oppression.

What, then, is that theory of man which Christianity gives forth?

Of how little value is a ship standing helpless on the stocks--but half-built, and yet building--to one who has no knowledge of the ocean, or of what that helpless hulk will become the moment she slides into her element, and rises and falls upon the flood with joyous greeting!

The value of an acorn is not what it is, but what it shall be when nature has brooded it, and brought it up, and a hundred years have sung through its branches and left their strength there!

This view assumes distinctness and intensity, when we add to it the relationship which subsists between man and his Maker.

This relationship begins in the fact that we are created in the divine image; that we are connected with God, therefore, not by Government alone, but by nature.

This initial truth is made radiant with meaning, by the teaching of Christianity that every human being is dear to God: a teaching which stands upon that platform, built high above all human deeds and histories, the advent, incarnation, passion, and death of Christ, as a Savior of men.

The race is a brotherhood; God is the Father, Love is the law of this great human commonwealth, and Love knows no servitude. It is that which gilds with liberty whatever it touches.

One more element to human liberty is contributed by Christianity, in the solemn development of man's accountability to God, by which condition hereafter springs from pure character here.

You cannot present man as a subject of Divine government, held responsible for results, compared with which the most momentous earthly deeds are insignificant, plied with influences accumulating from eternity, and by powers which though they begin on earth in the cradle, gentle as a mother's voice singing lullaby, go on upward, taking every thing as they go, till they reach the whole power of God; and working out results that outlast time and the sun, and revolve forever in flaming circuits of disaster, or in sacred circles of celestial bliss; you cannot present man as the center and subject of such an august and eternal drama, without giving him something of the grandeur which resides in God himself, and in the spheres of immortality!

Who shall trifle with such a creature, full bound upon such an errand through life, and swelling forth to such a destiny? Clear the place where he stands?--give him room and help, but no hinderance, as he equips for eternity!--loosen the bonds of man, for God girds him!--take off all impediments, for it is his life and death and struggle for immortality!

That this effect of accountability to God was felt by the inspired writers, cannot be doubtful to any who weigh such language as this:

These are the things that give value to man.

A Christianity that takes care of the rich, the strong, the governing class, and neglects the poor, and ignorant, and the unrefined, as the antitype of Christ.

But if he be an heir, waiting for an inheritance of God, eternal in the heavens, woe be to him that dare lay a finger on him because he is a minor!

I dwell the longer upon this view because it carries the world's heart in it. We must deepen our thinkings of man, and bore for the springs of liberty far below the drainings of surface strata, down deep, Artesian, till we strike something that shall be beyond winter or summer, frost or drouth.

A Christianity that tells man what his origin is--of God; his destiny, to God again; his errand on earth, to grow toward goodness, and make the most of himself--this Christianity is rank rebellion in despotisms, and insurrection on plantations. It cannot be preached there.

In the South, exactly the reverse is true, not by stealth, not by neglect of a recognized principle, but as the result of men's ideas, and by organized arrangements. Touch a hireling's wages, in the North, and the Law stands to defend him and beat you down! Take the laborer's wages in the South, and the law stands to defend you, and beat him down.

Beat a man, in the North, for a private wrong done, and the law will strike you. But in the South, it is the right of the white, unquestioned and unquestionable to beat every third person in the community.

Let the proudest mill-owner break but the skin of the poorest operative in Lowell or Lawrence, and both law and public sentiment, alike, would grasp and punish him!

But in the South the law refuses to look at any degree of cruelty in chastisements upon the universal laborer, short of maiming or death, and public sentiment is but little better than the law.

The laborer in the North answers to a tribunal; in the South, to a master, incensed, passionate, vindictive in justice executed upon all symptoms of resisting manhood!

In the South it is a part of the civil rights of men to do these things whenever they please. And though public sentiment is better than law, yet as no public sentiment on earth is a match for legalized lust, or avarice, or the grip of misfortune, these things are continually done, and remorselessly. Cruelty, chastity, virtue, do not mean the same things in the South as in the North. A man is not blemished by deeds and indulgencies, upon a plantation, among slaves, which in the North, would strike him through with infamy and house him in the penitentiary.

It needs no words, now, to convince you, that out of such different theories of men, there will exist in the North and in the South, extremely different ideas of Society, Government, and Public Policy.

In the South, society is divided into two great and prominent classes--the ruling and the obeying--the thinking and the working. The labor of the South is performed by three million creatures who represent the heathen idea of man.

All the benefits that have accrued to man from Christianity, are appropriated and monopolized by the white population.

Here is a seam that no sophistry can sew up. Here is a society organized, not on an idea of equal rights, and of inequalities only as they spring from difference of worth, but on an idea of permanent, political, organized inequality among men. They carry it so far that the theory of Slave law regards the slave not as an inferior man, governed, for his own good as well as for the benefit of the society at large, but it pronounces him, in reiterated forms, not a man at all, but a chattel.

Out of such original and radical differences, there must flow a perpetual contrast and opposition of policies and procedures, in the operation of society and of business. We will select but a few, of many, subjects of contrast, Work, Education, Freedom of Speech and of the Press, and Religion.

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