The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and abroad, be interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social or humanitarian democracy.It was because they regarded the war waged on the side of the Union as waged in the interest of this terrible democracy, that our bishops and clergy sympathized so little with the Government in prosecuting it; not, as some imagined, because they were disloyal, hostile to American or territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor of freedom for all men, whatever their race or complexion.They had no wish to see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would have regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up;but they held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy represented by Northern abolitionists as hostile alike to the Church and to civilization.For the same reason that they were backward or reserved in their sympathy, all the humanitarian sects at home and abroad were forward and even ostentatious in theirs.The Catholics feared the war might result in encouraging La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian sects trusted that it would.If the victory of the Union should turn out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized world will have no reason to applaud it.
That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be taken as a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be idle to deny.It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party throughout the world are in ecstasies over it.The party claim it.The European Socialists and Red Republicans applaud it, and the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict on us the deep humiliation of their congratulations.A cause that can be approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must be strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element.
It is no compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of men who assert not only people-king, but people-God; and those Americans who are delighted with them are worse enemies to the American democracy than ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow conspirators, and more contemptible, as the swindler is more contemptible than the highwayman.
But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their host.Not they are the real victors.When the smoke of battle has cleared away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by the Republic, and that that alone has triumphed.The abolitionists, in so far as they asserted the unity of the race and opposed slavery as a denial of that unity, have also won; but in so far as they denied the reality or authority of territorial and individual circumscriptions, followed a purely socialistic tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a watery sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late insurrectionary States are fully reconstructed.The Southern or egoistical democrats, so far as they denied the unity and solidarity of the race, the rights of society over individuals, and the equal rights of each and every individual in face of the state, or the obligations of society to protect the weak and help the helpless, have been also defeated; but so far as they asserted personal or individual rights which society neither gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action, they share in the victory, as the future will prove.
European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly against all legitimate authority, whether in Church or State, have no lot or part in the victory of the American people: not for them nor for men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams, have our brave soldiers fought, suffered and bled for four years of the most terrible war in modern times, and against troops as brave and as well led as themselves; not for them has the country sacrificed a million of lives, and contracted a debt of four thousand millions of dollars, besides the waste and destruction that it will take years of peaceful industry to repair.They and their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and civilization has won its most brilliant victory in all history.The American democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species of barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate authority, and made its natural association henceforth with all civilized governments--not with the revolutionary movements to overthrow them.The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative; but they have learned a lesson, which they much needed against false democracy: civil war has taught them that "the sacred right of insurrection" is as much out of place in a democratic state as in an aristocratic or a monarchical state; and that the government should always be clothed with ample authority to arrest and punish whoever plots its destruction.They must never be delighted again to have their government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor to his own sovereign as the nation's guest.The people of the Northern States are hardly less responsible for the late rebellion than the people of the Southern States.Their press had taught them to call every government a tyranny that refused to remain quiet while the traitor was cutting its throat or assassinating the nation, and they had nothing but mad denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the Neapolitan governments for their severity against conspirators and traitors.
