Memoirs of John Adams Dix; comp. by his son, Morgan Dix.

208

M EMOIRS OF JOHN ADAMS DIX.

leave it to time and to the order of Providence to determine
what shall be the legitimate fruits of measures which she
believes to be wrong, and to which she can never yield her
assent."
Let me give one more extract, full of significance, and now
to be read with painful interest-it expresses the strife in a
mind which weighs two evils against each other:
"Mr. President, I regret to hear either disunion or civil
war spoken of in connection with this measure. But, I repeat, the former is to be preferred to the latter. In wars
waged with foreign countries, deplorable as they always are,
there are some moral fruits which atone, in a slight degree,
for their accompanying evils. There is the sense of national
honor-the parent of high achievement; the sentiment of patriotic devotion to the country, which shrinks from no labor
or sacrifice in the public cause; and the feeling of mutual
sympathy and dependence, which pervades and unites all
classes in the hour of adversity and peril. Far as they are
overbalanced by the domestic bereavement and the public
evil which war always brings in its train, they serve to purify the thoughts of something of their selfishness by turning
them away from the sordid channels in which they are too
apt to run. But civil war has no ameliorations. It is pure,
unmixed demoralization. It dissolves all national and domestic ties. It renders selfishness more odious by wedding it to
hatred and cruelty. The after-generation which reaps the bitter harvest of intestine war is scarcely less to be commiserated
than that by whose hands the poisonous seed is sown. Less,
far less than these, would be the evils of disunion."@
I think there is no argument for the extension of slavery
which is not met and answered in the speech from which I

* " Speeches and Addresses," vol. i., pp. 195-197.