The Shasta courier., 1868-01-04
war the Penalty Of National Crime.

AT length the full lorbed sun of Freedom
and Enlightenment has risen upon the New
World. The trailing shadows of the darker
ages hare gone down to the deep abyss of
oblivion. We read it by the electric light
that courses the desert We feel it burning
on the altars Of our hearts. We translate it
from the shining alphabet Of the stars
And now we lock back with amazement,
wondering how we could have lived SO long
in a condition of so great national gloom
During three-quarte-s of a century, we have
been resisting the DEGREES Of manifest des.
tiny, deaf TO the appeals of humanity, blind
to the example Of religion, insensible to the
progress 81 civilization, and forgetful that in
the dark places of the land, millions of our
fellow creatures were crying nightly to
God, with the rude eloquence of the barba-
rian (which in the auditorium of heaven,
and having been uttered in the cause Of JUS
tice, is mighty as the defamation of St.
Paul, or tenderly moving as the pleading of
St. John. We were given up to the idolatry
Of mammon. At the North, great ships
with strained hulls and bellied sails, crowd
ed our harbors with the richest commerce Of
the world. In the East, we were continually
enriched by the driving wheels of manufac-
lures. From the mighty West, the gentle
Ceres came, with her snowy shoulders laden
with full cared corn. From the South, mil
lions of swarthy creatures brought their
burthens of the Imperial fabric. When tie
sun rose on our national splendors. thousands
of stately churches cast their long tapering
shadows over the land. The institutions of
charity stood everywhere. Adventurous
ships bore away our missionaries to distant
islands of paganism; and when the wall of
r,i, |,
hearts warmed with sympathy and our eyes
oyerfowed with tears.
All the while we had forgotten that we
were ourselves oppressors from whom. hu-
manity reconciled in horror that we were
pointed at by the accusatory finger of civili-
cation that religion crossed herself when
our inhumanitv was named that four mil.
lions of Gods people were held by US in
bondage, in comparison with which the
worst despotsm of civilization were the
fullest freedom. Under the sanction of
laws which had become venerable through
their very antiquity, we took the child from
the mother, the husband from the wife, the
father from the family, and sold them to
strangers and when the poor creatures
complained or tried to run away, we tied
them to the whipping post, branded them
with hot irons; rivited their shricking
limbs together took the price of their blood
and suffering and despair, and drove them
away. God forgive US but we have done
all these wicked things, under the authority
Of free constitution and in the presence of
heaghty flag to which the oppressed of
other nations were stretching their imploring
hands.
- If there is a God-and that there is. all
nature cries aloud in all her works-he must
delight in iustice.' If the lonely. friendless
sparrow faleth not to the ground without
the consent of its Maker, why should mil
lions perish, with souls immortal, with all
the faculties for moral suffering, with living
hearts to create and tongues to utter the
most impul,ve emotions of prayer? We
must acknowledge it. We must either deny
that living and true God controls the affairs
of the universe. or admit that the disaster of
civil war has justly followed our national
crimes. If such oppression could not iu the
course of century, invoke from Heaven
some stern rebuke, the spiritual state were a
soulless desert, and God himself creature
of the imagination. deaf as the statue of
Dagon, and insensible to justice as the
sacred monsters that swim the Ganges.-
Salem Unionist.