Lanterna Rally

Author: Francis Lieber

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-16

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 9781331493150

Excerpt from No Party Now, but All for Our Country Two years have passed; uncounted sacrifices have been made - sacrifices of wealth, of blood, and limb, and life - of friendship and brotherhood, of endeared and hallowed pursuits and sacred ties - and still the civil war is raging in bitterness and heart-burning - still we make the same profession, and still we pledge ourselves firmly to hold on to our cause, and persevere in the struggle into which unrighteous men, bewildered by pride, and stimulated by bitter hatred, have plunged us. We profess ourselves to be loyal citizens of these United States; and by loyalty we mean a candid and loving devotion to the object to which a loyal man - a loyal husband, a loyal friend, a loyal citizen - devotes himself. We eschew the attenuated argument derived by trifling scholars from meagre etymology. We take the core and substance of this weighty word, and pledge ourselves that we will loyally - not merely outwardly and formally, according to the letter, but fervently and according to the spirit - adhere to our country, to her institutions, to freedom and her power, and to that great institution called the government of our country, founded by our fathers, and loved by their sons, and by all right-minded men who have become citizens of this land by choice and not by birth - who have wedded this country in the maturity of their age as verily their own. We pledge ourselves as National men, devoted to the Nationality of this great people. No government can wholly dispense with loyalty, except the fiercest despotism ruling by naked intimidation; but a republic stands in greater need of it than any other government, and most of all a republic beset by open rebellion and insidious treason. Loyalty is pre-eminently a civic virtue in a free country. It is patriotism cast in the graceful mould of candid devotion to the harmless government of an unshackled nation. In pledging ourselves thus, we know of no party. Parties are unavoidable in free countries, and may be useful if they acknowledge the country far above themselves, and remain within the sanctity of the fundamental law which protects the enjoyment of liberty prepared for all within its sacred domain. But Party has no meaning in far the greater number of the highest and the common relations of human life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.