But assume, on the contrary, that the prediction is essentially well founded; that we have before us, in the immediate future, a period of extreme exhaustion, depression, and even of temporary discouragement in the public mind. All this need not, to the philosophic mind, cause the slightest apprehension of permanent evil results--of any serious check even, to our inevitable destiny, as the heirs of unbounded prosperity and the leaders of the vanguard of the progress of the world. A halt, in this sense, in the rapidity of our career, would be only the necessary price of our immense and invaluable achievement, the elimination of chattel slavery from the constitution of our social and political life. We have still other and great social evils remaining behind. The scientific and harmonious adjustment of the relations of capital to labor, of the employers to the employed, in the constitution of our free competitive society as it will still remain after Slavery is dead, is the next great practical question which will force itself upon our attention, and insist upon being definitively settled, before we can enter upon that ulterior triumphant national development which is reserved, in the decrees of destiny, for us as a people. This problem, seemingly so difficult, will be found unexpectedly easy of solution, so soon as the thinking and practical mind of the people is seriously called to its consideration. It is worthy of observation, that periods of great pecuniary depression are favorable to the progress of ideas. It is written in the Providence of God that the American people must, within the few years to come, solve the whole problem of justice to the laboring man; must, indeed, accept its office as the Champion and the Illustrator, in a practical way, of Universal Justice, in all the relations of life. Are we prepared to enter on this career, intelligently, lovingly, and with voluntary alacrity, from affection to the True and the Good; or must we be again scourged into the consideration of great questions lying immediately in our way, by the providential inflictions of disaster and distress?
We can now see easily enough, that had we been ready and desirous, as a people, to do justice to the black man, we should have escaped the horrors of a great war. We may predict, with the assurance of a religious faith, backed, we might almost affirm, by the certainty of a scientific demonstration, that if we are already sufficiently prepared to be simply just, we shall be saved from the serious infliction of more national suffering; and that if, on the contrary, this preparation of the heart and the head has not been wrought in us by what we have already endured, we shall be called directly and continuously to the suffering of more and perhaps greater inflictions. 'Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,' but not blindly nor uselessly, and not, therefore, after the right frame of mind has been wrought in the subject of the punishment. The law is precisely the same, whether we speak theologically or from the profoundest philosophical principles; and it may almost be said that the American people have only to choose whether they will immediately enter, with the close of the war, upon a higher career of prosperity, or whether they will endure an additional term of tuition in the school of adversity. These words may seem mystical, unaccompanied with further illustration and elaboration of the ideas, but it is not the place here to pursue them.