The dangers and duties of the present crisis! : a discourse delivered in the Union Church, St. Louis, January 4, 1861 / Page: 8 of 18
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8
fro-ning battlements that cast their baleful shadow over the lovely
landscape. Laborers were needed to till those fields, yet almost every
third man I met was a soldier. It was with pride that I contrasted
t= :aud with my own. I said, we have rivers that flow with as bright
a ide, between hills just as fruitful, and under skies far nore bright.
lnut we need no " towers along the steep," no fortress of Ehrenbreitstein
f. owns over our cornfields and vineyards, and no hireling soldiery
obtrude upon the peaceful scene. But let our Union be dissolved, and
this boast can no longer be made by the American traveler. The
hills of the Ohio, and the bluffs of the Mississippi, will be crowned
with forts and arsenals, and our young men will be called from the
peaceful walks of life to man and defend them.
It becomes us, then, to consider well the character of such a strife
as would be inevitable, and here history must be our teacher. The
records of domestic wars should be re-read by us with a new and
painful interest, for in the historic page we would find our future mir-
rored. The ninety years' struggle in the Netherlands, and the strife
between the cantons of Switzerland, would have a terrible meaning
for us. I am aware that these conflicts were embittered by religious
differences, and this has led some to hope better things for us, where
no such element would enter into the strife. But this remark does
not apply to the wars between the states of Greece, that perhaps pre-
sent a nearer parallel to our condition than any other government the
world has ever seen. There is no page of history that has a deeper
interest for us than that on which Thucydides has recorded the horrors
of the Peloponessian war. Private friendship and the ties of blood
were as powerless to protect as civil rights and constitutional enact-
ments. Nothing was sacred, nothing safe. New crimes demanded
new names, and words of honorable use were degraded into the ex-
pression of those vices that grew in the hotbed of civil strife. Private
morality and public faith went down before the deluge of iniquity that
swept over the land. As we read, let us take warning.
But it may be said by the hopeful, that we are of a better stock;
that our Anglo-Saxon civilization has in it conservative elements that e
would keep us back from such a strife of devils. But our own ances-
tors answer this plea - the history of the mother country teaches us
unmistakably. That was a knightly scene in the Temple Garden,
in London, when the rival houses plucked the one a red and the other
a white rose, as badges of their parties, and left their quarrel to the
bloody arbitrament of arms. It was well nigh as imposing as those
gay military parades that cause the youth of this day to fall in love
with the pomp of war. Yet that war desolated England, and swept
the barons from the earth. Hume says: "The scaffold as well as the
field incessantly streamed with the noblest blood of England, spilt in
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Anderson, S. J. P., (Samuel James Pierce), 1841-1873. The dangers and duties of the present crisis! : a discourse delivered in the Union Church, St. Louis, January 4, 1861 /, pamphlet, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth497972/m1/8/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Schreiner University.