William E. Channing Memorial Lecture at Faneuil Hall; HENRY STEELE COMMAGEr

When liberty is in danger said young Wendell Phillips standing in this platform final Hall has the right it is her duty to strike the key note for these United States that great occasion when the golden voice of Wendell Phillips was first raised. When we first heard the mines and lived to the horrors of Boston that is why it's so appropriate that we meet here and this is a story a call to recall the memory of the man who was for over a generation. The conscience of Boston minister of the federal St.. Churches ministry embraced not only Boston but the whole of the East. But it is not the clergyman or the theologian we. Recall to celebrate here tonight. But the public figure and reformer. For 40 years his presence was a benediction to Boston and beyond Boston to the whole of New England saintliness was a challenge to see Him and His Holiness a rebuke to iniquity.

He made the most of Daish assumptions about human nature and shame man into granting them as he shamed the mayor of Boston into granting the use of this fall. His idealism was inexorable. His faith in the goodness of man ineradicable. In a man disappointed him as they so often did his grief stung them like heroes. He had not great learning but spoke with the voice of authority he had neither brilliance nor wit but wisdom and his works were read and pondered everywhere in the north. He had something of the innocence of Bronson all caught but he did not suffer fools gladly nor tried to live apart from man but accepted his responsibilities in society. His great tolerance did not paralyzes moral sensibilities nor his patience and understanding cool his passion for right just as not a heretic himself he made heresy acceptable not a revolutionist. He made revolution

respectable and lent dignity to every reform because servant even you with a moderate middle age with every year chanting grew more radical which is a model for all of us. The Peace Society of Massachusetts was born in his study and in his study to Dorothea Dick's penned movie memorial to the legislature of Massachusetts on the condition of the insane there to that other Boston heroine Elizabeth Peabody who served as Channy secretary for nine years laid the foundation for her a half century of good works. Jannie championed penal reform the evolution abolition of capital punishment and he assured his wealthy parishioners that the criminals had caught something of their infection from the rich immoral his great successor Theodore Parker was to hammer home in his famous sermons on the merchants and on the perishing and dangerous classes. He befriended brought Chanelle all conduct the Temple

School and Horace Mann a nurse that Harvard College addresses health to the education of the poor. He never quite moved over to radical Unitarianism but he was Catholic in his sympathies. He supported the Siemens evangelist and Herman Melville's father Taylor and he invited the rabbi who James Freeman Clarke to his pulpit and encourage that weathervane arrestees Bronson in his religious forays in all directions and he extended the hand of fellowship to the Catholic bishops uterus when Adnani land was judged for blasphemy. He had cast doubt upon the virgin birth you may remember it was Channing whose name had the petition for pardon and when the Come-Outers and fanatics gather jargons Greek conviction they had Channing's blessing. Only toward the end of his life did he identify himself openly with the major reform groups but he was through most of his life an inspiration and an ideal. And together with his great successor Theodore Parker he placed a religious even a clerical stamp upon the reform

movement of the mid 19th century. All in all the most remarkable reform movement with the most remarkable group of reformers in the whole of our history. On a fellowship it was perhaps only Boston in its hinterlands could have produced it. And even Boston has not produced its like since then. Call the roll of that company the names ring down the corridors of time. There was an eloquent window Phillips who made his debut in this hall and never thereafter retired from the conflict. Don't shilly shally Wendell his wife used to say to him and he never did. There was a Mr Bronson all caught father the immortal Little Women big and unworldly except when there was a call to battle. And his brother in law the beloved Samuel Joe made a veteran of many a rescue of fugitive slaves disobedient civil disobedience if you will. There was an angular Garrison fanatical about freedom and Horace Mann who freed the minds of children and Robert Graham to remember the working man and women and children

too. In Dr. Charles following of Harvard who had known tyranny in Germany and did not propose to stand by and watch it here there was a chevalier Dr. Harlow which fought for Greek independence and came back to work with the blind and for the slaves and Charles Sumner who stood in this very hall and announced on the 4th of July too that there was the true grandeur of Nations was to be a leader in peace not in war. There was your obscure Henry thorough civil disobedience attracted little attention is own day but has commanded some suits them. There were those wonderful women Lydia Maria Child with her attack on slavery only last memorable than that. Of the other New Englander Harriet Beecher Stowe. And there was Margaret Fuller who crusaded for women's rights and then went over to Italy and gave aid to the forces of liberation there. And Dorothea Dix who championed the cause of the insane everywhere in the western world and Elizabeth Peabody when her long life and all the other Crusades.

There was Emerson. There was Emerson who was the Col from whom all grew their milk as one of his contemporaries sin. And there was a mighty Theodore Parker Channing's Sasser as the great American preacher the most learned man an American the bravest to war himself out in his far ranging struggle for freedom for the fairer perishing classes of all mankind. What were they about these men and women so respectable and so heroic. Most of them were clergymen and all would vote so they would have said they were about their father's business. But they were secular too they thought Christianity was a weak day as much of the Sunday affair and were prepared to socialize the gospel. So they were about humanity's business. They were universal reformers. Nothing that concerned the moral welfare of man was alien to them. Prison and penal reform the welfare of laboring man children who were in Mill

as women who suffered indignities from the law and worse indignities from man the plight of the immigrant the tragic love of the perishing classes the poor the blind the deaf the feeble minded the tragic lot of the dangerous and criminal classes the cause of peace. The wrong of slavery. This reform movement which we associate with Channing and with his followers and disciples had a very special character one which marks it off from all the other reform movements of our history. First it was grounded on moral law and animated by moral Ferber in the eyes of the reformers all problems were ultimately moral. And salvation was to be achieved by squaring secular conduct with moral laws. Second they assumed indeed it was basic to the whole of their philosophy they assumed a divinity. We would now say the dignity of man. It was this assumption which explains the wide neck which the reformers cast for

once assume the divinity of all men black as well as white women as well as man the poor the emigrants the insane the immoral. Then you must logically try to remove all those impediments to the realisation of divinity. That is what Emerson see and the power which is at once a spring and regulator of all efforts of reform is a conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man which appears at the call of worth and in all particular reforms of the removing of some impediment. This reform movement was universal and the reason it was was philosophical as well as historical. This been in the third place that the crusades would have the city be aggressive. How remove the impediments. How removed except by incessant crusading by bringing men to their senses by legislation and of necessity by force and in the end they were prepared to use force against the greatest of evils.

The evil of Negro slavery. They were the most law abiding of man but done afraid of challenge not afraid to challenge and even to disobey laws if they thought they were morally wrong. They were the most respectable man graduates of Harvard College Almost all of them but they were not afraid to speak out in a good cause. Even if that meant social ostracism as you did for window Philip's conduct about it and how this or even to demonstrate if they thought that useful they did not always issue violence when he was drunk was very wrong of them. With this the attempted rescue of the slave Anthony Burns when reverend gentleman in cloth tore down the bannisters of the city museum and used it to batter in the doors of the courthouse. And when one of the sheriffs was killed in the practice. This principle of the dignity of man to. Live radically deeply radical and revolutionary. The reformers called every institution before the bar of reason and required them to present their credentials.

The institution of property in the church the law the Constitution the state itself slavery. Nothing was sacred except man. They were a fearless fellowship and following arguments to their logical conclusions. They were actually prepared to end child labor to end the subordination of women to men to limit the profits of property and its special privileges prepared to provide for universal suffrage universal education. They were actually prepared to place a trues of conscience above those are fourth in the scriptures and above those written on the statute books. This meant quite simply that they recognized John to be a higher law higher than the Constitution. The moral law. This was a dangerous game no doubt has a steely is it who can doubt that that society is healthier which permits it's best men and women to obey conscience and that which does not.

In any event these reformers were not to be fired dogged by the easy pleas of patriotism or of loyalty to the status quo or to whatever commitments government and society might have made. They were not taken in by the glib argument now so popular that what society has committed itself to an institution let us say slavery or let us say a policy let us say war. That all good citizens are bound to fall in line and accepted. They knew their history and recall that James first had defended his despotisms with the argument quote that which concerns a mystery of the king's power is not lawful to be disputed. Just what the Pentagon is telling us today they remember Chief Justice Finch sustaining the hated ship money with the argument. If a company of people will go about any public Reformation This is high treason. Just senators Dirksen and Mansfield said the other day they had listened as Attorney General Austin sit in this hall of love joy that he died as a fool dieth

they were not intimidated. When the mighty Daniel Webster admonished Massachusetts to conquer her prejudices for liberty or win the silver tongued Edward Everett invoked the patriotism of all citizens to abstain from discussion. No they were not to be silenced or intimidated by specious pleas that it is somehow proper to criticize government when nothing is at stake. But pernicious to do so when it is committing irretrievable errors are of Channing had something to say on this in his lecture on war. This sentiment is speaking of uncritical patriotism. This sentiment often degenerates into a narrow partial exclusive attachment alienating us from other branches of the human family and instigating to aggression on other states. The Spirit. It is a chauvinist patriotism still exists.

The tie of countries it is thought to dissolve me in from the obligations of universal justice and humanity. Statesmen and rulers are expected to build up their own country at the expense of others and in the false patriotism of the citizen. They have a security for any young creatures which are sanctioned by success. The man who refused to honor the fugitive slave law and who thought the slave in title to his freedom regardless of constitutional law would have refused to honor the claims of the Nazi government to the loyalty of its citizens and the claims of our own government today to one Christian in acquiescence of its citizens in the war. It is now waging. Finally the reformers of this generation for all their devotion to the individual saw that the great evils which afflicted their society were not the consequences of personal sin but of collective social and official Siham. It was that the individual merchant of the privileges of property that were at fault not the individual man who

exploited women. But the system that subordinated women to man. Not to say district mate who was guilty of flogging semen but the system with just average logging as a policy not the jailer who was responsible for the desperate plight of the jails. The whole system of prisons and the whole penal code not the individual slave holder even but the system of slavery not the politician of the general but the principle of war itself. Now and then to be sure. But here are Parker and Webster for example. The reformers lashed out against individuals but mostly it was a large collective evil that they denounced. Now what remains of this heritage of reform we no longer subscribe to truths that are a priori and transcendental. We no longer talk. Perhaps we no longer believe in the divinity of man. We no longer have the enthusiasm for revolution that we once boasted. Not revolution abroad and certainly not revolution at home

yet much of the Shannon Parker philosophy if I may call it that in much of the conduct too is still vital. Much of it is in mortal peril. We're coming ever more to see the problems which glare hideously upon us from every quarter of the horizon are in fact moral problems in this Channing and his generation were right. We call them by other names. We take refuge of the language of social conduct your economics or perhaps our mathematics when we do our little games of one kind or another and fall back upon computers to solve our problems. But we cannot invent evade the conclusion forced upon us from years of discussion and years of misconduct. The problem of racial injustice is ultimately moral. But the problem of the inhumanity of one part of our society to others is more wrong than the problem of the use or even the threat of nuclear weapons is moral. That the issue of the Vietnam war is moral no matter how our rulers and our

spokesmen seek to conceal this issue with propaganda with double talk. Without a candidate for the presidency is recently chary to be brainwashing the moral issue like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hands will not wash out. Parent chemical don't here on this corruption of the language which is I think one of the first signs of a deep intellectual and moral corruption in any society. When I use a word Humpty Dumpty and Alice it means just what I choose it to mean and that is the way we are rapidly coming to use words. It is the way our government is rapidly coming to use words. All of our opponents are automatically communists not Vietnamese. No we do not call our soldiers capitalists or use other projects or terms. Note. Note that all North Vietnamese soldiers and fight in the south are infiltrators. What should we say of the half million Americans fighting 7000 miles away are they infiltrators.

Note that the pound is called jello. And when we bomb a South Vietnamese Vietnamese by mistake it is called Friendly Fire. Note that all targets are military targets even those removed from the military. Even those hit by soft shrapnel shells designed to penetrate nothing stronger than human flesh. And the proof that they are military targets is that we bombed them. We speak of Vietnamese aggression as if we ourselves have no experience right. And just the other day our attorney general said that we do not we do not wish to destroy North Vietnam yet we are dropping a heavier weight of bombs on that country than we dropped on either Germany or Japan during the last war. If it is not our purpose to destroy her we're certainly going about not destroying her in a very odd way. We speak of Viet con terror and atrocities but do not use these words for bombing villages or for the use of net power or for d 48 of the 48 ing chemicals. We heard we heard

thousands of South Vietnamese into compounds and call them refugees. In the last war we used the right word. These were as they are concentration camps. And I need not to elaborate upon anything I now is painfully familiar Is this but I do think we should keep in mind that the corruption of language is part of the general corruption of mind and of spirit. What remains further of the philosophy of reform first that it is a great moral issue second concern for the dignity of man all of course subscribe to this principle of the dignity of man. You know in our country insists that they are prepared to carry it to its logical conclusion of true equality. It is unnecessary to remind you that our conduct in our institutions do not square with this principle. Ours is one of the least equalitarian societies of the West is one that denies both the Equality and the dignity of

its citizens. I have in mind not merely the different standards of citizenship for black and white in the south. And in large parts of the North as well. That is too familiar to enlarge upon. I have in mind that we have created conditions of life which make a mockery of the concept of equality and of dignity for a large segment of our population. And then we seem to be adding hypocrisy to neglect by using terms like Great Society for those who are the victims of our discrimination and our heartlessness ours is not a great society. More and more we may doubt that it is even a society rather than a conqueror he's an embattled and infuriated groups. Whatever our professions whatever our history the evidence is persuasive that we do not really believe in equality or in the dignity of man anymore not an equality for little children in our schools James Cole and made that clear in slums and suburbs and you have recently had demonstrations of this in Boston.

What is true of Boston is true in every large city in the country. We do not really believe in equality or in dignity when it comes to housing. Other societies the scandinavian the Dutch the German the Swiss somehow managed to rid themselves of their slums but rich as we are we have no money for this and the slums grow a piece in every city ghettos mostly for Negroes Puerto Ricans Mexicans and others. Is it because the problem is too difficult or the cost too high. But the problem of Transportation is difficult and the cost high but we managed to build almost all the roads we want and have the most elaborate road system in the world where our hearts are. There are roads we boast that we are the richest nation in the world which is true. And we have the highest standard of living which is not true. Ours is a society with a high standard of living for one half and a low standard for the other. We do not really believe in equality of the dignity of man when it comes to

public health. Other societies can provide medical and hospital care for all but only within the last year have we managed to provide minimal care to the aged in the great mass of the people is still without medical care comparable to the British the Scandinavian The Dutch and others. We do not believe in equality or dignity even in the elementary arena of public justice. There is in most communities one law for the rich and another for the poor. One for those who are quite in another for those who are not. Somehow you never hear of police brutality of the Somerset club nor of police interference with American Legionnaires who choose to demonstrate on the streets of our cities and when as in the last decade our song. The Supreme Court has finally moved into the stricken field in a series of great decisions thrown protection of due process around the perishing and dangerous elements of society. Respectable opinion everywhere in the country.

That is the bar associations have decried this coddling of criminals. Third what remains of the transcendental reform is some of the original drive around the collision. We cannot in the nature of things indulge in the radicalism of that generation. Our social fabric is too delicate for that. Besides there is no ruler no class no body of officials no particular interest against which we can direct our revolutionary energies. If there is fault there is guilt it is shared by all the intellectuals among us those who are the present Channing's in the Parkers in the Phillips take refuge there for in demonstrations or drop out. We deprecate demonstrations not on and even jail those who are too obstreperous in demonstrations without enquiry very closely but the demonstrations are about. Perhaps we have reached the point here in America for all demonstrations are bad

if less than 100 years old. I do not in any event. I do not in any event recall that our schoolbooks deprecate the violence of the Mohawk to dump tea in Boston Harbor or apologize for that little demonstration on Lexington common in Concord Bridge in April 1775 and you will remember perhaps a million Union soldiers march to battle to the tune of John Brown's Body without feeling too embarrassed at the recollection that John Brown little violent demonstration against slavery and Harper's Ferry dock as violence is always to be deplored. But let us not too easily ape Edmund Burke. Whose eloquent tribute to the freight royalty an aristocracy inspired that wonderful observation from Thomas Paine that he admired the PLU age but forgot the dying bird violence in the streets is not the only violence in America. There is violence against the negro that has been heaped upon him year after year for a hundred years. There is a violence and we are committing on a massive scale and with

relentless persistence in Vietnam. May we not say that most of those in official positions would deprecate violence do not come before us with clean hands. The danger of demonstrations is they might run into lawlessness and violence. Do we need a Channing or a Parker to remind us that the most widespread and the most ostentatious lawlessness is official not individual that it is government itself sets the example and traces a pattern as in war or in slavery in the south. Every Southern negro can testify to the lawlessness of every Southern state for 100 years. Lawlessness is ignoring and ignoring the clear requirements of the Constitution and the laws concerning the negro. The spectacle of Southern governors like Wallace or Maddox or Ross Barnett deploring the lawlessness of Martin Luther King is revolting. They and their predecessors in office all of whom took an oath to

obey and preserve the Constitution of the United States have floated the laws. A negro suffers due process and equal protection of the laws for generations. They do not come into court with clean hands nor do those who speak for the United States speak with accents of his sincerity. The United States is today the greatest of lawbreakers. We are engaged in undeclared law which violates international law violates United Nations charter and thus violates our own Constitution and laws which incorporate United Nations by treaty. It is revolting for those who are daily providing exhibitions of lawlessness on a prodigious and on scale. And as long as this has exacted the toll of hundreds of thousands of lives to rebuke as lawless those who protest against and refuse to be tools of this official misconduct. Our conduct and our misconduct in the arena both domestic and foreign policies are sins of omission at home and of commission abroad have alienated a large

part of the young people from their government and their nation. This is a sobering and tragic consideration that everywhere on every college and university can university campus in the country those whom society has in effect selected as its future leaders are embittered and alienated from the society they are supposed to lead lead alienated more deeply and more bitterly than in any previous time in our history. This is but another way of saying that our government has forfeited the confidence of the best elements of the American people. Those elements inspired by idealism by outrage against injustice by he cribbed of war. What a spectacle greets us every day now. The spectacle of our government. We get war on two fronts one against a distant people with whom we have no legitimate quarrel and the other against the American people. I know that there is under way a reaction against the dissenters in the demonstrators. The students who are supposed to

be enjoying so many privileges that it is very ungrateful for them to be critical of their government. Few gatherings public or private are complete now without some official deploring of the younger generation the hippies a drop all supply of flour people. We have fancy names for all of them to cleanse our conscience. But from the point of view of the young people of opted out it is not they who have failed to take on responsibility but government and society. They do not really regard themselves as drop all they regard their official rulers their governors and mayors their legislators their police officials as dropouts. And who are looking at the neck surely human wreckage that litters our landscape. The city is rotting at the core lakes and streams polluted beyond salvation. The air filled with not just gases the millions without medical care the old in the middle age thrown on the slag heap the overcrowded schools the inadequate hospitals the prisons and mental hospitals bulging with victims of social disorder.

The industry geared to making more and more products that are useless or pernicious like cigarettes for example. Police wielding clubs and bayonets and tear gas against their own people and rulers in Washington wasting the natural National Substance and the national energies in work of destruction who look in on all this can blame the young for dissenting and for dropping out. Much of our conduct is down to silly and even few tile. Young people seem equally few times when they demonstrate or when they withdraw into their own world. They are many of them extremists they use via language they indulge in vulgar criticisms of their betters. They engage in foolish acts like sitting down in court houses or trying to penetrate the Pentagon which is off limits to the American people or lying down in the streets to stop trucks from transporting their Palam or burning draft cards

to criticism of all this we must say what the beloved Sam Joel made the uncle of little women said to William Ellery Channing in 1834. I am tired of these complaints. The cause of suffering humanity is called as loudly upon others as upon us. It was just as incumbent upon others as upon us to espouse it. We are not to blame that wiser and better man did not espouse have long ago. The cry of millions have been heard throughout our land for half a century and disregarded the wise in the prudence all the wrong but thought it not wise and prudent to lift a finger for its correction. You must not expect those who have been left to take up the great cause that they will plead it with all that seemliness of phrase which scholars might use us not expect them to manage with all that calmness that statesman might exhibit. We abolitionists are what we are big sucklings obscure men silly women publicans and sinners.

And we shall manage the matter we have taken in hand just as might be expected of such as we are. It is unbecoming in a blind man who stood by and would do nothing to complain because we manage this know about no better. And he had a profound observation. The great interests of humanity do not lose their claims on us because sometimes in judiciously maintained. The conscience of the American people is troubled now as it has not been since the controversy over slavery. We have all of the overcame the great crisis of the Depression and modernize our government in a single decade. We took up arms against the Nazi carrier and side by side with Britain triumphed over totalitarianism. We will boldly planned to meet the crisis of the post-war years in the rest of the buckle of Europe and set Europe on the road to recovery and health. We seem to have lost our moral purpose and our vision. We seem to have lost our way. We have no policies only anti policies. We are not really for anything anymore.

We are merely against things against communism. Against Russia against China against Cuba against violence against revolution against change direction lies the lunacy of our foreign policy we conjure up nightmare dangers and terrify ourselves with these threats to Secretary rest Ross the other day conjured up the nightmare danger of a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons and prepared to overrun the other continents so far. Does this never occur to those in official position. So far the United States is the only nation that has ever used a nuclear weapon in war. So far ours are the only armies overrunning foreign soil. On another continent we seem incapable of cherishing anything but a double standard. Just yesterday it was the Secretary Rusk was reported to advise that Israel should not make reprisals against Egypt for the sinking of a destroyer.

What a pity he did not think of that when he was advising President Johnson whether to make reprisals against the aimless and harmless shots fired but not hitting the destroyer matics in Tonkin Gulf we pray to the Great Society and watch our society deteriorate and unravel. We are the richest nation on the globe and spend ourselves into bankruptcy on the work of destruction and historian looking back upon the spectacle a century from now if everyone or anyone is here a century from now to look back will conclude that we had literally lost our sense. Now as we look at our own situation and that of the rest of the world we cannot quite say with the Austrians that the situation is desperate but not serious. But we can say that it is desperate desperate but not irremediable. There is never been a time in American politics not since the 1850s when the average citizen felt so important. Well when government acknowledged itself to be so important but the United States is not important we are not really baffled by the complexity of the crises which glare

upon us nor are we really frustrated by the intransigence of events over which we have no control. The crises are pretty much of our own making and as we made them we can unmake them. We decided to ostracize China it was all our doing. We plunged into the war in Vietnam and escalated it to its present awful scale. We involved ourselves in the affairs of Cuba in Santa Domingo and even in those of continental states like Brazil of our own free will. We set up NATO and assigned tasks. It could not perform. We have forfeited by our Congress the support of our former allies and so here in Europe and elsewhere we can reverse our policies not without loss of face to be sure but rather lose face and lose honor. Which we are losing. If we could in fact recover Honor we would save face as friends save not only face but honor in her decision on Algiers. We are in fact masters of our own destinies so we do not seem to know that we

can and we will overcome the perils of menace us and that ministry and confines in what we have to do is reasonably clear and reasonably simple. First we can and if we are to avoid catastrophe we must end the war in Vietnam not just end the bombing are on our own. Not just in the bombing that's an essential prerequisite but in the war itself. It is a war which is leading Vietnam to death physically and leading the United States to death morally. Whatever the pros and cons of particular issues our society can no longer tolerate the deep moral divisions which this war has imposed upon us and the deep moral wombs which it daily inflicts upon us. We cannot afford the moral disapproval of which our conduct inspires throughout the rest of the world. Time

was when we boast of a decent respect to the opinion of mankind every wholly ignored and forefront of that. It is sometimes said by critics and opponents of the war that the whole to be at Nama is not worth the life of a single American soldier. It is arrogant and indecent to put the matter in that fashion. Say rather the most complete victory in Vietnam on any terms is not worth the cost to Watson Harlem in Cleveland and Detroit not worth the cost to the tragically neglected human resources and natural resources of our country. Not worth the cost of the disintegration of our political system now under way. Not worth the cost of poisoning the political and social atmosphere of our nation. Not worth the cost of the alienation of the best elements of our society from our government and from our country. Second we can and we must if we are to avoid catastrophe abandon the Cold War we have waged with ferocious concentration for 20 years and whose consequences

have been to exacerbate misunderstanding throughout the globe to discourage neutral ism to stir up hatred in our own people not only against communism abroad but against whatever seems critical of our policies at home. There is no point in assessing responsibility for the Cold War. The Shish Guild may well have been Russia's to start with but responsibility for preexisting units long after to serve for their ever purposes it might originally have served as ours and sole true responsibility for turning it into a holy crusade. Having worked their way after a fashion out of our obsession with Soviet Russia who are not yet out of the Cold War we are now plunging headlong into another with as little restraint and with as little dignity and with as little thought for consequences. An obsession with communist China. We can and we must rid ourselves of the obsession with communist China con Chinese communism which promises to be even more paranoid than death of

our obsession with Soviet. We must abandon our pull Graham against China. Our pretense. One of the most remarkable examples of self delusion in all history. Our pretense that the island of Taiwan is a real China and that the Eight hundred million Chinese people on the mainland are not there. We must see what cannot be called other than persecution of China. Opposition to. For many others to recognize or opposition to admitting her to the United Nations support to Shon Kai shek military and naval as well as political continuous denunciation and vilification of her character continuing threats to our territorial integrity. Imagine if Europe had treated the new United States this way in the 18th century or England and France had resisted recognizing the Confederate government in exile on Jamaica or in Cuba for 20 years after APA matics.

We must abandon this program for the sake of China for the sake of peace and for the sake of our own intellectual integrity and our moral health. We should On the contrary try to do with China what the goal is trying to do with the Soviet. We should try to bring her back into the society of nations to restore if it is still possible something that each and friendship did flourish through much of the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Try to heal the wounds which we have inflicted on China and to cease what must must appear in what are daily threats to her very existence. There is no indication that we are trying to do any of this and there is strong indication that we are trying to do just the opposite. To counter China by ourselves becoming a great Asian Power. Nothing in the whole of our history would be more dangerous to the future of this country and I think to the future of mankind and for the United States tried to be. And Asian Power.

We are not. We cannot be we have not the resources to be an Asian power. It is more and more clear that the crucial issue of our foreign policy. In Asia but not there alone is Adam morality. And this takes us back to Channing and his crusades. We had be admonished to fear and excited to hate. We have been compelled to kill and to destroy. We know what happens to any individual or group or society when it gives over to mass fear or mass hatred. We do not need to go to Nazi Germany for a laboratory of this. We can go to our own history the history of the American south with slavery and with the freedman Saugus to back in the 1850s developed a kind of paranoia about the peculiar institution they felt themselves threatened criticized attacked. They knew they were right and that they were upright and they realized they could not persuade others of their righteousness to protect their way of life. That is a way of life based on slavery.

Later to protect the principle of white supremacy they silence dissent expel dissenters rallied opinion everywhere in the south to the de France support of slavery and of white supremacy. They subordinated their politics economy education culture even their religion to the events of that peculiar institution. And no chapter in history proves or soberly the rightness of that observation that those who wouldn't slave others must first enslave themselves for the South put itself in voluntary bondage to the negro for 200 years. They succeeded in instilling such fear and hatred of those who were opposed to them that in the end they were able to rally their people to break up the union and then to fight a long war. Because they were really victims of their obsession and their hate. They found themselves on able to think clearly about slavery or about race or about their relationships with the rest of the world. Not only today but the whole country has paid for their blindness for

more than a century. The moral of this chapter of our history is familiar to everyone familiar from domestic experience has from public experience. He created dangerous to those who are as objects. It is fatal to those who indulge in it. The America of Channing's day had no talent for competing with the great powers of the old world or of the past. No talent for empire no talent for political power. The genius of America is a founding fathers and the leaders of New England understood it or imagined it if you will was to demonstrate what man would be if he put aside the temptations of power and exalted the potentialities of freedom justice equality and peace. This was the American dream not the dream of power beyond the imagination of man power in the Americas power in Europe. Power in Asia power to impose our will upon others power to create a life or death for hundreds of millions beyond our shores. If we are unfaithful to our genius for being different from all the great nations of the past.

If we go whoring after Empire and conquest and world power those activities had made a shambles of the great nations of the past ours will be once again the tragic story of Paradise Lost. We are tempted now in our mood of dissolution to take refuge in those melancholy lines of William Butler Yeats things things fall apart the center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the blood tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned the best lack all conviction on the worst are full of passionate intensity. But even as we quote these lines we are aware they do not faithfully define our position. Things fall apart to be sure anarchy is loosed upon the world and those who pursue war do so with passionate intensity. But the best. Do not lack all conviction. The Crusaders and reformers of Channing's day did not despair because their nation wage an unjust war with Mexico and slavery flourished in the south. We can draw

inspiration from their example. We can draw inspiration from that movement of all could buttes true true greatness the true greatness of the cities that man can build. Let us draw strength so through cities tells us apparently he said in that greatest of operations Let us draw strength from the busy spectacle of our great city as life as we have it before us day by day falling in love with her as we see her and remembering that all this greatness she owes to man with the fighters daring the wise man's understanding of his duty and the good man's self-discipline in its performance. For you now it remains to rival what they have done in knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart not just a fate not to idly to stand aside from the enemy's onset.