I see no reason, however, to modify my language.
It is too often the case that men of the loftiest ideals seek to
attain them by the most objectionable means, and the maxim Fiat
justitia ruat coelum cannot be literally applied to great affairs.
The conversion of the Mahomedan world to Christianity would be a
nobler work than even the emancipation of the negro, but the
missionary who began with reviling the faithful, and then proceeded
to threaten them with fire and the sword unless they changed their
creed, would justly be called a fanatic. Yet the abolitionists did
worse than this, for they incited the negroes to insurrection. Nor do
I think that the question is affected by the fact that many of the
abolitionists were upright, earnest, and devout. A good man is not
necessarily a wise man, and I remember that Samuel Johnson and John
Wesley supported King George against the American colonists.)
Unfortunately, something more than mere political rancour was at
work. The areas of slave and of free labour were divided by an
artificial frontier. "Mason and Dixon's line," originally fixed as
the boundary between Pennsylvania on the north and Virginia and
Maryland on the south, cut the territory of the United States into
two distinct sections; and, little by little, these two sections,
geographically as well as politically severed, had resolved
themselves into what might almost be termed two distinct nations.
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