1 LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class 1 THE ANTI-SLAVERY PAPERS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN TWO VOLUMES II THE ANTI-SLAVERY PAPERS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL ii BOSTON AND NEW YOKK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY MDCCCCII OF THE UNIVERSITY OF Copyright 1902 by Houghton Mifflin * Company All rights reserved , Z. CONTENTS THE COURSE OF THE WHIGS PAGE 3 v January 11, 1849 OUR SOUTHERN BRETHREN 10 January 18, 1849 POLITICS AND THE PULPIT 17 January 25, 1849 ETHNOLOGY 25 February 1, 1849 MR. CALHOUN S REPORT 33 February 15, 1849 THE MORAL MOVEMENT AGAINST SLAVERY 4a February 22, 1849 ABOLITIONISTS AND EMANCIPATION 50 I March 1, 1849 GENERAL TAYLOR 58 March 15, 1849 MR. CLAY AS AN ABOLITIONIST SECOND APPEAR ANCE IN FIFTY YEARS 65 March 22, 1849 C vi n SLAVEHOLDING TERRITORIES 74- April 19, 1849 ANTI-SLAVERY CRITICISM UPON MR, CLAY S LETTER 80 April 26, 1849 PUBLIC OPINION 90 May 10, 1849 MOBS 98 June 14, 1849 THE ROMAN REPUBLIC 105 July 12, 1849 / FOURTH OF JULY IN CHARLESTON 112 July 26, 1849 MODERATION 119 August 9, 1849 CRITICISM AND ABUSE 126 September 20, 1849 PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE 134 October 4, 1849 CANADA 142 November 1, 1849 CALIFORNIA 150 November 29, 1849 GENERAL BEM S CONVERSION 156 December 6, 1849 C vii 3 TURKISH TYRANNY AND AMERICAN 158 December 13, 1849 THE SOUTH AS KING LOG 164 February 21, 1850 COMPROMISE 171 March 7, 1850 MR. WEBSTER S SPEECH 177 March 21, 1850 ANOTHER WORD ON MR. WEBSTER S SPEECH 195 April 4, 1850 V^xIPSEUDO-CONSERVATISM 197 November 14, 1850 All these papers appeared in "The National Anti-Slavery Standard," on the dates given above. ANTI-SLAVERY PAPERS THE COURSE O* 1 THE WHIGS _L HERE is no need of any speculation as v to the course which the Whigs, as Whigs, will take in re gard to the measures in which the question of slavery is involved. The result of the late presidential v elec- tion defines their position. After the bargain by which they gained the victory, there is no more free agency left them than the Constitution left to the Northern States when the compromises were once assented to. They have placed themselves in a dis graceful dilemma, and have only a choice of treach eries offered them. They must either betray Party or Man. In such a position men are apt to be decided in their course by the nearness and ap- preciability of the retribution which is to follow, or by the chances of tangible reward. If the Whigs act up to their Northern professions, the immediate disruption of the party will be the sure result. An opposition may combine a great many discordant political elements and various shades of opinion, but a triumphant party can only reap the fruits of vic tory by compactness and the sacrifice of individual interests to the imperative necessity of union. C 4 ] Some moralists have asserted that men are to be judged rather by their intentions and professions than by their deeds. No doubt many Northern Whig politicians during the late campaign believed themselves to be sincere haters of slavery. It was pleasant to utter humane and generous sentiments, especially as the people seemed to like them and the thing could be done upon credit. As long ai votes could be purchased by mere promises to pay)) the signing of a name gave very little trouble. Warmed by the enthusiasm of the occasion, they were willing to give notes to any amount. But the day for payment of all promises arrives sooner or later. Even those which ardent and in spired youth makes in solitude and silence, manhood will publicly demand the fulfilment of, and the pleading of infancy infects all the rest of life with a suspicion as well as a self-consciousness of insol vency. The Whig notes, however, had too short a time to run. They must be taken up within a fear fully limited period. If there were a Notary Public to witness their protest for non-payment, his fees would amount to a handsome fortune. Payment might be avoided by pleading infancy, duress, or an immoral consideration, but we rather think that the more compendious method of bankruptcy will be adopted. The capital of the old firm will somehow I 5 3 be juggled into the hands of the new concern of Taylor & Company, which will deny any legal or moral accountability to the creditors. We think that the Whig party has overreached itself. It has gained a momentary advantage at the cost of its existence. As far as party action is con cerned, it has done its best to strike a deadly blow, not only at the cause of humanity, but at every kind of principle. It has been hypocritical and per fidious in its inhumanity. But the mask is slipping aside more and more from the pro-slavery face, or rather it is being discovered that its real face was turned southward, while an anti-slavery vizard on the back of the head was made to answer for the North. Already are the directors of the party be ginning to stone their prophets, men like Palfrey and Giddings, whom they have hitherto put promi nently forward as lures for Northern and Western anti-slavery aid. All through the last campaign the Whig presses were finding fault with Mr. Van Buren for not being anti-slavery enough. We have no controversy with them on that score, though the requirements of a party which could be satisfied with the owner of a hundred slaves could not be very great. But these zealots, these out and out abolitionists (for the nonce), had their doubts whether Mr. Van Buren C 6 3 were in favor of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. His own assertion was not enough to satisfy them. But there is no variability of tempera ture so great and no changes of temperature so sud den as those indicated by a meteorological journal of politics in the free states. For the two months preceding the third Tuesday in November, all the weathercocks point steadily northward, and the atmosphere is clear and bracing. But on Wednes day the wind shifts to the opposite point of the compass, and a southerly fog creeps gradually up, whose effects on Northern constitutions are exceed ingly debilitating. Men of all professions (but espe cially anti-slavery ones) are subject to the most alarming and fatal attacks, and disappear from the community without a line of obituary. Not two months have passed since the Whig leaders were clamorous because the Free Soil Party had stolen their platform which means something to stand upon before election and to trample on after. Heine says somewhere that Tieck was a good satirist, but that the progress of events was more bitterly satirical than he. We need no severer Juve nal here. Mr. Giddings introduces a bill to take the sense of the inhabitants of the District of Columbia in regard to emancipation. He very properly bases his resolution on the principle which was the ful- C i H crum of our Revolution and which forms the corner stone of our system of polity, that all government is founded on the consent of the governed. He accordingly proposes that the vote of every male inhabitant of twenty-one years and upward shall be taken. It was not only just, but peculiarly proper, that his motion should take this shape, for it has somehow got to be the opinion in America that the slaveholders are the suffering party, who alone are entitled to our commiseration and to a voice in the question of Abolition. It was therefore wise and ex pedient in Mr. Giddings to frame his motion as he did. It is the slave who is the chief party in interest. Yet for this Mr. Giddings is denounced by high Whig authority as a demagogue, whose only object is to exasperate the South. On the same principle the Declaration of Independence should have con fined itself to a consideration of the rights and in juries of George the Third. Mr. Giddings s error arose from a want of due attention to chronological proprieties. He should have been aware that prin ciples are entirely dependent upon times and sea sons, and that this motion should have been made before election. The flood-tide of party anti-slavery takes place every fourth November, and rises as rap idly as in the Bay of Fundy. The ebb is equally sudden. C 8 3 So, too, in regard to the Wilmot Proviso. This was so popular with Northern Whigs a few weeks ago that Mr. Webster took pains to claim it as " his thunder." He is probably sorry by this time that he ever burned his fingers with it. In the debate on the petition of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (February 12, 1790) Mr. Madison said that " they might make some regulations respecting the in troduction of them (slaves) into the new states to be formed out of the Western Territory, different from what they could in the old settled states. He thought the object well worthy of consideration." This is the doctrine of reason and common-sense as well as of justice and humanity. Before the elec tion, this was clear enough to Whig eyes. But it seems pretty certainly determined that the bill of Senator Douglas, which yields everything to slavery, will receive enough Whig support in Congress to ensure its success. We believe that a majority of the Whig rank and file are in favor of the Wilmot Proviso. But the misfortune is that it is in the power of a few Truman Smiths in Congress to con trol for a moment the destinies of the country. It takes only a moment to commit a great wrong, but it may require centuries to repair it. The Missouri Compromise (the second downward step of the Re public) was controlled by the vote of one man from Massachusetts. C 9 3 We said that the Whig party had overreached itself. The anti-slavery sentiment of the country is fast strengthening into anti-slavery principle. It is not a thing which can be used and thrown by. Wise political leaders would have seen that its gains are permanent, and that its recruits are enlisted for the whole war. But the Whigs have no positive prin ciple to give them cohesion. Skilful only in the tac tics of opposition, they find it impossible to take an affirmative stand. The movement not of America only, but of the whole world, is onward. They are the destructives who endeavor to hold back. True conservatism employs itself in preparing a smooth way for the inevitable future. " Safe in its breast the new moon clasps the old, And round it still its guardian arms doth fold, Forever turning fuller to the sun Until increase of light hath made them one." OUR SOUTHERN BRETHREN JL HE inconsistencies of men, especially those which have their origin in self-interest, have always af forded a favorite theme for the satirist, and as long as the world lasts he will hardly be at a loss for a fresh text from this longest chapter of human ab surdity. But there is one variety of inconsistency so regular in its operations that we are almost in clined to seek for its causes in some climatic or physiological peculiarity. We refer to the change which the air of Washington produces in Northern members of Congress. At home these gentlemen are almost tedious in their eloquent advocacy of the dignity of labor. Their one idea would seem to be that the hard- handed democracy is the bone and sinew of the commonwealth. They may be for or against the tariff, the bank, or the subtreasury, but they are unanimous in their devotion to the cause of the workingman. This is all very fine, and their glow ing and generous sentiments find a response in every heart. But who, after all, is included in the C 3 term workingman? What is the implement the use of which confers such nobility upon the hand that wields it? Is it the axe, the hoe, the hammer, or the plough ? This matter is made clear to us after the arrival of the eloquent and philanthropic gentle men at Washington. It is not the daily handling of any or all of the tools we have mentioned that en titles one to these fine candidatial sympathies. A man s palms may be as hard as iron and his back may be crooked with constant toil, and yet he may neither be truly a hardhanded democrat, nor a bone and sinew, nor have any claim whatever to the orator ical dignities resulting from labor. It is the ability to use a ballot which admits him to the freedom of the guild. But in truth, so many pitiable objects present themselves to the eyes of Honorable Members on their arrival at Washington that their sympathies are necessarily diverted into other channels. It is no longer the " toiling millions " who claim their tender and respectful regard. It is now " our bre thren of the South " who absorb their interest and call into active operation all the finer feelings and all the active benevolence of their natures. Who are these newly discovered brethren of ours, these objects of so devoted and sublime a charity ? At this distance, our too sensitive hearts, still C 12 3 throbbing with tumultuous emotions called up by contemplating the dignity of labor, we are apt to fall into a very natural mistake. We have heard of laborers at the South, and taking it for granted in our simplicity that, if a necessary nobility attaches itself to a man who toils for wages, some yet higher and inconceivable grandeur must belong to him who toils for nothing, we imagine that it is among these Southern workers that we are to look for relatives so near and dear. This is an entirely erroneous view of the subject, and a little reflection will convince us that it is equally an unphilosophical one. Whether or no we are right in surmising that it is the power of voting which raises the Northern laborer to so high a level of humanity, it is quite certain that a man whose mere calling involves so much dignity and attracts so much respectful consideration stands in need of nothing else. It is the person who has not work, whose hands are soft, who suffers the lifelong mis ery and disgrace of idleness, and is thus excluded from the privileged classes, who is the proper object of our pity. It is unfortunates of this sort who make the hearts of Northern representatives bleed. It would be sheer arrogance in them to put forward a claim of kindred with those nature s noblemen who drudge on the cottonfields and in the rice swamps. i: is 3 Christianity involves us in an inconveniently large family connection ; according to that system we are all children of a common Father, and if we make any distinction of fraternity it is to be in favor of our unhappy brother fallen among thieves. Three millions of such we have at the South. But the Con gressional method simplifies matters amazingly, and reduces " our Southern brethren " to a bare two hundred and fifty thousand or so. The descendants of Ham are decided to be children of an tmcommon father, and therefore no relatives of ours. But it is not in the New Testament that our legislators look to find their relatives. Their family register is not inscribed even on those blank pages between the old law and the new which we might suppose to be the only portion of the Holy Volume to which they had devoted any special attention. It is the Constitution which settles all these tangled questions of consanguinity. This is our new Dis pensation abrogating the old, our new tariff of social and moral duties. This teaches us who are really our " Southern Brethren." It was a happy discovery, this of defining the limits of human brotherhood by degrees of longi tude. By means of a globe an American child can be very rapidly instructed in the simple elements of geographical humanity. East, West, and North, our C 14 ^ sympathies are allowed an indefinite expansion. The safety-valves of our benevolence open toward these three quarters of the earth. A convenient Manual of Ethics calculated from the meridian of Wash ington might be added to the course of instruction in our common schools. Thus, we may sympathize keenly with oppressed Ireland and the downtrodden masses of Europe. Our detestation of tyrants may grow fervent in the precise ratio of their easterly distance. We may contribute largely and meritori ously to rescue the souls of Hindoos from Satan, and the soles of Nestorian Christians from the Ma hometan bastinado. We may join societies for pro moting the phrenological development of the Flat- head Indians, or for supplying the Laplanders with pure olive oil. In all these directions we may law fully pray " that come it may, And come it will for a that, When man to man, the warld o er, Shall brithers be." But, turning southward, our humanity gradually contracts itself, embraces fewer and fewer objects, and probably comes to a point somewhere in the neighborhood of the Emperor of Brazil. It has been a matter of controversy whether the New Testament should be one of the books read by C IS 3 the pupils in our public schools. As one chief object of these institutions is to fit the youth of our coun try for their duties and responsibilities as American citizens, we cannot but think that the habitual perusal of such a book would be likely to produce mental confusion and be the cause of error in after life. Some such cause as this may be charitably assigned for the divergences of such men as Gid- dings and Palfrey from the strict line of American patriotism and religious obligation. Or is it barely possible, after all, that Jesus Christ may be right and the glorious framers of our Constitution wrong? Ought we in truth to embrace with the arms of our brotherhood not John C. Calhoun or Zachary Taylor, but the living, suf fering, hoping, and despairing property of those eminent Southern Brethren ? Is it the brother fallen among thieves and not the thieves themselves who are to be the recipients of our pity and our help ? Can it be that the eye of a politician too long fixed in rapturous contemplation upon the image of Lib erty stamped on the coin of our country, is thereby unfitted for deciphering the lineaments, now dim and obscure, of the Almighty Father, impressed upon three millions of his duskier children ? These ques tions have suggested themselves with more or less distinctness to a considerable number of men and C l6 3 women. If America be, as Fourth of July orators assert, the new Eden of the world, these persons have imagined that they heard in the garden that dreadful voice which demanded of Cam Where is thy brother? The signs of the times seem fa vorable to this little company. The great onward movement of humanity fights for them. The pro gress of events is their most eloquent lecturer and propagandist. The human heart is ever busy mak ing them converts. They have only to continue firm in that belief expressed by Dryden, that " There is a necessity in Fate Whereby the bold brave man is fortunate." POLITICS AND THE PULPIT w E published last week some extracts from a sermon by Mr. Higginson of Newburyport. We esteem such a sermon a gift to be received as some thing more than a mere matter of course tribute to duty. Mr. Higginson asks and expects no com mendation. He does not barter self-sacrifice for an equal weight of praise. But there are many ways of doing one s duty, and there is something in doing it bravely and generously which attracts, and deserves to attract, our admiration and applause. The spirit of this world is fond of inculcating a middle course as the path of wisdom, cunningly flattering our prudence in order to deceive our higher reason. Men are wont to think that they have extinguished a dangerous fire or dispersed a mephitic vapor when they have succeeded in ridding themselves of that enthusiasm of youth which was truly their God-sent pillar of flame by night and of cloud by day. Ec lecticism is very good in its way, and self-satisfies us with a feeling of judicial impartiality; but, if we try to keep the balance even between God and VOL. II. C 18 3 the world, the flesh is apt to slip an ounce or two of overweight into the worldly end of the scales. Eclecticism as between Heaven and Hell, which is a system of philosophy uncommonly popular, and dignified with the name of common sense, gen erally amounts to sitting on the fence between those two regions and enjoying at the same time beatific visions of the one without losing a genial glow from the other. Let us thank Mr. Higgin- son for rejecting this eclectic vicarship of Bray, and for giving us not merely the exact measure of duty, but for giving it pressed down and running over. There can be no fallacy greater or more danger ous than is contained in the popular axiom that politics and religion should be kept carefully dis joined. It is an axiom which had its origin in the unprincipled self-interest of politicians. It is of a piece with the system which would shut God out from the secular part of the week and imprison Him in a particular day and in certain buildings. With equal propriety the merchant might banish religion from business, and the tradesman keep it carefully away from his shop. Indeed it is too often true that, as the clergyman leaves his robes hanging in the vestry, the congregation doff their religion to be locked up in the church where it will be kept C 19 3 safely till they need it to put on again when the seventh day, appropriate to that ceremony, shall have come round again. Next to having no religion at all, this kind, which can be put on and off at will, is certainly the most convenient. The African, when he is meditating a predatory excursion, quietly buries his fetich under a tree, and, the theft being safely got through with, exhumes his wooden deity and allows him once more the superintendence of his conduct. The ed itor who rebukes some faithful clergyman for preaching against war or the extension of slavery, is only angry because the fetich has been dug up too soon. Had the clergyman decorously waited till the thing was done, he might have belabored war and slavery in the abstract to his heart s content without being called in question for it. By this sys tem, religion is put upon the short allowance of lib erty conceded to an imprisoned debtor. Kept care fully under lock and key during six days of the week, she is allowed a kind of qualified freedom (within the limits) on Sundays. In point of fact it is not politics against which people would shut and bolt the door of the pulpit. Let a clergyman preach a Whig sermon, and the discontent will be found nicely proportioned to the amount of Democracy among his hearers. Let him C 20 3 preach a Democratic one, and it is only the Whigs who will go out of church and slam their pew doors behind them. If, on the other hand, he should de nounce one of the " Ultraisms of the Day " even as far as fifteenthly, he would excite no unpleasant feelings except in such of his congregation as were anxious to get to the post-office. It is religion itself in its application to the life of the individual, which they would have the preacher eschew. It is such preachers as Nathan that are found fault with for meddling with exciting topics. The great hardship of the Christian revelation lies in the exact closeness with which it will fit you and me. Embodying a universal truth, it possesses within itself a principle of development which ren ders it a test for the church, the state and the indi vidual in every possible phase of society. It is a standard which cannot warp or shrink, and which indicates with impartial indifference every deviation from the immutable line of right and duty. It can not well be a very comfortable instrument in the hands of a faithful minister. The editor, virtuously indignant at the mingling of politics with religion, while he fancies that he has laid fast hold upon the protecting horns of the altar, has in truth only offered himself to be tossed upon those of an inevitable dilemma. For he must C 21 3 either grant that politics are too vile to be admitted into the company of religion, or that religion is too nicely holy for certain kinds of society. If Chris tianity be good for anything, it is good for use and universal circulation. It is not to be shut up in the Church, as in a kind of bank-vault, to serve for an imaginary specie-basis to the everywhere current shinplasters of sect. Abolitionists have no quarrel with the Church as a Church, but only with the Church as it is. This is the reason why they are odious to sect-wrights and divinity-mongers. They do not deny the great services which the Church and the Clergy have rendered to truth and progress as the instruments of order and organization. But they affirm that a Church, to be of any benefit, must be in advance of the social ideas of the age, and demand of the Clergy that they no longer organize sects, but soci ety. It is not politics which they ask them to preach, but Christianity itself. To state the matter more strictly, it is not the Abolitionist who makes the demands. They are the requisitions of our present social condition. Nor is the Church so much called upon to be a Reformer, as to be truly a Church. The clergy, at least in America, are no longer a privileged order. They do not and cannot any longer occupy the position C 22 n which they held when the mouth and the pen were the only vehicles and disseminators of truth. They are no longer the only priests, and there are other pulpits than those in churches. The members of Congress, the lecturer, and, above all, the editor, are priests and preachers, and the newspaper furnishes, a pulpit whence their voices may be heard from one end of the land to the other. Nevertheless a certain amount of prestige still attaches itself to the clergy. They are still looked upon as guardians specially set apart to watch over religion and spiritual things. A seventh part of the year is reserved for them, and their obligations to truth are larger in proportion to the opportunity afforded them to disseminate and enforce it. It will be their own fault if they allow themselves to be superseded by lay preachers. It is hardly to be expected that the older clergy, whose characters have been formed under the pres sure of a wholly different style of ideas, should readily adapt themselves to the requirements of a new order of things. If they are not active reform ers, they at least offer the example of blameless lives. Let us not question their sincerity to forms which to us seem empty. But all the more ought we endeavor to reinvigorate the Church with an infusion of the reforming and progressive spirit. C 23 H The Church has suffered here also by having been in some sort an establishment and having thereby necessarily crystallized into formalism. The same results have everywhere and at all times followed the same causes, and the denunciations of the Abo litionists have never been more severe than that sarcasm of the Saint who said that, " whereas the Church had formerly wooden chalices and golden priests, she has now wooden priests and golden chal ices." The form of the Church has always been com pelled to adapt itself more or less nearly to the de mands of the age. The new spirit of zeal which is making itself manifest in the younger clergy of all denominations shows that the Church is preparing itself for a new development. Hitherto the Church has been shored up with external props ; it is now beginning to be asked whether she contains in her self any principles of life and growth, and men are busying themselves in eliminating the formula of the Ideal Church which is to be the Church of the Future. The Puritans divorced the Church from Art, and, as far as they could, crushed the poetical element out of religion. But Art had its ample revenge, for it attracted religion to itself out of the Church. The time will come when the two shall be again C 24 ]] united and work harmoniously together. Poetry, painting, sculpture and music shall be the steps to that new temple, and the priests shall be ordained by the laying on of the hands of God himself. ETHNOLOGY w, B have just seen the hopes of the friends of liberalism and progress in central Europe thwarted in a great measure by foolish disputes about races and nationalities. While the honest men were fall ing out, the rogues have succeeded in getting what was not their own again. The German Punch has a print representing two men, in different national costumes, engaged in a furious combat, the point at issue being whether the name of a certain town should be pronounced Gratz or Graetz. When this matter of nationality is reduced to a downright absurdity by setting the inhabitants of two neighboring villages together by the ears, it affords us only matter for a smile, but it becomes serious when acted on a larger stage and by more prominent players, though abstractly as ludicrous as before. Almost all races, in proportion as they have come powerful and distinguished, have endeavored to justify their preeminence, as it were, by attribut ing to themselves a divine or at least a noble origin. I * ] Nations, like individuals, when they have risen in the social scale, go immediately to the herald s office for a coat of arms and a pedigree. Had the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth a thousand years earlier, their exodus from the land of bondage and their arrival in the Promised Land would have been forerun and accompanied by an abundance of signs and wonders. As it is, we are obliged to con tent ourselves with vague assertions of our Anglo- Saxon descent, the truth being that only the settlers of New England, and of those only a very few, can lay any probable claim to such an origin. We have no especial interest in these assertions of national nobility, except in as far as they have been the cause or the apology of national oppres sions. Men are very willing to excuse any unnatu ral feature in their social system by tracing it up to some inscrutable divine arrangement. Whatever re volts from the natural religion of the human heart they shore up with the props of their artificial and traditional religion. An inferior tribe among the Hindus sprang from the feet of Brahma, which, of course, explains to general satisfaction why they have always been, and should always continue to be at the foot of the social scale. In the same way the consciences of many excellent people are not so much negatively relieved as positively exhilarated, c 27 3 when they have succeeded in transferring (by any thing but a Baconian induction) the wrongs of the African race to the broad shoulders of ancestral Ham. An anti-slavery lecturer was formerly pretty certain to be received in a strange place with an en tertainment of Ham and eggs (the clergy and people contributing their respective quotas), which kept the promise of hospitality to the ear and broke it to the sense. When the descent of the negro races from the Scriptural Ham had been pretty clearly disproved, and the application of the curse entailed upon his progeny transferred to another race, pro-slavery was necessarily reduced to another line of defence. A divine origin was attributed to slavery by tracing its natural cause to an innate inferiority, both mental and physical, of the negro family of man. It is here that the researches of ethnologists be come particularly interesting to Abolitionists, and furnish them with arguments more generally appre ciable by the mass of mankind than those appealing exclusively to the principles of abstract justice and right. It is worth remarking from how varying and unexpected sources the quiver of the reformer is constantly recruited with fresh arrows, and how the investigations of science, prosecuted in directions which seem the farthest removed from every day C 28 3 interests, have yet a practical bearing, more or less decided, upon the humanitary questions of the time. Ethnology, or the science of races, is of very recent origin, and, dependent as it necessarily must be on glottology (the science of languages), which is also in its infancy, it must generally make its ap peals to inferences and probabilities rather than to actual demonstration. Its conclusions may in fact be assumed as incapable of experimental proof, since periods of time quite beyond our ordinary concep tions of duration, as derived from human history, might be required to produce any foretold result. And yet a sufficient number of examples may be found of various kinds, in localities widely sepa rated, and wholly independent of each other, where certain causes have produced certain effects, to es tablish a firm basis for reasonable induction. The most comprehensive work on the science of races is that of Dr. Prichard, " The Natural History of Man." It is necessarily somewhat deficient in arrangement, because ethnology is as yet less an ex act system than an agglomeration of detached facts, all, however, tending to one result, so that it is not difficult for the reader to generalize for him self. Dr. Prichard is a man of great learning, and apparently of an honest and well balanced mind, not likely to be led astray by theory, nor to form his C 29 3 conclusions in advance of his facts. He gives very full extracts from the accounts of particular tribes of men, given by travellers of different nations at different periods of time, so that the reader may form conclusions for himself without being obliged to rely too implicitly upon the conscientiousness of the author. The instances hitherto collected by ethnological students seem to put beyond question the fact that difference of physical structure, and of the color of the skin, may all be referred to climatic causes, and do not in the least countenance the theory of essen tial diversity of race. The examples by which this proposition is supported are very numerous, are found among ah 1 races and in all quarters of the globe, and are to our mind perfectly convincing. The Jew, transplanted to Poland, becomes red- bearded and blue-eyed. In England his complexion grows gradually fair. In the East Indies, on the other hand, colonies of Jewish stock are found who are entirely black, and that without the least proof or probability of foreign intermixture. In China they are described as having approximated very nearly in complexion and feature to the native type. This is a strong argument, because the uni form reluctance of the Jews, wherever scattered, to contract marriages with other races, puts the purity C 30 D of their blood almost beyond dispute, and refers us to some other natural causes for a solution of the problem. These natural causes are to be found in difference of climate, habits, and food. Of the influence of climate a remarkable example is afforded by the Ber bers inhabiting a mountainous region in Africa. Their language, their habits, their history, and their traditions all prove them to be of one unmixed de scent, and yet they differ in complexion and some other characteristics in proportion as the particu lar tribes occupy a position farther from the plain, ranging from yellow hair, fair complexion and blue eyes, to black skins and woolly hair. We have seen the influence of climate upon complexion and the color and texture of the hair. Changes equally remarkable in the shape of the skull, in the length and general characteristics of the limbs, and in the development and tissue of the muscular system are brought about by the habits and diet of a race, dependent upon the climate or some other circumstances of local condition. The difference between the Turk settled for four cen turies in Europe and the original race still existing in Asia is so great that nothing but the clearest proof deducible from language and authentic his tory would suffice to satisfy us of their identity. As n 31 3 remarkable are the changes which have taken place in the races at present occupying the western portion of Europe. Not to speak of the entire contrast they offer to their original Asiatic type, it will be enough to allude merely to their dissimilarity in general features from their ancestors as described by the earliest trustworthy observers. The most important general conclusion to be drawn from the study of ethnology is that the dif ference in type exhibited by different races of men is not greater than may be found existing in indi viduals of the same race subjected for a long period of time to the action of climatic or other physical causes. We may say further that the conclusion to which many inquirers have been led is that the white skin, and not the black, is a divergence from the original type, effected either by climate or by the propagation of an accidental variety, such as we still find to be produced among races naturally black. We wish that Dr. Prichard s work might be re printed in this country, since the high price of the English edition places it beyond the reach of the great majority of readers. We have some doubts, however, whether such a book would pass the nice censorship of the press which presides over our American republishers. Slavery demands the ex- C 32 n purgation of science as well as religion, and, like Moliere s " Doctor in spite of himself," would change the heart from the left side to the right, if its ends could be served thereby. An excellent summary of the book may be found in the last number of the Edinburgh Eeview, where the reader will also be able to see at a glance the progress of ethnological studies, and the present boundaries of its discoveries. Except for purposes of reference, it will be more interesting and useful than the original book, which we have found to produce some confusion in the mind after a single reading, from the multiplicity of its facts and refer ences. MR. CALHOUN S REPORT A THOROUGH practical treatise on the obstetrics of mountains, with a statement of authenticated cases, would seem to be still a desideratum in medi cal science, although the report of ^Esop upon the earliest recorded occurrence of the kind has been sustained by a great deal of experience, since the public mind continues to be roused to an unhealthy state of excitement by the intelligence that an in teresting event is expected to take place in the mountain family. As a general rule, the race has been distinguished for its steady habits, but indi viduals have been known to fall into habits of dissi pation, scattering their pocketfuls of rocks in the most spendthrift manner, and some have displayed a dangerous predilection for playing with fire, which has rendered them very uncomfortable neighbors. Suppose some unbreeched monster should scream for a crater, and an overf ond mother should indulge him with so terrible a plaything, who would answer for the result ? On what kind of a coral shall young Master Mountain cut his ponderous granite molars, VOL. II. c 34 3 and those canine teeth, productive of so much riot in the nursery, and at midnight compelling the sans- culotted father to an enforced enlistment in the order of peripatetic philosophers ? Members of the family, old enough to know better, sometimes dis cover a mischievous vein : witness the pranks which Emerson has reported of the venerable Monadnock. A dreadful crisis, also, may be expected when the young aspirant, just emerging from hillockhood, shall make choice of a profession. If he should prove of an atrabilious turn, and insist upon being a volcano ! These and other such considerations no doubt combined to keep the public in a feverish state of apprehension when it was noised abroad that a very eminent mountain was daily expecting her accouche ment at Washington. If the hitherto spotless Yung Frau had run off with Ben Nevis, or if Jim Borazo and Sary Nevada (of whom we have heard some of our returned volunteers speak) had been looking forward to the birth of an heir, the newspapers could not have been fuUer of it. The services of Mr. Calhoun had been engaged as man-midwife, and everything seemed to portend some tremendous con summation. Nevertheless, at the end of the appro priate period of gestation, nothing but a faint squeak is heard, and it is discovered that mountains con- c: 35 3 tinue, as in the days of ^Esop, to bring forth mice. Indeed, in the present instance, even this legitimate progeny is smaller than usual. The offspring of the Southern mountain, like Burns s field-mouse, is a " Wee, sleekit, cowerin , tim rous beastie." Diminutive, however, as it is, Mr. Calhoun has taken the precaution to muzzle it, threatening to let it loose upon the North unless that section of the country maintains a very respectful and even sub servient demeanor. Probably, from long experience, he conceives of the North, as sagacious Nick Bot tom did of the ladies, that it would be thrown into convulsions of terror by " The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on ground." Nevertheless, emboldened by such knowledge of natural history as we are masters of, we shall ven ture to approach this prodigious little creature and to describe it for the benefit of our readers. Upon a nearer examination, we even begin to suspect either that mountains have degenerated, or this is no real mouse after all, but a stuffed specimen, a counterfeit, introduced, perhaps, as was rumored of the Pretender, in a warming-pan. Mr. Calhoun s document is not so much a report as a Jeremiad. It consists mainly of a catalogue of the wrongs and grievances which the Southern C 36 ] Israel has sustained at the hands of the Heathen round about. In one respect it is meritoriously dis tinguished from the doleful palaver of Northern pro-slavery. Its tone is gentlemanly, and there is no snuffle, no piety in it from beginning to end. Ham is not alluded to, and there is no hypocritical twaddle about the mysterious designs of an inscru table Providence. Let us be thankful that we have at least a pro-slavery appeal in which the slaveholder and not slavery is defended, in which the guilt of wrong and inhumanity is not laid to the charge of the benign Father of us all. The Eeport may also claim another merit, that of adroitness. An aggressive tone is assumed throughout. It is the South that has all along been the injured party, enduring, with too Christian a forbearance, a series of outrages as atrocious as they were unprovoked. Mr. Calhoun, from long experience, evidently understands all the properties of Northern Dough, an article for the raising of which no yeast powerful enough has yet been invented, and which we sincerely believe will be behindhand in rising at the last day. Mr. Cal houn probably remembers the expedient made use of centuries ago by the masters of the insurgent Sicilian slaves, and, when other weapons have failed, brandishes the whip, trusting not vainly to the pres tige of its traditionary terrors. C 37 H Mr. Calhoun s first tears are shed over the fatal Missouri Compromise. This was the first attack upon the rights of the South, the first only because here the earliest opportunity was offered. The ques tion of the admission of Missouri as a slave state for a time rendered the continued integrity of the Union doubtful. An ominous crack already began to run along and to open wider and wider between the opposing sections of the country. The glue of the famous Compromise made all sound again in appearance, but left the cemented members more liable to split asunder at the first throe of convul sion. The mention of the Compromise reminds Mr. Calhoun that, in point of fact, aggression began much earlier, and that nothing but a spirit of self- sacrificing concession on the part of the Southern States rendered the original formation of the Union possible. He must go deeper down and farther back than this for the origin of the anti-slavery move ment, and seek it, if anywhere, in the nature of man. Mr. Calhoun and other pleaders for the peculiar institution seem to think that the claim to buy and sell human beings gathers validity by the distance of time at which it was recognized as a portion of our political system, and that its respectability is proportionate to its antiquity. But, however true C 38 ] this may be of just and rightful things, it is certain that age only attracts a deeper damnation toward what is wrong and unjust. The force of the antag onism to it is cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. Every year adds to its horror and its odium, length ening out the loathsome vista with new objects for indignation, and new claims for retribution and re dress. The age of slavery, like the gray hairs of Cenci, only heightens the sense of its atrocity. Shall it claim a privilege for cruelty because it has been cruel long ? Shall it sanctify tyranny by the plea of invariable usage ? After showing what divinity doth constitutionally hedge Slavery in the Southern States, Mr. Calhoun proceeds to draw a charming picture of the pre cautions taken to prevent the escape of runaways, and of the assistance which the pursuing masters received from citizens of free states in those earlier and simpler days of the Republic. But, like other pictures of a bygone Arcadia, it unfortunately is not founded on truth. There was never so much or so sincere anti-slavery feeling in the Northern States as at the period immediately following the Revolu tion. This is made evident by the emancipation, or the movements toward it, which took place at that time. That it was not easy to recover fugitives in some of the states, we have ample evidence. There C 39 ] is now in existence an unpublished letter from General Washington to Joseph Whipple, collector at Portsmouth, N. H., asking his aid in the recap ture of an escaped woman, a favorite slave of Mrs. Washington. The general asks the collector s opin ion as to whether an attempt to send her back to Virginia would be likely to excite a popular commo tion and lead to violent resistance. We have seen the rough draught of Mr. Whipple s answer in his own handwriting. He displays a sufficient lack of zeal in the undertaking, thinks the woman could not be peaceably kidnapped, and concludes by hoping that slavery will soon be abolished throughout the country. Whether any further correspondence took place we do not know, but the woman was never molested, and died a few years ago in New Hamp shire. A correspondent of the " Liberator," at the time of her death, sent a notice of it to that paper with an outline of her story as related by herself. Considering that fifty years had elapsed since the date of her escape, her narrative tallied with the facts of the case with truly wonderful exactness. Mr. Calhoun next laments the change which has come over the amicable relations of the oppressing race in the two great sections of the country. He shows that in spite of the figurative decision of Mr. Justice Baldwin of Connecticut, who pronounced I 40 3 slavery to be the corner-stone on which the fabric of our government rests, the obstacles thrown in the way of the exhilarating sport of man-hunting are becoming daily more insurmountable. A hundred years hence it will be almost incredible that an American Statesman should exhibit such a tender regret over the decline of a pastime so horribly inhuman. The next pathetic remonstrance of the Keport is in regard to the Extension of Slavery into the newly acquired territories. It appears that it is the insult of the thing which our too sensitive Southern brethren feel so keenly. They do not wish to extend slavery to California and New Mexico, not in the least. They merely wish to emigrate thither with their slaves ! A distinction as nice as that of An cient Pistol between stealing and conveying. " Con vey, the wise it call." They would like to convey slavery thither, not to extend it. This metaphysi cal sublety indicates Mr. Calhoun s Scotch extraction as plainly as where he says, " we would (should) in a word change conditions with them " (the slaves), a piece of Christian fellowship very far, we suspect, from the thought of the Chairman of the Southern Committee. A Southern Keport on Slavery in which Captain Bobadil did not have a finger would be incomplete. C 41 3 Accordingly Mr. Calhoun goes on to mourn that partial surrender of independent sovereignty to the exigencies of the Union which precludes the gallant South from an appeal to arms. He seems entirely to overlook the fact that such a position of affairs would bring about emancipation in the speediest and least satisfactory way. The compensation, in that case, would be exacted by the other party to the Institution, and would have to be paid in some thing redder than gold. May Heaven avert so righteous yet so dreadful a consummation ! We must in justice say that this is the only part of Mr. Cal- houn s Keport which is absolutely boyish. Could we put its subject wholly out of view, could we for get that it is a plea for the most enormous tyranny which (taking it in relation to the age and country in which it exists) the world ever saw, we should say that the tone of the whole document was digni fied and gentlemanly. As to what is said in regard to the number of volunteers for the Mexican war furnished by the North and South, respectively, we are very glad to accept Mr. Calhoun s statistics. It is gratifying to know that the most populous and civilized portion of the country supplied only half as many maraud ing barbarians as the other. This was to have been expected. C 42 3 On the whole the Report may be considered as one of the most cheering signs of the times. Its tone of confidence is evidently an assumed one. It is the stratagem of a general who kindles needless watchfires in his camp to convey an impression of his strength to the enemy, and who seems to threaten an assault when there is nothing to dread so much as an engagement with the enemy. There is a slight quaver of shaken confidence perceptible throughout, and the effect of it ought to be to redouble the efforts of the enemies of oppression. In particular we hope that the friends of the Slave in Congress will be only impressed with the apprehensions which Mr. Calhoun expresses in regard to emancipation in the District of Columbia, and will be encouraged to more strenuous exertion by his prophecies of the effects likely to follow thereupon. We believe with Mr. Calhoun that the first break in the line of slavery will be fatal, the speedy precursor of total rout. Already it is more than probable that deser tions will soon take place from the ranks of the enemy. It is only the first step which is difficult, and, that once taken, the rest will be only matter of course. THE MORAL MOVEMENT AGAINST SLAVERY WEEK or two ago the editorship of the Boston " Republican " passed into new hands. The new editor signalizes his advent by disclaiming for his party any responsibility for the opinions of disun- ionists. But, in repudiating the doctrine of dissolu tion, as if it were something odious and shameful, we think he acts unwisely. Men may honestly entertain opinions in favor of a division of the Union, with no reference whatever to the question of Slavery. If any person who has got enough knowledge of the externals of history to believe that the Roman Empire fell asunder because of its vast extent, should Phillips publish a tract to-morrow recom mending a peaceable dissolution in order to avoid the catastrophe necessarily incident to territories of our size, no editor would calumniate about parrici dal hands and no orator would allude to Casca and Brutus. It is for the simple reason that the Ameri can Anti-Slavery Society advocates disunion on anti- slavery grounds that it draws up to itself odium and C 44 I] denunciation. The Quaker still continues to enter tain a traditional and entirely respectable aversion from a Church and a hireling priesthood, without exciting any animadversion. But let Parker Pills- bury or Abby Foster do the same, and they may reckon with tolerable security on being pelted. The reason is plain enough. The Quaker appeals to dead George Fox, the Abolitionist to the living heart of man. It is because the American Anti-Sla very Society touches Church and State in a rotten place that it is hated and feared. Men call it a lit tle knot of fanatics. But a little knot of fanatics is a great force. Indeed the men who do anything great must be fanatics. Poets prophesy what is right, philosophers see it, fanatics accomplish it. Whatever opinion the editor of an anti-slavery paper may entertain as to the evils or benefits which would result from a dissolution of the Union, he should never himself (nor let his readers) lose sight of the fact that those who urge that measure do so from an intense appreciation of the horrors of slav ery. They are men and women who keep the pop ular mind alive to an example of self-devotion in behalf of a purely moral object and charge it with a portion of the magnetism of their self-sacrifice, who attack fearlessly and without question of odds every institution, however venerable with time or C 45 3 hallowed with associations, which affords shelter or vantage ground to the forces of the evil principle they are at war with. Who that has a heart capa ble of the kindred thrill of heroism, who that in a world slippery with compromise and conventionali ties loves the firm feel of earnestness, but must honor these faithful few ? Shortsighted men may not appreciate the importance of their victories. Their results may not yet be palpable on the Ex change. But it is no small triumph that they have achieved for themselves an existence and maintained it. And courage, devotion, loyalty to conscience, are not these indefeasible successes ? The Disunionists can afford to do without the Free Soil Party, but can these do without the Dis unionists ? Wisdom may break down a bridge be hind, but not a bridge before. We were among those who were rejoiced at the Buffalo Convention and the formation of the new party. Opposition to the extension of Slavery opened a door by which men could escape from the two irretrievably cor rupt parties to higher ground (for any anti-slavery ground was higher), and the Buffalo platform offered common footing where all who hoped to achieve the defeat of slavery by political action could stand to gether. We believed that the step from anti-slavery feeling to abolition principle would (with sincere C 46 3 men) be a short and necessary one, that men would see, as it was pithily expressed the other day in the " Chronotype," that there was no essential difference between extending slavery in space and in time. We believe so still, and that the leaders of the Free Soil Party must advance to a better defined and more commanding position. After exciting the en thusiasm of their followers, after showing them the wrong, and crying charge ! they cannot stand still or they will be trampled to death. If to keep soil free be good, then to make it so must also be good. If fetters must not be carried into Oregon and Cal ifornia, why should they not be stricken off in Vir ginia and South Carolina ? Had anything been wanting to convince us of the necessity of a purely moral anti-slavery organiza tion the result of the Free Soil agitation would have supplied it. Political parties have their crises of enthusiasm. Their zeal rises before an election and as naturally subsides after it. The course of these things is as natural and as easily to be foretold as that of the tides. They have their regular ebb and flow. An unsuccessful election contest, moreover, is a defeat, and defeat is discouragement. During the long interval between election and election, the forces of a defeated political party must suffer the demoralization of inaction. Like the troops of a C 47 ] partisan and irregular army, they gather suddenly for an immediate object and disappear as rapidly. Their orators, wanting the customary excitement of controversy, become silent. It is quite a different thing to harangue a crowd of benches, and a crowd of eager men. Meanwhile, a pure Ethical Idea can never be de feated. It cannot, indeed, be brought into conflict with material organizations, but only applied to them as an impartial test. It cannot attract to itself the rancorous animosity, nor the imputation of motives of personal aggrandizement, to which a political as sociation, however pure, is liable. It does not pre sent to the gross and indiscriminating popular eye a divided object. Its activity is not sensible of any seasons of peculiar intensity or depression. It is not restricted to time and place the year long caucuses are held in the family and the workshop. It knows no distinctions of age or sex, but draws to itself the yet undissipated sympathies of youth and contracts indissoluble alliance with the finer instinct and more persistent enthusiasm of woman. Two things especially absorb the admiration and sympathy of men practical success and that wea riless devotion which does not need the stimulus of success. The former is the key to the popularity of Taylor, the latter to the power of Garrison. People c 48 n without ideas laugh at the man of one. But these men are not so common as is generally imagined. That mind is of no ordinary strain which, through long years of obloquy and derision, can still keep its single object as fresh and attractive as at first. It is the man of one idea who attains his end. Narrow ness does not always imply bigotry, but sometimes concentration. At the present moment the natural reaction which has followed a crisis of extraordinary anti-slavery excitement in politics, shows not only the policy but the absolute necessity of a distinctly moral organi zation against slavery. The Free Soil Party lacks any attraction which might arise from success. It has so cautiously secluded itself from every imputa tion of fanaticism that it has deprived itself of an other and no inconsiderable element of strength. It has been diverted into many by-questions and dis putes with regard to the merits of individuals, and so, in a great measure, failed of concentrating the public attention upon things. It has not made itself numerically terrible, and, by its necessary devotion to a candidate, it has lost the prestige which be longs to devotion to an idea. Already its best news papers are failing, thus giving to the movement the appearance of a transitory convulsion instead of a revolution, and losing the benefit of that supersti- C 49 3 tion with which the notion of permanence enthralls the fancies of men. We say these things from no prejudice, but state them only as matters of fact affording matter for reflection. The Free Soil movement has done as much as we expected. If it has not broken in pieces the two old parties, as we hoped it might, that con summation will be brought about at no distant day by the administration of General Taylor. But the necessity of renewed and continuous exertion on the part of non-political abolitionists is enforced by all the signs of the times. It is they who keep alive the scattered sparks which are fanned into flame during the gusty days of electioneering excitement. Nay, at what altar was the firebrand lighted which the Fox of Kinderhook carried into the standing corn of the Philistines ? VOL. n. THE ABOLITIONISTS AND EMANCIPATION N, i EXT to the charge of being possessed of only a single idea, the accusation most often brought against Abolitionists has been that they have re tarded the progress of emancipation and made more galling the fetters of the slave. If emancipation at all hazards be the one idea of the Abolitionists, this is the one idea of their opponents. As far as the comparison goes, the advantage is clearly on the side of the former. From the frequency and bitterness with which this reproach is urged, one might suppose that an amelioration of the slave s condition was the object which the whole community had most at heart. As that fine pagan emulation of the trophies of Milti- ades would not let the young Athenian sleep, so a purer and more Christian solicitude for those in bonds would seem to make uneasy the pillows of all classes of society, and especially of the politicians. In all ages of the world the Mob have displayed the keenest anxiety for the preservation of an undefined C 51 3 religion, and it was accordingly to be expected that they should not be indifferent while the kindred cause of philanthropy was in danger of receiving detriment. It is doubtless not without some of that exultation which springs from conscientious self-de votion that thousands of Christian philosophers and patriots deposited their ballots for a slaveholder, sacrificing their natural desire to express immedi ately their harassing Anti-slavery zeal to the yet stronger desire of seeing the slave emancipated at an earlier period by means of prudent concession. But martyrologies are not the pleasantest kind of reading, and we gladly turn from the contemplation of such sufferings. Let us rather consider whether they are necessary, and whether the cause of eman cipation has been in reality so greatly put back. In the first place has there really been a change of public opinion for the worse, either at the North or the South, since the Liberator came into existence eighteen years ago ? We select this period as the point of departure, and not because we have for gotten Woolman, Benezet and Lundy, but because these stand in the same relation to the Anti-slavery movement in America that Dante, the Lollards and Huss hold in respect to Luther. That Anti-slavery was regarded with less repug nance by many persons at that time than now, we C 52 1 are ready to admit. The naked question, presented to any mind not deadened by custom or blinded by interest, was very certain to receive an affirmative answer. But there are many intellects so constituted that an object loses its interest in proportion as it grows less novel. There are many which weary of a long and barren march without apparent results. There are many which estimate the common enthu siasm by their own, and are disheartened by meet ing with coldness and sluggishness. Moreover, at the time when the movement began, Slavery was regarded as a distant and detached object. The immense spread of its roots, and how they had forced themselves into every crevice in the foundations of Church and State, was not even suspected. Men were ready enough to condemn an alien sin which concerned only their neighbors, but were soon satis fied that what they were themselves interested in could be no sin. The Politician, the Merchant, the Clergyman, each in turn found that it would not do to be an Abolitionist, and, as they were naturally unwilling that anybody should be better than them selves, and as the large majority of the Community was either influenced by, or dependent upon them, it is no hard matter to come at the result. When we add to all this the widespread influence of that common self-deception which leads men to believe C 53 3 that they are acting with prudence and wisdom, when they are really held back by coldness and timidity of nature, or by regard for what they sup pose to be their interest, we shall see with how much Anti-slavery had to contend. Any one who has read Clarkson s "History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade " cannot fail to be struck with the similarity of the objections brought against the advocate of that measure in England and those which are constantly thrown in the way of American Anti-slavery. Prominent among these was this same one, that they were retarding the accomplishment of their object by their intemper ate zeal. But the result showed that success drew nearer in proportion as they grew more daring in their reproaches and sharper in their denunciations. So far as there being any truth in this charge of having retarded emancipation, the simple fact un doubtedly is that were the Abolitionists now to go back to the position from which they started, they would find themselves less fanatical than a very re spectable minority of the people. The public fol lows them step by step, occupying the positions they have successively fortified and quitted, and it is ne cessary that they should keep in advance in order that people may not be shocked by waking up and finding themselves Abolitionists. The Garrison of C 54 3 1831 might be a popular man and a member of Congress now. But it is part of the order of Pro vidence that there should be always Garrisons as well as popular men and members of Congress. It would seem at first sight that the recent elec tion of a slaveholder was a sign of retrogression. That the Whigs stultified themselves and gave the lie to the professions of years in nominating Taylor there can be no doubt. That the temptation of political preferment made many renegades is equally certain, though there is the consolation of reflecting that a man who could become a renegade was never worth having. But never at any former presiden tial election was the slavery question so prominent. Indeed it was the only question. The great quarrel which the Whigs had with Cass and Van Buren was not that they were opposed to Bank and Tar iff, but that they could not be trusted on the slav ery question. The very majority which secured Taylor s election professed to vote for him reluc tantly and as a choice between two evils. We are not now concerned with the absurdity of voting for a slaveholder to restrain slavery, but only with the ostensible motives which influenced a very large number of voters. The motives which men pretend for their conduct show clearly what public sentiment is. So widely spread was the Anti-slavery feeling, C 55 3 and so exactly did the Buffalo Convention harmo nize with the public sympathies, that even wary pol iticians were for the moment staggered. Had the election taken place in August, the result would have been widely different. Three months gave time for enthusiasm to subside, for old associations to regain their hold, and for the whole disorgan ized machinery of party to be repaired and set in motion. So much for the retarding effect of the Anti-slav ery agitation at the North. At the South, if vio lent opposition has been excited, it has been a mere offset to equal violence on the other side. It has arisen from the fact that the defenders of slavery instinctively felt that their weakness was in their own camp. How could what is in its own nature the most unreasonable of institutions, be reasonably de fended ? How could that which is founded on force and fraud be gently and honestly supported? How could the vilest of existing tyrannies find countenance from any but the vilest arguments ? But it is said that the condition of the slave has grown worse, and that the laws against him have been made more severe. If this were true, the lapse of eighteen years, and the necessity of other injustices which one injustice entails would be enough to account for it. But it is not true. The efforts of the Aboli- C 56 3 tionists have drawn so much attention toward slav ery, and their sentiments have found so much sym pathy even in some of the Slave States themselves, that every evil, cruelty and misery belonging to the system has become painfully conspicuous. The slaveholder in the remotest rice swamp of Florida feels that the walls have eyes and ears. The fanaticism of the Abolitionists has retarded emancipation, just in the same way that Luther retarded the Reformation. Considering the im mense odds against which they have had to struggle, they have brought about a revolution in a wonder fully short space of time. It does not matter that the advocates of emancipation in the Slave States shrink from accepting the abolition doctrine in all its length and breadth. However they may deny all sympathy and connection with those whom it is the fashion falsely to call advocates of violent meas ures, it is no less plain that their strength is derived from those very persons. It is these fanatics who have put them in connection with the moral senti ment of the whole world, and who make their op ponents feel that behind them He encamped the great moving forces which have given every forward impulse to man. Along the slender wire of North ern Anti-slavery the Southern Abolitionist receives the inspiring influx of the religious sentiment, the C 57 3 love of freedom, and the humanity of entire Chris tendom. Slavery has nothing behind it but the sheer precipice, nothing before it but the inevitable retributive Doom. GENERAL TAYLOR T HE long succession of Democratic rulers has at length been broken. Mr. Polk has laid aside and General Taylor has put on that striking likeness of a kingly crown which our republican rulers are permitted to wear. But, though an undoubted change has taken place in the person of our chief magistrate, and a presumed one in his political principles, the Dynasty remains the same, and one slaveholder has quietly taken the place of another in the presidential chair. Whatever doubts there may be with regard to some articles of the Consti tution, it seems to be generally understood that there exists somewhere in that august instrument a pro vision settling the order of succession in the South ern line. It is an instrument on which the politi cian s cunning finger can play what stop he please only it must be to a slaveholding tune. As far as the North is concerned, General Tay lor comes into office as the avowed opponent of the extension of slavery. The assertions of the Whig Press upon this point were unanimous throughout C 59 ] the Free States, and here and there a fortunate gen tleman carried in his pocket a letter from the Can didate provisionally defining his position as Presi dent. These letters the inteUigent voters of the country were not permitted to see, and we have very great doubts whether they will ever form part of any collection which some future Sparks may make of the writings of the second father of his country. It was enough that they entirely satisfied the Anti- slavery requirements of such original (highly ori ginal) Abolitionists as Mr. Lawrence. It has been an honor to that gentleman and a benefit to the community that his pocket has not generally been so retentive or so tightly buttoned as on this partic ular occasion. But General Taylor is the representative of the Whig Party, and that party has hitherto been the Anti-slavery party of the Country. It has battled for the Right of Petition, and has elected such men as John Quincy Adams, Giddings, and Palfrey. This was to a certain extent true as long as the Whigs stood in need of Anti-slavery aid, and thought that aid worth bidding for. At that time not Garrison himself could have been more bitter in denouncing the unholy alliance between Northern Democracy and Southern Patriarchalism. But this was the jeal ousy of disappointed rivalry. The South, fickle in C 6o 3 everything but devotion to itself, and the Whig Party, destitute of every principle but that of self- preservation, have struck up a match. The Whigs, compulsory renegades from Anti-slavery doctrines which they never sincerely believed in, assail the consistent men in their late party with all that blus tering rancor with which renegades endeavor to be wilder themselves out of the feeling of their own self-contempt. Having caught their fish, they toss regardlessly overboard the bait no longer fresh. They would make an auto dafe of Giddings and Palfrey if they had the power and the opportunity. It would be laughable were it not disgusting to read the diatribes of some of the editorial turn coats. It is common to call such personages Bene dict Arnolds and Judases. But the memory even of traitors should be treated with justice. Arnold was a man of ability, and Judas had so much right feel ing left in him as to go and hang himself. We can only say that if the Whig Party paid thirty pieces of silver (even of the smallest denomination) for some of these gentry, they paid a most unconscion able price. In speaking of parties, it is only just to make a distinction between the leaders and the led. We believe that the majority of the Whig Party at the North have never been dissatisfied with anything C 6l 1 but the meagreness of the Anti-slavery diet allowed them by their providers. But the masses of a party are necessarily passive and not active politicians. They are accustomed to order and subordination, and to have their work cut out for them by the comparatively few who make politics their profes sion. Discipline is as necessary as in an army. They obey orders without asking any questions. The officers of this great voting militia are men who embark in politics as in any other trade. In the ordinary transactions of life they have morals as high as the cis-penitentiary degree, enough, that is, to keep them out of the State s Prison. But in politics they make no scruple to lie, to bear false witness, to forge, to obtain votes under false pretences. If suc cessful, they enjoy a four years quiet to plunder and to be forgotten in. At the end of that time, the people are ready to be swindled and they to swindle again. The Whig managers have now fairly gone over to the South and the party has instinctively followed. We have gained a great victory, say the Managers, but over whom or for what, the Party has as little idea as the boy Peterkin in Southey s ballad ; over the principles they have professed for the last ten years, we should be inclined to say. The child who goes for the first time to the wharf and sees the C 62 3 troop of urchins busy with their sticks at the bungs of the molasses-hogsheads, says to himself why, this is stealing ! But presently the impulse of gre- gariousness seizes him. The sin, dissipated among so many blithesome perpetrators, loses its intensity and sharpness of outline. Divided among so many, it becomes infinitesimal. Presently he takes a small stick and, by and by, as long a one as he can get, and is as busy as the rest. Still, he reserves to him self a conscience, and regards as disreputable petty larcenors those who transfer their luscious booty to a kettle. These are the abstruser distinctions of ethics. The Whigs saw the Democrats enjoying the plunder won by base compliances with slavery. At first they only remarked the compliance, but, ceas ing gradually to be shocked at what they habitually witnessed, they at last beheld nothing but the plun der. So far, then, from expecting any Anti-slavery measures from the Whig Party, we shall be sur prised if their movement be not henceforth decid edly retrograde. They have taken the costly first step. They have already undergone that initial slump in the mire, after which one is careless about picking his steps. The fact that General Taylor has summoned to his cabinet as prime minister a gentleman who, as senator, has proposed a compro- C 6 3 ] mise on the question of slavery in the territories, indicates the future policy of the administration. It remains to be seen whether the hope of govern ment patronage, and the desire of preserving the in tegrity of the Party, will furnish the President with a compliant House of Representatives. General Taylor has all along professed his entire unfitness for the office to which he has been pro moted, and his unwillingness to ascend the danger ous elevation of the Presidency. This petty affec tation of coyness he has kept up even on his way to Washington. It is like the nolo episcopari of a bishop. He pointed out a log cabin on the banks of the Ohio and informed his admiring hearers that he would rather occupy that mansion than the White House. It would be a matter of economy in Con gress to make an appropriation for building him such a dwelling at Washington. We confess that this cant of the General has not tended to convince us of that straightforward sense and frankness which have been so liberally attributed to him. Our public men are not so shy of the Presidency that it would have been difficult to find another candidate if the General had resolutely resisted. He reversed the Irishman s bull, and, instead of being forced to vol unteer, volunteered to be forced. No augury of the President s future conduct can C 64 ] be drawn from an inspection of the entrails of his inaugural discourse. It has the merit of brevity, a questionable one, after all, when it is not combined with fulness of meaning. Major Bliss can express himself with distinctness, witness some of his dis patches to the War Department. The Whigs pro fess to see in the address a reduction of the golden age of the Republic, and cry with one accord redeunt Saturnia regnal The General declares that he shall be governed by the Constitution, and, where there is doubt, that he shall follow the interpreta tion of the earlier presidents, particularly Washing ton. Where these guides are wanting he will sub mit himself to the decision of the Supreme Court. Unsafe pledges these in the matter of slavery. The question of its extension had not arisen in Washing ton s time, and a majority of the Supreme Judges are slaveholders. As to the General s own opin ions on the subject, we can only judge them by the fact that he has extended the institution over some thing like a hundred new victims since he became a candidate for the Presidency. But we must wait and see. An Inaugural Address is no safe criterion. We have no doubt that the speech of his majesty King Stork on ascending the throne of the frogs was as liberal and as full of respect for the consti tution as that of his predecessor King Log. MR. CLAY AS AN ABOLITION ISTSECOND APPEARANCE IN FIFTY YEARS politics have presented no more singu lar phenomenon than the popularity of Henry Clay. As Napoleon seems to be the fashionable nickname now, one being the Napoleon of Peace, another of Finance, and a third of Magnetic Telegraphing, we may call him the Napoleon of Defeat. He has achieved more signal unsuccesses than any states man in the country. His popularity has never struck down any deep root into the heart of the people. Old Hickory, who put a great deal of straightforward sense into very crooked spelling ; who hanged the Bank as he had hanged Ambrister in Florida ; who bullied France, who dragooned South Carolina, and swore by the Eternal now and then, had a far stronger hold upon the masses because he reflected them more truly. But Clay somehow con jured an enthusiasm into merchants and cotton-spin ners. He found, and had a way to set on fire the hearts of Banks and Brokers Boards. Though a VOL. n. C 66 3 slaveholder, uttering sentiments which would have authorized his own chattels to cut his throat, he was the idol of those whose enthusiasm for freedom is multiplied by the square of the distance at which the struggle for it takes place. Though not im maculate in private character, he attracted to himself the support of the religious classes. Bible, Tract, Missionary, and Magdalen Societies were well-nigh unanimous for him. Washington was the Jerusalem and he the Godfrey of a new Crusade. Was not all this because he was the genius of Compromises, of middle courses, of blowing neither hot nor cold, in short, of the American System ? Whatever the cause, the loyalty to him has no parallel except in the history of the House of Stuart. In this view it becomes poetical. As a forlorn hope, as a devotion to disinterested defeat, it has gained, here and there, a recruit from a different order of minds. Whittier addressed to him the most poetical of modern polit ical verses. And even now, as Hogg wrote Jacob ite songs after the last of the Stuarts had for years been laid in his mockery tomb at Rome, Greeley turns sadly away from the solid Rough and Ready pud ding, to sup full of the east wind of long ago hope less hopes, and to compose cold water dithyrambics to the patriarch sitting over his wine at the St. Charles Hotel. C 67 ] The Whigs have at last grown weary of the at tempt to make bricks without straw out of their .Clay. The wreck of the great Western politician lies, a weather-beaten beacon, upon the shoals of Compro mise. Ships of larger rate and stouter timbers are thumping there which might be got off by backing the sails and throwing overboard a little constitu tional ballast, which, among other disadvantages, has the prime one of shifting. Mr. Clay has been the most unpolitic of politi cians. He has made, at best, only coasting voyages, hugging the shore closely all the while. He has never struck out into the open deep of great princi ple, for his navigation is not by compass or by the eternal stars, but like that of other fishermen who venture in their own private dories, by certain land marks on the shore, such, for example, as the White House. A fog leaves him bewildered with a pair of arms and oars, and his good or bad luck, as it may happen. Mr. Clay has in his time split as many hairs as another, and, as Alexander ordered a bushel of pease to the dexterous pea-shooter, the Whig Party, in giving their will-o -the-wisp leader the mitten, should have been careful that it was a hair one. His philanthropy embraced all races, but embraced the African with a difference that is, with a handcuff. C 68 3 He was a republican of the sternest pattern, but who could conceive of a republican blacking his own boots ? Indeed we think it would be hard to prove that Cincinnatus, the favorite sample of that sort, ever did anything of the kind. He was willing to allow that slavery was a moral and political evil to both master and slave, but were not his chattels fat and sleek? He was opposed to the annexation of Texas, but then, he was in favor of it. He was torn by conflicting emotions. Northwardly he was anti, southwardly he was pro. He was opposed to the Mexican War, but would have relished slaugh tering his private Mexican in a humble way. On the question of the Wilmot Proviso, we suppose he would be against the extension of slavery into new territory, but would be in favor of allowing " South ern gentlemen " to emigrate thither with their flocks and herds. In reviewing his political life, what great principle do we find that he was ever capable of appreciating ? One, and only one that Henry Clay of Kentucky ought to be the next President of these United States. But unfortunately he has always had a fancy that the Presidential Chair was situated somewhere between two stools, and has ac cordingly several times seated himself with an un comfortable rapidity upon the floor. This mistake in reckoning the locality of that desired object has mis- C 6 9 D led others. It left General Cass lately with his heels in the air. And yet General Taylor found it in that very position and succeeded in sitting down in it. We have said that the name of Mr. Clay comes up to the mind associated with the advancement of no great principle, of no interest that has bearings more general than a locality or a class. It is true that he was an advocate of Emancipation in Kentucky half a century ago, and he tells in his recent letter that his opinions have remained unchanged ever since. That fifty years have wrought no advancement or ripening of his ideas on this subject does not tend to raise him in our minds as a statesman. But in truth his views of slavery have never been those of a statesman nor of a philanthropist. Statesmanlike they could not be, for they were limited by the sup posed interests of a single class and they have re ceived no forward impulse and no expansion during the period of more than an entire generation, a gen eration which has accomplished more than any other in the propagation of social and humanitary science. Truly philanthropic they could not be, for they were smothered by the pressure of a merely physical majority. The medical history of the human mind exhibits many instances of sufficiently ludicrous hallucina tions. Men have fancied themselves to be teapots, C 70 ] junk-bottles, and what not. Lord Timothy Dexter had a penchant for considering himself dead, and we have known those who took it for granted that they were alive with as little substantial foundation in fact. But we have never met with any vagary of mental assumption more preposterous than that Mr. Clay should suppose himself an Abolitionist. His letter reminds one of Governor Panza s din ner in the island of Barataria. The preparations for the meal seem satisfactory enough and we sit down expecting a substantial repast. But, one by one, the dishes are whisked away from us and we are finally left to make such an arrangement with our importunate appetites as the assets left to us in the shape of knife, fork and napkins will admit of. We have no complaint to make of the three or four introductory paragraphs. Mr. Clay treats all the nonsense about the benefits of slavery contempt uously enough. But he immediately proceeds to consider the question with sole reference to the pre sumed advantage of the white race. He takes the case out of the court of conscience where alone it can be decided absolutely and without appeal, and puts it at the mercy of the never ending litigation of political economy. If there be no moral wrong in the robbery of one half of the community by the other half, the problem of the advantages of such a i: 71 3 system would meet with a very different solution from each moiety respectively. But, if the system be wicked, and unprofitable because that is one necessary condition of wickedness, the chances of prolonged debate are greatly lessened. Even after taking it for granted that Emancipa tion is for the interest of Kentucky, Mr. Clay humbly concludes by saying that if the majority decide against him, he shall submit. The majority of the people of the United States has several times de cided against Mr. Clay and yet he has shown no bashful reluctance to being again a candidate. " Pick your flint and try again " was his motto a few years ago. Is a question which concerns an en tire race to be given up more readily than the shadow of a dream of a chance for the Presidency ? If the majority be thus absolute in deciding what things are right and what wrong, what office would insure the throats of the masters in any state where the slaves become numerically superior ? The truth is that Mr. Clay s letter is disgraceful to the community in which it is written. We admit that deliberation should characterize the movements of states, and such deliberation will necessarily, without any precaution of ours, characterize the movement of large masses of men living under a long established social system, providing they are C v 2 n begun early enough and are made in accordance with the spirit of the age. For example, if the slaves of Kentucky were liberated to-morrow and relieved from every political disability, the question of their position in the social order would settle itself by the slow and gradual operation of natural causes. A social wrong, based originally upon brute force and perpetuated by it, may be reached and remedied by legislation, and the sooner the better. Why wait for the rust to eat handcuffs asunder, when there is a key ready to unlock them ? We concede to Mr. Clay that deliberation should characterize statesmen no less than states. The rudder which determines the direction of the intellectual or ethical advance ment of any age may be behind it, as in a vessel, but the steersman at the wheel in front, and with a clear outlook forward. Mr. Clay s notion of the duty of the man at the helm seems to be that he should be keeping his balance astride of an empty cask out of sight in the rear of the ship. We shall not trouble ourselves with an analysis of a document which all our readers will probably read for themselves. The spirit of barbarism which dis tinguishes it would alone be a sufficient argument in condemnation of a system which could so blunt the sensibilities of an originally fine nature and ob scure the perceptions of a keen and quick intellect. C 73 ] The Letter is valuable chiefly as a curiosity and as a sign of the times. It is the unwilling creaking of a rusty political weather-cock which begins to feel the first indications of wind from a new quarter. One thing is very certain. It is not of such mate rial that reforms are made. Here is compromise out- compromised, and terms offered to the Devil such as he would not have dared to ask. Here is wrong to be treated on the principle of similia similibus curantur, but with no homoeopathic dose. The poor slave, if he escape being sold out of the state, and if he survive the thirty-nine years administration of hairs of the dog that bit them prescribed by Mr. Clay, is to be transported to a fever manufactory at his own expense. A man is drowning and Dr. Clay is called in. The following is his prescription, " Take of water (if distilled the better) enough to submerge the patient. Keep him carefully sunk therein thirty-nine hours, or more in proportion to the length of time he has already been under water. Then raise him carefully, attach a fifty-six pound weight to each ankle, transport him to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (at his own expense), and then drop him overboard. I think he will never be liable to a recurrence of the complaint. 9 SLAVEHOLDING TERRITORIES JL HE German poet Schiller, in a little poem, the humor of which is delightfully interpenetrated with graver meaning, has imagined a new division of the earth. Let us suppose such a partition to be once more about to take place. A claimant comes for ward and says, "I have invented and brought to perfection the great doctrine of human freedom. But, in order that freedom may be fully appreciated (such is the weakness of human nature), a strong contrast is necessary. Our light, that it may draw the eyes of men, must have a background of dark ness. Accordingly I have appropriated unto myself the bodies and souls of one hundred of my bre thren after the manner of thy servant Abraham. These toil and spin for me to the end that I may be even as a lily of the field, and that the desire of other men to be like unto me may be increased. These are the bushel whereupon the divine idea of liberty being set in my unworthy person (an unde serving candle) may give light to the whole world. i: 7.5 3 Without this system, pride, the habit of command, the aversion from labor, and other virtuous charac teristics of the Christian freeman could never be brought to their fullest and healthiest activity in the naturally wicked heart of man. Now the earth is like a nursing mother and must herself be fed that she may give sustenance to her children. But it is one of the unfortunate contingencies of my system that under its operation she soon becomes exhausted. Therefore it is fitting that I should have a larger proportion than my brethren, lest I and these my menservants and maidservants should starve upon the soil I have received from my fathers as a herit- age." The answer should doubtless be, " Who art thou that I should be mindful of thee? Have I not given the earth among all my children that they should use it as not abusing it? Which of you shall say he is a first-born son that his portion may be double that of his brother ? Behold, I have made the locust and the caterpillar. These I know, and that they devour every green thing, making no return for that which they have taken. Man also have I made, but not as the locust and the caterpil lar. Art thou a creeping thing that thou shouldst blacken and desolate, or is it a good thing in thee that thou shouldst make a desert where the garden C 76 3 now is? And what pratest thou of Abraham? He also was good in his season. If thou seest thy son, being a boy, tearing off the wings and legs of flies, thou excusest him. Not so, being a man. Neither shall the world s boyhood be for an example to thee, nor shall Abraham stand between thee and guiltiness toward thy brother." We have stated the matter in this form simply because it brings the enormity of it more palpably before the mind. This was precisely the demand which slavery made in regard to Texas, and obtained all that it asked. It puts forward its claim again as to the new territory, with a fair prospect of getting half of it allowed. It is now spinning its web for the larger prey of Cuba. According to the cosmogony of the Singalese, the earth itself was originally edible, and, without suf fering diminution, afforded sustenance to the beings that inhabited it. These, at first, held it contentedly in common, but, after a time, the fear lest this mirac ulous food should fail them, engendered selfishness and the desire of private property. They therefore parcelled out the earth among them, and from that day it lost its property of food. Next, a kind of grain was self -produced, which, without labor on the part of men, supplied all their necessities. This again was divided, and in consequence was taken away. C 77 ] Thus by degrees the earth was brought to its present condition, demanding constant toil to make it pro ductive. This is a pretty parable of the common right to the soil, a doctrine the number of whose advocates is increasing every day. Some sufficiently conser vative political economists have given their assent to it as an original principle, the gradual reproduc tion of which in practice will remedy many of the evils of our present civilization. The more limited principle that the title to the soil is in him who can most profitably use it is gaining a more general ad mission. Something like it lies at the bottom of the proposition which Sir Robert Peel has lately brought forward in Parliament for bettering the condition of Ireland, a scheme, by the way, advocated several years ago by Mr. Richard D. Webb of Dublin. Now, is it not wonderful that, with the experience of the Old World before our eyes, we should for a moment allow it to be a Debatable question, whether slavery should be permitted, not only to defile, but to blast a territory whose future destinies we may shape as we please ? It is the merest folly to talk of it as a constitutional question. The Constitution has sins enough to answer for already. That which V is palpable treason against God, man, and the nature of things cannot be a question at all. According to C 78 3 our thinking, radicalism is not that system which, like an over-hasty child, is continually pulling up its plants to see if they be well rooted, but that which takes good heed that the plant be originally well set, and that it have every reasonable chance to grow and thrive to afford fruit and shade to our sons sons. The terror which in the mind of Richter s Schmelzle finally swallowed up all the rest, was lest some chemist (as he had heard of the invention of such a process) should suddenly extract all the oxygen from the atmosphere of the earth. Slavery does liter ally worse than this in the territory over which it ex tends itself. Not only does it rob the moral atmos phere of that oxygen which is necessary to the lungs of free labor, but it also extracts from the soil itself those nutritive properties which render it capable of supporting life. Suppose the inhabitants of one of our territories should apply to Congress for admis- sion into the Union as a State, with a provision in their Constitution binding them within a certain number of years to reduce all the arable land within their boundaries to the condition of the Desert of Sahara. Would Congress entertain the petition for a moment ? Yet these are virtually the terms upon which a slaveholding territory would demand to be admitted. It is mere nonsense to say that the people C 79 H of a territory have a right to establish whatever Constitution they please, provided it do not infringe the Constitution of the United States. Is it, then, a greater crime to violate the Constitution of the United States than to violate the Constitution of the Universe? We rather think that some of our pro found Statesmen who have got the President s chair in their eyes and so are unable to see that it is mor ally wrong for man to blast and embrute God s chil dren, would hesitate before they acknowledged the rightfulness of deliberately blighting and laying waste God s earth. ANTI-SLAVERY CRITICISM UPON MR. CLAY S LETTER J_T has not surprised us that Abolitionists should be found fault with for not being entirely satisfied with Mr. Clay s plan for emancipation in Kentucky. It is generally expected of them that they should be " Contented wi little And cantie wi mair." Nay, they are looked upon as peculiarly ungrateful and impracticable (that is the favorite term) if they do not devote their entire energies to soliciting nothing, and express a thankfulness amounting almost to rapture when they get it. For eighteen years they have received their regular allowance of it, have thriven and grown upon it, and their de mand for an extra spoonful or two is received with as much amazement as Oliver Twist s petition for more. That the Anti-slavery criticism of Mr. Clay s letter should be blamed for severity was to be expected, but we confess that the quarter from which some of the C 81 3 reproof has emanated has excited our amazement. Abolitionists cried out against the scheme of the Kentucky statesman as coldblooded, and as leaving out of sight altogether the rights and wants of the chief party to the act of emancipation. But the " Tribune " defends Mr. Clay on the ground that mod eration is the best policy and that he is better able to judge how large a dose of freedom the Kentucky stomach is at present able to bear. The patient is on the verge of delirium tremens, and the " Tribune " would not recommend total abstinence, but would think it wiser for him to mix enough spirits with his water just to kill the insects. We take no one to task for inconsistency simply as such. It depends entirely on the direction which the inconsistency takes, whether it be glorious or shameful. It is certainly no disgrace to a soldier to be able to run swiftly. It is even a desirable accom plishment. Swift-footed is Homer s favorite epithet for Achilles. Yet in a battle (such are the prejudices of education) our opinion of the soldier s merit is entirely determined by the consideration whether he exercised his pedal gift toward the enemy s lines or away from them. So, when an inconsistency takes a backward direction, we are inclined to look upon it with suspicion. Mr. Greeley s enemies have been in the habit of charging him with being under the VOL. n. C 82 3 exclusive domination of the sign Capricorn, being thereby impelled to butt violently against whatever is constituted and established. Nevertheless, in the matter of Slavery we think we find indications of the influence of Cancer, the inspirer of retrogression. If he be about to butt also against the Peculiar In stitution, he runs backward so far to get a start that we well-nigh lose sight of him altogether. We speak of Mr. Greeley by name because he is identified (and honorably so) with the " Tribune " and has given to that paper its peculiar character. We intend no vio lation of editorial decorums, nor shall we forget the efficient service Mr. Greeley has rendered to the cause of Progress, because we find his judgment in some respects so entirely perverted. The Whig seems now and then to slip down over his eyes. Before alluding to matters of wider bearing, we wish to say a few words upon a point of more exclu sively individual interest. On several former occa sions, as well as in connection with Mr. Clay s letter, Mr. Greeley has taken the opportunity to indulge in contemptuous expressions toward Garrison and those who are nicknamed Garrisonians. That truly illustri ous name needs no defence and no eulogium of ours. It may be safely transmitted to the guardianship of the Future. But that Mr. Greeley should charge Garrison with fanaticism as a fault has, we confess, C 8 3 ] been a matter of wonder to us. Why, God sent him into the world with that special mission and none other. It is his peculiar glory that he has fulfilled it so entirely. It is that which will make his name a part of our American history. We would not have all men fanatics, but let us be devoutly thankful for as many of that kind as we can get. They are by no means too common as yet. Let us remember Dr. Johnson s excellent advice, above all things to en deavor to clear our minds of cant. And there is no cant more foolish or more common than theirs who under the mask of discretion, moderation, statesman ship, and what not, would fain convict of fanaticism all that transcends their own limits, and then abolish it as dangerous to the body politic. From the zoo phyte upward everything is ultra to something else. And oddly enough Mr. Greeley owes his success to the fact that the element of ultraism slightly pre ponderates in his composition. Undoubtedly the zoophyte taxes the barnacle with a rash activity, and considers the framework of society endangered by the unsettled notions of the periwinkle. The friends of every class of Reform in America owe a debt to Garrison, and in such matters there should be no repudiation. Especially let not the butt end of the wedge sneer at the ultraism of the entering part. How does it happen that only abolitionists are [ 84 ] charged with wanting moderation, and that slave- holding is the one sin that is to be treated with tenderness ? Is there then a scale of meritoriousness in crimes? Mr. Greeley subscribed five hundred dollars to assist insurrection in Ireland. We freely admit that, if ever rebellion were justifiable, it was so in that case. And why ? Because no plan of relief was sufficiently radical, and because all of them looked to the interests of the great landholders rather than of the great body of the people who were chiefly concerned. But let us apply here Mr. Greeley s reasoning in regard to Kentucky. Surely Lord Clarendon and the great landholders who were on the spot could judge better than anybody else what measures were most judicious and most likely to have a salutary effect. If what the law makes pro perty be property in Kentucky, why is it not so in New York, and how will Mr. Greeley defend his anti-rent doctrines? But perhaps a man s property in the bodies and souls of his fellow citizens is more sacred and indefeasible than his title to the soil. We did not think that rebellion was the best medicine for Ireland, nor should we recommend a servile war as a cure for Kentucky. The cold-blood cure is not to our fancy. But it seems to us that Mr. Greeley was more nearly right in his Irish than in his Kentucky prescription. In that case, at least, C 8 5 3 he followed the diagnosis of his heart. We humbly conceive that, when justice is to be done, some por tion of consideration and even of redress is due to the injured party. The very same arguments are brought against the Irishman and the African. He is improvident, he is lazy, he cannot take care of himself, he is creation s natural loafer. In short, there is a wonderful sameness in the arguments of oppression all the world over. It is said that the Abolitionists, while they are dissatisfied with the plans of everybody else, offer no plan of their own. This is not to be complained of in them, for it is the necessity of their position. They are critics and not constructives, it is true, but they are fulfilling their appointed destiny. Criticism must precede construction. But, if ever there was a case where criticism is the one thing needful, it is in regard to American Slavery. Here is a case where the primary laws of Nature are violated. All that is necessary is that this violation should cease, and that Nature, always organizing, always constructive, should be left free to work a cure. A limb of the body politic has fallen asleep. Remove the unnatural pressure and the blood will circulate freely again. The Abolitionist unquestionably is a bore. So was the old Eoman with his Delenda est Carthago, his old-fashioned protective tariff. But he carried his C 86 ] point, and so will the Abolitionist. It is true that the Abolitionist plan does not please the slaveholder. Neither does the associative plan carry instant con viction to the minds of the civilizees. But that is no argument against either of them. We ask again what claim the slaveholder has to peculiar tenderness of treatment ? Is the holding of slaves more innocent than the holding of locofoco opinions ? Mr. Greeley can find it in his heart to denounce that offence. Will denunciation convince the one and only exasperate the other ? We agree with Mr. Greeley that society needs a radical reor ganization. Perhaps he thinks that Slavery is one of those natural conditions in the progress of society which natural progress will remove without inter vention of ours. If society must go through all these natural stages before it reaches that point of disorganization where reorganization will be for the first time possible, why oppose the introduction of slavery into the new territory ? It cannot survive its dissolution in older states. The plan of the Aboli tionist, if it do not look to natural laws for the ex tinction of the evil, is willing to trust to them for the safety of society whenever its extinction can be brought about. All that it asks is that these natural laws shall be disentangled from the snarl of an odi ous and fatal discord. C 87 ] But, while Mr. Greeley seems to deny, at least by implication, that the occasion for anti-slavery action has yet arrived, he also impliedly admits that the golden moment of opportunity is numbered some where upon the dial of time. In noticing some Vir ginian comments upon the letter of the " Tribune s " Fairfax correspondent, Mr. Greeley says that " he (the correspondent) is not disposed to act against Slavery till the proper time comes." We quote from memory, but with enough exactness, we believe, to be guilty of no misrepresentation. Now, who is to set the alarm of the clock at the fitting hour ? Mr. Greeley was willing to take the word of Paddy as to Ireland, will he consult Pomp as to Virginia? Or must we leave it to Pomp s master? Those who profit by any abuse are not apt to be in any particular hurry about reform. Let us remember that stanza of good Dr. Watts which we learned when we were children, " T is the voice of the sluggard ! I hear him complain : You have called me too soon ! Let me slumber again." We rather think this would be the answer Mr. Greeley would receive from the slaveholder when, satisfied that the " proper time has come," he comes forward to shake him by the shoulder and arouse him to the C 88 3 exigencies of the occasion. The sauce to which the Garrison has been treated would be liberally dis- pensed to the Greeley also, or there is not so much human nature in man as is generally suspected. But then Mr. Greeley would doubtless have a plan. This unquestionably would be a philosophical mode of proceeding, but how are we to be sure that it will suit the slaveholder ? We are tolerably confident that it would not. The slaveholder, when Mr. Greeley would politely request him to state what method would be most consonant to his feelings, would an swer, as did the " impracticable " boy whose mother asked him what he would like for breakfast, " Just what you ain t gut ! " Mr. Greeley does not stop to enquire whether " the proper time has come " to lament prostitution or to rebuke bitterly the causes of it. He can denounce land-monopoly and wages-slavery. Yet all these, as well as African slavery, would naturally cease to exist were society once reorganized upon a scientific basis. The time to cry out against any popular sin has come whenever God has sent a message to that effect to any ardent and fearless soul. It is only Jonah who turns back, and it is he also who gets thrown overboard for his pains. If Mr. Greeley cannot unite the Whig and the Reformer in his own person, it does not necessarily follow that Abolitionism is the impracticable element which prevents fusion. The Reformer must expect comparative isolation, and he must be strong enough to bear it. He cannot look for the sympathy and cooperation of popular majori ties. Yet these are the tools of the politician. A man can be a politician, and at the same time a re former to a certain extent. He cannot be wholly both, but he has his choice which he will cleave to and which he will cast from him. It is for him to judge whether of the two be the most valuable. All true Reformers are incendiaries. But it is the hearts, brains, and souls of their fellow-men which they set on fire, and in so doing they perform the function appropriated to them in the wise order of Providence. PUBLIC OPINION " It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary social revo lutions which have taken place in England that revolution which in the thirteenth century put an end to the tyranny of nation over nation, and that revolution which a few generations later put an end to the property of man in man were silently and imperceptibly effected. They struck eon- temporary observers with no surprise, and have received from historians a very scanty measure [sic !] of attention. They were brought about neither by legislative regulation nor by physical force. Moral causes noiselessly effaced, first the distinction between Norman and Saxon, and then the distinction between master and slave. None can venture to fix the precise moment at which either distinction ceased. Some faint traces of the old Norman feeling might perhaps have been found late in the fourteenth cen tury. Some faint traces of the institution of villeinage were detected by the curious so late as the days of the Stuarts; nor has that institution ever, to this hour, been abolished by statute ! " MACAULAY S History of England. the " Standard " of April 19th an article was copied from the Louisville (Kentucky) "Journal," in which the foregoing extract from Macaulay s history is taken for a text, and the conclusion drawn from it that Slavery in Kentucky were better left to itself to perish by natural causes. Now, though we are no friends to the material gallows, we do not think that society has yet reached a stage where the moral gibbet may safely be dispensed with. Great offend- C 91 3 ers against humanity must be hung up, as hawks are nailed upon barn doors, for an example and warn ing to their predaceous fellows. The newspaper is the modern pillory and the amount of mud and the quality of the eggs are matters of editorial taste. The nineteenth century has shown nothing stronger or more instructive than a French Emperor, the emulator of Charlemagne, suing an English editor for libel. The great statutes of humanity get passed silently and suddenly. Sometimes it is only a poet or two who compose the parliament. Hood held two short sessions and laid the seducer and the needle woman s employer under pains and penalties unheard of before. In such cases the criminal pleads in vain that he has done but what his fathers did before him without hindrance, and that he was ignorant of the law. Eob Koy s son without avail claims an cestral prescription against hemp, and is brought to the woodie in extreme bewilderment, and amid much lamentation from the lovers of border romance. Sic itur ad astra is the moral of Plutarch, but we want not only finger-posts for the starry road, but warn ing-boards to tell us what ways are unsafe. The in vention of the newspaper has supplied the Jonathan Wilds of the world with their unwished-f or Plutarch also, who closes every column with a surly sic itur ad patibulwn. C 93 3 History, it was long ago said, is philosophy teach ing by example, but it is only those who have some touch of philosophy in themselves who make apt scholars in that High School. With most of us even the a-b ab s have to be feruled in, lessons in one syllable demand personal applications of the historic birch, and a fresh breeching must go with every added syllable to make it stick. After all, Common Sense is as good a teacher as any. Every fresh gen eration, like every fresh little boy, must be put to school to its own experience. No histories of former Tommies will avail to keep the new Tommy s fingers out of the fire, a piece of wisdom which a live coal will ineffaceably inculcate in a second. Yet it is in such minor and personal prudences only that History is good for anything as an in structor. Human nature undoubtedly remains un changed from age to age. But it is very question able whether the height and the depth of it have ever been wholly revealed in the conduct of affairs. We are speaking of human nature as it has been illus trated by nations and societies of men, not by the individual. In this respect it has been constantly working itself through a process of development and disentanglement. The average has been rising from generation to generation. Accordingly the relation in which any people stands to history can never find C 93 3 an exact parallel or a guiding precedent in its own failures or successes at a different epoch, or in those of another people whose conduct has been shaped and whose history has been imperceptibly deter mined by the influence of social and religious ideas clearly intelligible only to itself and upon the spot. For example, the success of the American Revolu tion, wrought by a people accustomed to self-gov ernment, perplexed by no social problems, and scat tered over a country where there was more work to be done than hands to do it with, could afford to no thinking man a base whereon to erect the horoscope of the France of 1845. The noble Lamartine has been sniffed at as a very French Washington. The absurdity was in expecting the French to have a Washington at all. Washington, the heroic flower of Common Sense, was, intellectually and physically, and by constitution and temperament, ordained to the leadership of men of the English stock, a stock the least of all influenced by its poets, or fitly repre sented by them. Lamartine showed himself the man for the occasion, and Washington did no more. In the great Frenchman s case, it was not the man, but the occasion that was less fortunate. Another in stance is offered us in Hungary and Ireland. The territorial position of the people of both countries in relation to the central government is very similar. C 94 3 Hungary is also, to all intents and purposes, an island. The people are without arms, and the armies, the discipline, and the prestige of a powerful empire are directed against them. Yet Ireland will not fur nish the premises for a logical syllogism in regard to Hungary. In short, there is no such thing as a syntax of History. The verb signifying to reform will require one case in one people or generation and another in a different one. To come back now more immediately to our text. And let us say in advance how agreeable it is to find a Southern editor who is willing to speak tem perately and reasonably on the subject of Slavery, who is desirous of drawing philosophical conclusions (however unsuccessful he may be), and who is able to speak of Garrison, not as a monster, but as a legitimate product of the order of Nature. Are there, then, any points of resemblance be tween the causes which brought about the abolition of villeinage in England and those which are in operation against slavery in America ? Without doubt there are, but they lead directly to conclu sions which would not be particularly palatable to the Kentucky editor. One thing is tolerably certain, that the son of Zachary Macaulay (however unphilo- sophic he may be in regard to Whig principles as a panacea for all the social diseases of England) C 95 H would never find in the history of Saxon enfran chisement an excuse for the continuance of African bondage. Let us remember, at the outset, that, although the social condition of Kentucky may find a parallel (it self no very encouraging circumstance) in that of England in the 13th century, the comparison, how ever generally true, fails in particulars. That is a sufficiently loose kind of reasoning which quietly leaves six centuries out of the question. If we could have supposed villeinage to have continued in a par ticular county of England, after the progress of ideas had indignantly expelled it from all the rest of Christendom, the comparison would be more legit imate. The only safe argument that can be drawn from the abolition of Slavery in England, and the fact that it was accomplished silently and without leav ing any scars, would tell in favor of the Kentucky emancipationists and not of their opponents. If his torical precedents are to be admitted at all, there should be an exact coincidence in all particulars (external and internal) between the ancient case and the modern. In the present instance the precedent settles one thing clearly, that slavery must be abol ished in one way or another. The question is whether the same natural causes are at work in both C 96 3 cases. If not, the moral of the three wise men of Gotham might have been brought against Columbus with unanswerable force. One great "natural cause" was wanting then which is in full activity now, a cause, which, by les sening the chances of an appeal to brute force, in creases the necessity of moral agitation. This is the newspaper. Had this existed in England during the time that the villein was struggling upward to the ownership of himself, we should find traces enough of violent fermentation. In truth the contest was a long one between the feudal lord and his serf, and the latter finally attained not his natural but his legal rights, a resource from which the Kentucky slave is wholly excluded. The Southern slave has one remedy which the serf also frequently relied on, namely, his legs, and the lawyers at last, by their construction of the law, made recapture so expen sive, harassing, and difficult an operation, that the lords gave up all attempts at it. The abolition of villeinage was in truth the fulcrum on which origi nally rested that great lever of opinion which over turned the African slave trade first, and then West Indian slavery. The famous Somerset case was de cided in accordance with English precedents of the time of the abolition of villeinage, and so important and close was the bearing of those precedents upon C 97 3 the case of African slavery that Granville Sharp wrote a History of Villeinage and its abolition, that the analogy of the two cases might influence the public mind. VOL. n. MOBS JjJ_OBS as often wear velvet as fustian, and hard words are as commonly their missiles as brickbats. Wherever force and majorities are appealed to against reason or right, there is a mob, whether led by an anointed king or an unanointed Bynders. Anax- agoras was mobbed by pagan, Galileo by Christian priests ; Wordsworth by reviewers ; the Abolitionist first by the populace, and since by editors. An in vading army is only a mob organized and put into regimentals. America, France, Austria, and England in turn mob Mexico, Kome, Hungary, and India. So clumsily have we managed matters hitherto ! It is curious to observe who and what have been subjects of mob law. The printing-press, the revolu tion of the earth round the sun, the circulation of the blood, the spinning-jenny. Indignant Marblehead made a kind of Stephen of the Salem lawyer who first displayed to them the ungraceful succinctness of the spencer. Mr. Kaebuck, opening the first um brella in England, was pelted with something harder than raindrops. Shakespeare has Cinna threatened C 99 3 with tearing in pieces for his bad verses a terrible but ineffectual example. Toward the close of the last century, the London mob made as recognized a part of every day s performance as the Chorus in the Greek tragedy. They seem to have been enthusiastic but rude practitioners of a primitive species of hy dropathy. A douche under the pump, a plunge in the Tower-ditch, and applications of mud in various stages of dampness, seem to have made up the sum of their simple pharmacopoeia. Their range of prac tice was extensive, from the king to the pickpocket, inclusive. A criminal, acquitted by the ordinary courts, had still to pass the Rhadamanthine tribunal of the mob. A ducking or a pelting formed the colophon to the daily volume of nearly every public performer s biography. " The MOB then took him and proceeded to, etc. ; " this is the way in which the "Annual Register" concludes its account of the appearance of most actors on those perilous boards. A deputation of periwig-makers waits upon the king to desire his countenance in the present depressed state of their trade. His majesty gives a gracious answer, and the consoled artists withdraw with our sincere sympathy. But it appears that two or three of them have basely compromised their principles by wearing their natural hair ! These the fate of Absa lom is to overtake. Accordingly the MOB at once C 100 3 enters as retributive justice, seizes the renegades in the very fact of trampling on their principles, and puts them upon a severe course of ditchwater. But of all the mobs of which we ever heard, the late one in New York was the most causeless in its inception and the most melancholy in its results. The joke of a king, certainly not exceeding either in point or delicacy the average of royal facetiae, once brought fire and sword upon France. But this is not so strange as that a theatrical criticism in the Lon don " Examiner " should have occasioned the deaths of twenty-one persons in Broadway. Are we to have war between America and England because an Eng lish critic does not happen to agree with the Bowery " b hoys " in his estimate of Mr. Forrest ? Are Amer icans to be prevented from hearing Macready because Englishmen did not care about hearing Forrest? We might apply to the mob the words of the strange lady in " Christabel," - " Vainly thou warrest, For this is alone in Thy power to declare : That in the dim Forrest Thou heard st a low moaning." The Forrest was " dim " enough, beyond a doubt ; but the moaning would have been in better taste and more innocent if it had been lower. C 101 1 It has been judicially decided in England that an actor is not protected by the usages of civilized soci ety, that a person who enters a play-house gives up his gentlemanly feeling with his ticket at the door, and is at liberty to express his disapprobation of a performer in any less emphatic way than tearing the house down. We have always thought the position of an unpopular actor peculiarly hard, a single man at bay before a whole audience and subjected to the grossest insults and indignities. It is the natu ral impulse of right feeling to take sides with the weaker party. If an actor be dull, the benches and boxes will tell him of it soon enough in their quiet way. We should have a terribly mauled and bat tered community if all dull people were to be pelted. There were particular reasons why Mr. Macready should be sustained and protected. We leave en tirely out of the question the fact that he is a scholar and an artist, and that he bore himself with singular forbearance and dignity under the gross insults of Mr. Forrest. It is enough that he was a stranger alone in a strange land. The question was not merely one between two actors. If it had been, there was no reason why justice should not be done. But it was more : it was a matter of national fairness and courtesy. We did not intend to enter upon a controversy, which every reasonable person in the country has already decided in favor of Mr. Macready. We in tended to show that the Respectability of New York had only itself to thank for the late dreadful occur rences, and that the monster set at work fifteen years ago with general applause to put down the Abolition ists has returned to plague the inventors. The dis graceful riots which took place in July, 1834, were first instigated and afterward excused by some of the leading journals of the city. After the first riot (at the Chatham Street Chapel), the " Courier and Enquirer " published the following paragraph : " Learning that there is to be another meeting at the Chatham Street Chapel to-night, we caution the colored people of this city against attending it. No one who saw the temper which prevailed last night can doubt that if the blacks continue to allow them selves to be made the tools of a few blind zealots, the consequences to them will be most serious" A few days after, the same paper, speaking of the Abolitionists, says, " When they openly and publicly promulgate doctrines which outrage public feeling, they have no right to demand protection from the people they thus insult." " On the whole, we trust the immediate Aboli tionists and amalgamators will see in the proceedings C 1Q 3 3 of the last few days sufficient proof that the people of New York have determined to prevent the propa gation amongst them of their wicked and absurd doctrines, much less to permit the practice of them. If we have been instrumental in producing this desirable state of public feeling, we take pride in it." This was after a brutal mob had had its own way in the city for several nights, during which it had entertained itself by sacking the houses of those who happened to be obnoxious to it. Nor did those journals which took the most decidedly the part of law and order fail to attribute the chief blame in the matter to the Abolitionists. Undoubtedly the frogs were very much in fault because the boys stoned them. The other day we saw the remarkable phenomenon of a mob-captain waiting on the Mayor and offering him favorable terms of capitulation. " If Macready performs to-night/ says the generous Rynders, con fident in his superior forces, " there will be a riot. But we will let you off if you will close the Opera House. Trust yourself confidently to the magnani mous forbearance of Tag, Rag, and Bobtail." Now, in this case Rynders only made a logical deduction from the premises of 1834. It is lawful and praiseworthy to mob unpopular persons and C things : Mr. Macready is an unpopular person, and the Opera House an unpopular thing ; therefore we may mob Mr. Macready and burn the Opera House. How must the sensibilities of the brave Bynders have been lacerated by finding the Opera House open ! How must his humanity have been outraged by finding it protected ! Nevertheless the path of duty was clear enough. The obnoxious edifice must be destroyed in tenderness to the feelings of the people. Accordingly the attack was made under leaders (perhaps) who had their military education in the successful campaigns of 1834. An investigation into the causes of the riot is now going on in New York, and we hope that it will be extended far enough back in point of time. It would be a pity that so salutary an instance should be lost of the evil influence of a press which encour ages brutal violence in the lower ten thousand by pandering to brutal prejudice in the upper. The homely old proverb says that, as you make your bed, so you must lie in it. If you educate mobs you must expect to have them, and make up your mind to consider them as a political engine not always under exact control. THE ROMAN REPUBLIC T wo years ago Pius IXth was the most popular man in the world. Even the thrifty descendants of Puritan ancestors paid their quarter-dollars for a sight of his portrait. It was believed that, as former great pontiffs had extended the spiritual dominion of the Papacy by the arrogance of their claims and the astuteness of their priestly Diplomacy, so he was to render that ill-gotten ascendency permanent by the policy of renunciation. Like the tradesman who threw Fox s promises to pay into the fire, he seemed inclined to elevate into debts of honor a portion of those hereditary dues whose liquidation appeared otherwise doubtful. His career was watched anxiously by all Christen dom. Particularly nervous was that large class of Protestants who continue to do nothing but protest, though the day has long since gone by when they should have begun to assert. Their sole vocation had been to expose the errors and denounce the en croachments of Popery. As long as the Pope pushed one way and they the other, they were sure of sup- C port, but, if the opposing object were suddenly with drawn, what was to hinder their falling flat upon their faces ? Moreover, if the Pope of Kome were overthrown, the claims of Protestant popelets who domineer in single parishes might be too closely scrutinized. In spite of all that has since happened, we believe that Pius IXth was sincere in his desire for reform. But it was a hard thing to be at the same time a Luther and a Pope, still harder to weld together spiritual and temporal sovereignty. Even as head of the Church his freedom was sufficiently circum scribed, but as temporal prince he could scarcely make a move without being checked by the wooden- est pieces on the chess-board of Europe. He found himself a compulsory fellow-conspirator with every empty head that wore a crown, and with every base heart that beat under royal purple. Italy was ready, and needed but the introduction of one more ele ment a great leader to crystallize into a distinct nationality. It is not likely that Pius loved to see his native land lying like a pearl beneath the sordid hooves of Austrian swine, but the papal robes en tangled his feet and denied him all freedom of mo tion. There is no middle ground between good and evil. The first backward step carries us across the boundary line. This step Pius has taken. He who C 10 7 3 might have shown himself to be holder of the keys by unlocking a glorious future to united and re deemed Italy, chose rather to prove himself the repre sentative of Peter by a too hasty appeal to the sword. No motive of piety can be assigned for the attempt to reinstate Pius in his temporal sovereignty. It is not as head of the Church that Absolutism feels any interest in him, but simply because it is not safe that a single link should be broken out of that in tolerable chain of hereditary privilege which binds the nations of Europe hand and foot. A rupture in one part loosens and lightens it in all. Absolutism has a true etymological sense of the word Religion and is resolved that it shall not depart from its ori ginal signification of a binding again. It is sad and strange that so entire an apathy should be manifested in America to the movement now going on in Europe, a movement so pregnant with gigantic results that even the Reformation can hardly be called the prelude to it, but only the tun ing of the instruments. The peoples have at length begun their exodus from the house of bondage. There may be a passage through the Red Sea, and after that a forty years wandering in the wilderness, but we believe that the road to the land of promise is found. There are everlasting principles working at the bottom of the present commotions. Reform [ 108 ] has become more than ever terrible to the selfish Maintainers of whatever exists, because it has turned practical in its radicalism. It will no longer content itself with lopping here and there a limb from the poisonous upas, but will grub up the widespread root from which new suckers continually spring. Anarchy and atheism were the mad-dog epithets with which the first French Revolution was hunted down, but it is found needful to invent the yet more terri ble bugbear of socialism to demoralize the last. One would think that the editors of English journals, from whom the greater part of our own take their cue, were disciples of Burritt from the horror they express at armed insurrection. But armed suppres sion is quite another matter. For our own part, if arms are to be used at all, we had rather see them employed to obtain rights than to maintain privi leges. Not glory, not conquest, but only freedom has ever sanctified the sword. If a broken statue be dug up in the garden of an Italian nobleman, the event shall be chronicled in the newspapers of the whole civilized world. But when heroic men have disinterred from the gathered rubbish of ages the noble image of a Republic, of a Republic, too, whose history is taught us before that of our own country, it must be buried out of sight again as quickly as possible. Even the absurd cool I Y \ JJ .^^? libel that the Roman triumvirate had sold those works of art which alone draw foreigners and their gold to the eternal city, caused more execration a thousand-fold than that the liberty of a nation should be trampled to death by the army of a man who has shown himself the equal of Bourbons in treachery and incapacity, and their superior only in this that he has been able to exorcise the unlaid ghost of a great name by rendering it contemptible. So much profounder a sentiment is our dilettantism than our humanity. History has hitherto been not so truly Philosophy as Conservatism teaching by example. As yet the people have been dumb, and the historian has writ ten in the interest of the governing or conquering class. Accordingly the cause of insurrections and attempted revolutions has been sought in the natural turbulence of the mob, in the inconstancy of the popular mind, anywhere, indeed, but in the right place. But the truth is that the people are always politically consistent. Theirs is the consistency of the needle in its loyalty to the pole. For, where want is, there will desire be also, the strongest mo tive of human action. It is all one whether the want be of bread, of a free activity, or of recognition as fellow-men. Bring into conjunction a ruler with an empty head and a people with empty stomachs, and C no 3 you have the sure materials of popular explosion. The people are singularly unexacting. The very least modicum of concession will keep them quiet for centuries. For theirs is always the largest share of loss by an unsettled state of things, and their gain from revolution comes slowly, if at all. It is only intolerable grievances that can force those ac customed to the endurance of authority to attempt a change. Hitherto no populace has kicked from waxing fat. The Roman revolutionists have been denounced as a bloodthirsty rabble who coerced the orderly citizens by terror. This would be a priori an ab surdity, even had it not appeared that no city could be so vigorously and successfully defended except by a unanimous people. It is a disgrace to America that she is not represented at Rome by a man with brain enough and heart enough to sympathize with the struggles of a race in whom fifteen centuries of bad government have not extinguished the memory of a glorious past. Bishop Hughes says sneeringly that the Roman Republic has been recognized only by the " female plenipotentiary of the Tribune. It is a pity that America could not be always as ade quately represented. But Miss Fuller has not merely contented herself with the comparatively cheap sym pathy of words, though even brave words are much C i" 1 if spoken at the right time. We learn from private letters that, the last American left in Rome, she was doing duty in the hospitals as a nurse for the wounded, thus performing also her mission as wo man. Women have been sainted at Rome for less, and the Bishop is welcome to his sneer. We cannot too often repeat that it is slavery which has benumbed the heart of the American people. It is one chain which binds down the oppressed of whatever race or complexion all over the world. As long as we have our own private sham to maintain, we are co-partners with all other speculators in sham wherever they may be. Nicholas and Calhoun are in precisely the same category. We cannot encour age resistance against the one without stimulating it also against the other. But it is impossible for us to be allies of the oppressed and the oppressors at the same time, so we judiciously present our com pliments to the strongest. FOURTH OF JULY IN CHARLESTON T HE fourth of July is an anniversary which well deserves commemoration. On that day ideas which had hitherto been considered as the waking dreams of scholars, beautiful inutilities like the metallic trees of boy chemists, were first recognized as principles, and embodied in the political creed of a nation. Yet even these ideas were not practically but only theoretically received. This was one of those rare occasions when a whole people, inspired by the re sentment of a common injury and the sympathy of a common struggle, rose for a moment above the plane of circumstances into that of the ideal. In the Declaration of Independence was embodied the youthful aspiration of America. What Goethe said of the individual is true also of the nation that there is no hope for it when it has ceased to rever ence the dreams of its youth. In view of the course which events have since taken, perhaps we ought to look upon the Declara tion rather in the light of a vow made during peril of shipwreck, or a sick-bed resolution of virtue. n us 3 " When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be ; When the devil was well, the devil a monk was he." But, however this may be, it will be worth our while to see how the Fourth of July was celebrated in some parts of our Confederacy. It could hardly be expected that South Carolina would permit so fine an opportunity for fustian to pass by unimproved, or that she would be content with any ordinary way of expressing her patriotism. Her position among her sister states is somewhat like that of Lord Brougham in the English house of peers. No one denies that she possesses many bril liant qualities, nor questions her fatal facility in ren dering herself ridiculous. To the true South Caro linian, Charleston is a metropolis to which the rest of the world stands in the relation of a dependent suburb. The view which such a city takes of con temporaneous history is accordingly of considerable (not to say of the first) importance. A celebration of this kind would of course be in complete without an oration. In the present instance we have not only an oration, but one pronounced by no less a personage than a General. This in itself may be considered as a circumstance of some sig nificance, since the post is generally conceded to a civilian, and affords the young politician an oppor tunity to fly the American eagle for the first time. VOL. II. C "4 3 The following is the sketch which the Charleston " Mercury " gives us of the General s discourse : " Looking beneath the surface of historical events to the hid den causes, perceptible only to the eye of the philosophical reader of history, the orator traced the causes of the American Revolu tion far back into the history of Europe, and proceeded to show the successive development and progress of the Democratic prin ciple ; the various modifications to which it has been subjected by the varying circumstances under which it has been brought into action ; the checks and safeguards necessary in the circum stances or character of a people to prevent its excesses ; its more recent progress in Europe, and the causes which have produced the tendency there exhibited to perversion and abuse ; the causes now in operation and daily increasing in the Northern States of this Union, destined ultimately to prove fatal to free institutions ; the superior adaptation of Southern institutions to produce and preserve that conservatism absolutely essential, under Repub lican forms of Government, to well regulated liberty ; the grad ual progress and present threatening aspect of the slavery ques tion, and the utter hopeless and universal ruin which must overtake the South if it be not arrested ; the immeasurably su perior importance of the preservation of our institutions to the preservation of the Union. These, and other positions, the orator illustrated and enforced with masterly ability, and concluded by an eloquent appeal to the South to rally in defence of her dear est rights, her interests, and her honor." We do not know how far back in the history of Europe the orator traced the causes of the Ameri can Revolution, but it seems to us it would have been more philosophical to have looked for its origin C "5 ] in the nature of man. The events of history are not causes but results, and those of modern European history are the results of a movement of the general mind tending steadily in one direction. If the Gen eral has looked deep enough to discover that the sacrifice of one class in society to the luxury of an other has ever been the conservative element of social organization, his philosophic eye must have pene trated to the very mud at the bottom, where theory is an easier process than accurate investigation. The great landmarks of Christian history show as distinctly the lines which indicate the successive sub sidences of Privilege as the surface of the earth does those of ancient sea-levels. No system of gov ernment can be secure which has not for its founda tion the satisfied intelligence of the governed. Dark ness, however it may sometimes be called solid by the poets, is not the safest basis of political institu tions. A crude idea of Partnership, becoming ever more and more distinct, may be traced through all the varying phases of the social state. Intellect and personal courage, in proportion as these were neces sary in the ruder ages to foster and defend that in dustry to which all communities have owed their permanent well-being, were allowed to draw a larger proportion of the profits. Hence aristocracies, whose lion s share was not disputed as long as they con- tributed their share of mental and physical capital to the common stock. But as the average of the popular intelligence gradually became higher and higher, a readjustment of the terms of the partner ship became necessary, and the middle class, an aris tocracy of wealth, came into being. More recently, Labor, which no longer feels the need of protection, and which has learned that it creates capital but is not created by it, has begun to demand a new set tlement, in which its claims shall be duly regarded. Our Carolinian orator seems unconscious that there is such a thing as an anachronism, and that slavery is an eminent one. Men talk very sagaciously of this, that, and the other thing as the conservative element of society. In England it is the Church or the House of Lords, in America generally it is the Senate, in South Carolina it is Slavery. But this is all the merest gabble. There is no conservatism for society short of the perfection of social order. One might as well hope to put out Hecla with a candle- extinguisher as to repress the natural aspirations of man toward a juster and more perfect organization of society by any such temporary makeshifts. The only conservatism to be depended upon must be a system as harmonious and as subject to eternal prin ciples as that of the planets. All that will be ne cessary will be to allow the laws of social gravitation C 117 ] to act unimpeded. It may be presumptuous in us to argue with a General, but we would suggest to him that it is a singular conservative principle which itself requires to be conserved, and which by the operation of natural and irresistible causes is brought every year nearer and nearer to the point of explo sion. That is an expensive species of industry, and conservative only in some sense hitherto unrecog nized, which uses up territory, instead of rendering it more productive, and whose motive power is the cart whip. We are afraid, after all, that the most sensible thing uttered at the Charleston celebration was the following toast offered by a Mr. Clark, " South Carolina and her institutions, if the rest of the world go crazy." We confess our sincere belief that this melancholy contingency of universal bedlam will be the only one in which the institutions referred to will have any chance of security. If the rest of the world go crazy, there will be nothing peculiar about South Carolina. It is certainly a singular circumstance that the Fourth of July should be selected for the delivery of an oration in defence of slavery. There is some thing melancholy in it, mingled with a strong sense of the ludicrous. For example, " Edwin De Leon, Esq., editor of the Telegraph/ " gives the following 1 118 3 toast, " The Southern Address, the first step toward a second Declaration of Independence." Fancy a " second Declaration" beginning "All men are not born free and equal " ! Indeed, so great is the repugnance felt in South Carolina toward that famous sentiment of initial equality that we should not be surprised at a document commencing with the assertion that some men are not born at all, a theory at which Mr. Calhoun more than hinted in his address, a production which came as near not being born at all as anything we ever heard of. One other toast is worth quoting. It is by " Dr. J. H. Morgan." " Resistance to aggressions upon Southern rights by the whole South if it will ; but by South Carolina anyhow, at all hazards, and to the last extremity." This in a city which, as our readers saw last week, was thrown into a tremble by the es cape of twenty unarmed negroes from the workhouse ! Why, if the protection of the United States were withdrawn, the city of Charleston might be bom barded by a squadron of oyster-boats. MODERATION J_ HE old fable of the bat who would be at the same time both bird and beast, and who ended by being 1 neither, is unconsciously illustrated every day by very excellent persons. They flit about in that ves- pertinal region through which light fades by imper ceptible degrees into darkness, gently reprehending the culpable extremes of noontide and midnight. They take mediocrity to be the happy mean of life, and by the silent example of their twilight virtue, convict both the eagle and the owl of an unwise ex cess. We do not accuse persons of this stamp of a conscious hypocrisy : we will only say that they mis take prudence for philosophy and respectability for virtue. We wish to make a few comments upon an article by Dr. Peabody, of Boston, in the July number of the " Christian Examiner." We doubt not that in writ ing it he was actuated by sincere motives, and we should not have thought it worth while to call atten tion to it, had we not seen it noticed as a model of philosophical reasoning. We admire as much as any C 12 3 one can that profound and kindly insight which can see the soul of goodness in things evil, but we think that one buys equilibrium of mind at a dear rate when he is fain to keep the balance poised by seek ing only the soul of evil in things good to put in the other scale. There is no more pernicious cant than this of moderation, no opiate which is at once so agreeable and so stupefying to the conscience. After reading such an article as this of Dr. Peabody s we are in clined to ask ourselves Are there no such things, then, as positive Eight and positive Wrong ? and does wisdom occupy a middle ground between the two? It does not touch the question at all to say that there are slaveholders who are pious, benevo lent, kind-hearted, and the like. Granting that there are, it is clear enough that, quoad their slavehold- ing, they are none of these things. They are apt to think a particular course of conduct wise and pru dent in proportion as it is convenient, and in the present condition of our politics and religion it is exceedingly convenient to sympathize with the wrongs and sufferings of the two hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders at the expense of the three million slaves. With our present light we are unable to see how a minister of Christ can make out the mas ter to be any more his brother than the bondman. C 121 j Dr. Peabody closes one of his paragraphs with a pretty sort of antithesis about " a philanthropy which goes far enough to be indignant, but which will not take the trouble to be just." But are not indigna tion and justice sometimes at one ? And this broad mantle of the Doctor s charity which he stretches over the Slaveholder, could he not have pieced it out so that it would have covered the Abolitionist also ? Yes, very clearly, it is hard to be just. If Dr. Pea- body can read Theodore D. Weld s " Slavery as It is" without feeling indignation, the boiling point of his blood must be at a vastly higher mark than that of most. When he will show us a reform that has been carried on without enthusiasm, we will on our part do the hardest thing we know of we will find an article on the Anti-slavery movement writ ten by a Northern clergyman, the staple of which is not a conscious or unconscious justification of the writer s apathy or opposition. God makes fanatics as well as philosophers. Every man has his particu lar functions to perform, and is more or less of a nuisance until he has found out what he can do and [has] done it. We see no good that can come of telling people that fanatics are fanatical. You may drive out the wasp that flies in at your study-win dow a hundred times, but she will come back again prying into every gimlet-hole till she has got quit C 122 3 of the last egg which it is her duty to lay. We pre sume that Dr. Peabody never reads the Prophets to his congregation. We mean no disrespect either to him or his profession when we say that nature puts something more (fire, or whatever it be) into the reformers than she expends in the composition of her Doctors of Divinity. For ourselves we can toler ate both these classes, and we suggest to Dr. Pea- body that, if he were fitting out a vessel which was meant to go, he would not rig her exclusively with anchors and ballast. He would reconcile himself, we fancy, to the somewhat violent persuasion of canvas, or even to the fiercer enthusiasm of steam. Against Dr. Peabody we will quote the excellent Dr. Jostin, certainly a moderate man and with nothing of the zealot in him. " A reformation," he says, " is seldom carried on without a heat and a vehemence which borders on enthusiasm, and, as Cicero has observed that there never was a great man sine afflatu divino, so in times of religious con tests, there seldom was a man very zealous for lib erty, civil and evangelical, and a declared and active enemy to insolent tyranny, blind superstition, polit ical godliness, bigotry, and pious fraud, who had not a fervency of zeal which led him on some occasions somewhat beyond the bounds of temperate reason." Now Mr. Peabody is not unwilling that there should C 12 3 H be Anti-slavery feeling at the North, and a judicious expression of it ; all that he desires is that the reform should be carried on so as to exclude the reformers from any share in it. He even undertakes to show that those who express themselves most strongly feel the least interest in the subject. He says, as Cole ridge had said before him, that men speak calmly when they are most deeply interested. But he lacks that fitness and fervour of illustration which Cole ridge brought to the succour of his theories. Dr. Peabody cites to us the example of a merchant who will talk violently of politics, but subsides at once to plain matter of fact when trade is introduced. The only difficulty about this comparison of the merchant with the reformer is that there is not even the ap pearance of parallelism. Neither politics nor trade appeals to the highest nature of man. Ask Garrison how much two and two make and he will not tell you twenty, ask him how many slaves there are and he will not multiply the real number by a thousand. But tell him some story of wrong and suffering, and the fervidness of his nature will multiply the impres sion of it a thousandfold. No, Dr. Peabody cannot have his cake and eat it, any more than the rest of us. He cannot have reformers with milk and water in their veins. All deacons are goody says the Yankee proverb, but there s a difference in deacons. c The rule which governs deacons a fortiori includes the humbler orders of mankind. "What is the reason/ said Gargantua, "that Friar John hath such a goodly nose ? " " Because/ said Grangou- sier, " that God would have it so, who frameth us in such form and to such end as is most agreeable to his divine will, even as a potter fashioneth his vessels." We are not more fond of violence or ex travagance than Dr. Peabody, but we endeavour to reconcile ourselves to the operations of Provi dence, tolerably well convinced that the world is as well peopled in the average, as if we could have had the pleasure of having all men made in our image. Dr. Peabody censures the fire and enthusiasm of Douglass, but gently and with an evident sympathy for the man. It is his associates, he thinks, who have corrupted him. We have a suspicion that if Dr. Peabody had seen his own sister whipped, the King s Chapel on the next Sunday would echo with an entirely unwonted kind of preaching. It is evi dently the Garrisonians that he has no bowels for. He indulges in a sneer at them (a temperate and judicious kind of sneer) as " gentlemen of ease " who make speeches in Faneuil Hall. We rather think that even now it is easier to preach at King s Chapel than to make Anti-slavery speeches in Fan euil Hall, and we doubt whether Dr. Peabody would find it easy to make one of Wendell Phillips s c speeches anywhere. Must Dr. Peabody live in a Broad-street cellar before he could venture to speak of poverty in Boston without being silenced as a " gentleman of ease " ? It is not easy, God knows it is hard enough, to have a hope and a faith whose triumph depends on the conversion of many mil lions of people continually backsliding, continually taking the evil for the good, absorbed in the world and its cares. However Dr. Peabody may understand the influ ence of the Abolitionists, it is very clear that but for them he would never have written such an article in the " Examiner." He remains at anchor, it is true, but the tide has turned, and, without his knowing it, he has swung round to the length of his hawser. He is subject to the human weakness of not being will ing to acknowledge the source of his change of opin ion. In a few years the tide will set strongly enough to make him drag his anchor a little and get still farther down the stream. In a few years he may be willing to acknowledge some merit in the men who are nearly as violent as Luther, and who have formed their style by the Hebrew prophets. We could not avoid the conclusion in reading his article, that the author of it had voted for Taylor. If this be so, it is to be viewed rather as a sort of apologetic defence of that act than as an expression of opinion un biassed by the writer s position. CRITICISM AND ABUSE o UR readers have had, from time to time, the privilege of seeing extracts from Southern news papers directly referring to the " Standard." Most of these, we are sorry to say, have not been so com mendatory as even a moderate self-esteem might have desired. Indeed many of them have been so childish that we are almost inclined to believe that the foun tain of youth does really bubble up somewhere in the South, and that some of our editorial brethren there have drunk a little too much of it. One of these reciprocations of courtesy had cer tainly the charm of being pithy and to the point. We are sorry that so forcible a writer should refuse us a periodical sight of his lucubrations. " You and your paper be damned ! " We have no clew to the authorship of this elo quent denunciation, but we have a fancy that it came from the editor of a religious paper. People of that class are uncommonly fond of these sulphur ous haruspications, and it must have been a special relish to the author of this compact refutation of C Abolitionism to encounter an adversary with whom no formalities need be observed, and who could be treated at once to the marrow of all theological con troversy. We shall give the destiny which he re commends a proper amount of consideration. His including the " Standard " in the anathema would seem to indicate that he attributes a soul to it, which, as newspapers go, may be reckoned no small compliment. We had no idea that we were such terrible fel lows. To be sure, we knew before that we were incendiaries, but we have been taught to believe that it was the happy and contented peasantry who made up the combustible and explosive matter of the Southern Social System. However, it seems to be the editors whom we have touched off, and they very naturally treat us to a blowing-up in return. We have never had any doubt that Anti-slavery was more than a match for them, but we should like to know whether any of them rubbed the " Standard " against a piece of sand-paper to see if it would ignite. We wonder if the keeper of a powder magazine ever gets to look upon ah 1 his fellow citizens who wear iron nails in their shoes as incendiaries ? if he considers flint and steel as inventions of the enemy of man, and the lightning, that ever busy scavenger c 12 : of the aerial highways, as a personal injury ? Such, at any rate, seems to be the mental condition at which our Southern friends have arrived. Though they profess to live in a house of such asbestic qual ity as might defy the final conflagration, they are in such constant dread of fire that Mr. Calhoun has even attempted to put out the sun with a four-ounce squirt. The contradictions in which the advocates and apologists of slavery involve themselves are certainly diverting. According to these more voluble than logical persons, the Abolitionists are retarding the progress of emancipation. Yet it is these very co- workers whom the Perpetualists would crush at all hazards. Nothing, not even invasion, could induce a servile revolt, and yet the mails must be robbed lest a stray eopy of an Anti-slavery journal should fall into the hands of a wretched helot who could as easily read the inscriptions of Nimrud. We have before us the Southern " Quarterly Review " for July, 1849, containing an article upon Elwood Fisher s notorious pamphlet. From this we propose to cull an extract or two for the amusement of our readers. It is written in an argumentative tone, keeps toler ably clear of declamation, and is wholly free from that vulgar and snobbish manner of alluding to the North which is a too common characteristic of Southern literature. Considered as a plea in favor of Slavery (even if we admitted the accuracy of the preposterous statis tics on which it is based) it is entirely aside from the point at issue. The question of Slavery is not a sectional or political one, nor can it be determined by an array of figures, still less by such a FalstafTs regiment of statistics as those at the head of which Mr. Fisher has been sent to Coventry by all honest men. It is not a squabble of emulous provincialisms, nor a party expediency. It is a matter of ethics, which includes statistics (because prosperity de pends always at last upon righteousness), but which cannot be included by them. We are quite willing that our reviewer should prove to his own satisfac tion that the South is richer, wiser, stronger, and more religious than the North. Nay, we are only amused when another writer in the same number of the " Keview " (who confesses with singular hon esty that "it is impossible for any man to learn to talk like a gentleman but by being bred among gentlemen ") tells us that the English language is only spoken in its purity to the south of Mason and Dixon s line. This is written and published in a city whose leading men are of French or Scotch de scent, and printed in a journal which does not know the difference between " shall " and " will." We did not suppose that even a gudgeon could be VOL. n. [ ISO 3 found anywhere who would so much as nibble at the palpably artificial bait with which our Fisher decorates the ends of his lines. Our simple-minded reviewer evidently has his suspicions. He swims around every surprising " fact/ sniffs at it, and says doubtfully once or twice, " if this be true." He has evidently a faint and far-off consciousness that this consideration is of some import. But presently he remembers that there is a gudgeon-public waiting for its quarterly dividend of flummery, and so makes a bold gulp. Yet he cannot help murmuring plain tively to himself, as Mr. Fisher furnishes him with " fact " after " fact," if this be true ! A melan choly reflection after supping so luxuriously at this Barmecide table, whether one has got nothing but east wind in his belly after all. After demonstrating that the " peculiar form of civilization " at the South is the very best and hap piest for both master and slave, our reviewer glances hastily at the risk of insurrection. But how is this ? Is there a man anywhere who cannot tell on which side his bread is buttered, when it is spread thickly on both ? In Sheridan s " Critic," Father Thames makes his entrance at the rehearsal with both his banks on one side. Our author is clearly a little puzzled by finding his " facts " in the same position. But instead of rectifying the error like Mr. Puff, C isi 3 and making Thames go out triumphantly " between his banks/ he goes all the way back to ancient Athens for a precedent in favor of the less natural arrangement. In the nineteenth year of the Pelopon- nesian War, Agis seized and fortified Deceleia, a vil lage only twelve miles distant from Athens, as an asylum for fugitive slaves. Yet, after ten years, only twenty thousand had availed themselves of the refuge. Spartan protection, however, was not precisely what a slave of judgment would fly to. Our author seems to forget that Deceleia on the other side of the great lakes, somewhat more than twelve miles away, to which already more than thirty thousand slaves (ac cording to Mr. Calhoun) have achieved their exodus. He tells us that there is no instance in history of any serious servile insurrection, although in ancient times there was no difference of color between master and slave. Are we to understand, then, that there is more antipathy between races of the same complexion than between white and black? He allows that there have been "uprisings of people whose undoubted rights were trampled on not of slaves." The in ference from this would seem to be that the more people s undoubted rights were trampled on, the less danger there is of their seeking redress. The insur rection of Haiti our author attributes to the instiga tion of the French Directory. The slaves of South C 132 ] Carolina, he affirms, " in cases of emergency would bare their faithful bosoms in defence of our families and their own/ etc. This is on page 307. Turning over the leaf, we find on page 308, that " if ever danger or suffering occur to us from our slave-sys tem," " from reckless enthusiasts associated with us in one government, etc., will come all the mischief." But what conjuration and what mighty magic are these enthusiasts to use in order to make rebels of a people who would remain obstinately loyal even in " a contest conducted as the Deceleian War, for the express purpose of giving them liberty ? " Father Thames will get between his banks after all. Our author next endeavors to persuade himself that in case of disunion the South would be stronger than the North. It would then have (as it ought) all the cotton, and all the manufactures, and all the commerce which are now shared between the two sections. Moreover it "might bring into the field a million of armed men, men born on horseback and with arms in their hands." Cavalry of this sort must be inexpensive, and we admit that we have heard of no such births at the North. On the whole we take leave of our worthy re viewer in perfect good-humor. Like an unskilful chemical manipulator, he tells his audience that when he pours the liquid in one phial into the other C 133 1 a fine blue color will be produced. Unfortunately the impression produced upon the mind of the spec tator is of a vivid and undeniable green. But this, the confused demonstrator assures him, is of no con sequence, since, had the materials been what he took them for, the experiment would have been success ful. We do not need the assurance which is given us in another article that our Southern friends " strive to keep the Yankee schoolmaster at bay." We are quite certain that if either Mr. Fisher or his reviewer could have had the benefit of a winter s attendance at one of our district schools, neither the one nor the other of them would have been capable of such vile cyphering. We are afraid that both of them re ceived their educations where the birch is an exotic tree. PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE E (VERY now and then we see it asserted that the system of chattel-slavery at the South is no worse than that of wages-slavery at the North, and that land monopoly is at the bottom of the evil. The apostles of this gospel are not content with the sim ple preaching of their doctrines, but pepper their dis courses with inter jectional sniffs at the Abolitionists. We confess that we can see no logical continuity here, any more than in Charles Lamb s famous case of the turnip crop and the boiled shoulders of mut ton. If wages-slavery were the worse of the two, the Abolitionists would not be guilty of making it so, nor does it follow that chattel-slavery is not bad enough because it is not so bad as something else. But it is the fashion for every one who has a pana cea for our social evils to head his advertisements with a Beware of Quacks ! The Abolitionists do not profess to have found any panacea. One particular evil has presented it self prominently to their minds, and they set to work C 135 3 to eradicate it. For so it is that by its own elective affinities each mode of reform takes up the minds that belong to it and are suited to carry it on, and leaves all the rest. We smile sometimes when we see an honest person stumbling over the Lazarus lying on his own doorstep in his hurry to drop in his mite for another Lazarus at the Antipodes. But meanwhile, perhaps, another sympathy is making its way over from the Antipodes under precisely similar circumstances. It is not till we have reached the highest class in the school of life that we learn the great lesson that Nature is wiser than we. Nor are we satisfied that the walls of limitation which she has built up around us have any solidity, till we have knocked our heads against them all. And then, perhaps, we spend the rest of our days in rubbing our sore pates. No doubt the ravens which supplied Elijah left some poor fellow bewailing the loss of his dinner, and wishing for bow and arrows to make in stant examples of those thievish birds. Let us en deavor, brother land-reformer, not only to be sat isfied, but even to be thankful for each other, and go about our respective works with a better heart. Perhaps we Abolitionists have but one idea, but that is no reason why you should endeavor to take away from us the one idea that we have. Concede for the argument s sake that you are in the same predica- C ment, and suppose we should try the experiment of clubbing our two ideas for the benefit of those that have none. Here would be practical Association. We are not entirely prepared to grant that the Abo litionists are totally depraved, for we have never yet found a man without some good in him, no, not even a doughface. Suppose there is no adequate help for us but in a thorough social reorganization, yet we must remem ber that the first thing needful is to convince the stupid Body Politic that he is sick at all. Or rather, perhaps we must begin by waking him up to make him capable of conviction. Once waked and con vinced, it will be for the patient himself to choose between our respective pathies. We confess that the arguments of the anti-land-monopolists are entirely conclusive, and we admit the great importance (espe cially in our new and as yet not fully peopled coun try) of beginning rightly. But after all, if the remedy is to be a radical one, and of that compre hensive kind before spoken of, it may be questioned whether the scheme of either the Land-reformer or the Abolitionist alone will be sufficient. On the whole we think it wise for each man to put his hand strenuously to that work which has for him the strongest attraction. We may then be sure that we are all working together for good. Let us C take courage and be thankful that the good Father has ravens ready for every Elijah perishing in the wilderness. We will not complain that they are not all detailed for the particular service which we think most important, and surely we will not shoot poisoned arrows at the divinely commissioned birds flying with the bread of life in any direction. Or, suppose the ravens fall to quarrelling with beak and claw among themselves, what becomes of the bread, and, worse yet, of the Elijahs ? We do not see how any advantage is to spring from disputes as to whether this or that injurious system is entitled to an evil preeminence, but we are not to be supposed as granting that chattel-slav ery is no worse than wages-slavery. It is one of those assertions which recoil disastrously upon those who make them. Opinion resembles a pendulum in this, that it swings as far back beyond the gravitat ing point on one side as it has been forced beyond it upon the other. And here the parallel unfortu nately too often ends. For, having an inward faculty of resistance, it ceases to oscillate and remains ob stinately fixed in its retrograde position. This matter of comparative miseries is hardly one to be settled by argument. Our human instincts de cide it for us at once, and without appeal. We do not believe that there is a hired laborer (man or C 138 n woman) in America who would exchange conditions with the fattest and sleekest slave at the South, not even though it were to be owned by Henry Clay or General Taylor himself. Were the question one solely of physical well-being, it would not bear argu ment for a moment. The Southern " Quarterly Ee- view " estimates the annual expense of a plantation slave at thirty-five dollars a year, or less than ten cents a day. But it is not a question of mere bodily comfort. The condition of the hired laborer everywhere is one which admits of exceptions in favor of superior en ergy and intelligence. That of the slave knows no exceptions, but crushes all to one dead level of stupid animalism or sullen despair. The slave had no hope but that weary northward flight, the bloodhounds, the worse than bloodhounds at his heels, and that horrible distrust of every human being in his heart. And at the very outset we are met by this great dis tinction of complexion which makes the poor run away an object of suspicion south of Mason and Dixon s line, and of lifelong contumely north of it. Nor is it only in the condition of the slave that the Abolitionist finds an imperative reason for com bating the atrocious system of which he is the vic tim. Slavery has paralyzed those fine instincts and energies of our republic which should have rendered C 139 3 it not only the example but the protector and de fender of freedom all over the world. It has cor rupted the integrity of our public men and made them as statesmen only not reproaches to each other. Worse than this, it has corrupted the foundations of our humanity itself, and made things customary with us which ought to thrill us with indignation and horror. Allow that by freeing the slave you only raise him to the ownership of himself, and that this in the present condition of society is a losing species of property. But you also do more. The same blow which strikes off the fetters of the slave makes our public men (the exemplars and moulds of our youth) also owners of themselves, nay, to a greater or less degree, liberates every one of us. Then you and I and all of us rise up. If it be said that slavery is only one pustule indicating the presence of disease in the whole social system, we are not concerned to deny it. Only, let not this be an argument for apathy, for letting alone, or for so generalizing and dissipating the efforts of reform that they fail of reaching particular evils. We have great doubts of the possibility of arous ing a community to the wickedness of monopolizing land, who feel no stings of conscience at monopoliz ing man. We do not believe that a man can be con- C vinced of the sinf ulness of paying small wages, while he is allowed to retain his belief in the rightf ulness of paying none at all. In short, we do not feel en tirely convinced that it is best to put the cart before the horse. At the same time we are willing to grant the perfect right of our neighbor to do so, if he find it profitable. It is best to proceed gradually with the poor old World and satisfy it of its miserable condition by de grees. Let us assault (at least, let those of us who feel it a duty) the largest sins first, for we may be sure that if one devil brings seven others in with him he takes at least as many out. At present there are so many kind friends speaking at once and divid ing their breath between recommending their own particular pills and charging each other with the intention to poison, that the world seems really in danger of a serious relapse. There is nothing to be eaten, drunk, or avoided, but some one has found in it the root of all evil, and amid so much confusion of Indian Doctors, Vegetable Doctors, Cold and Hot Water Doctors, and what not, this generation feels inclined to go on in the old way as its elders had done before it. Meanwhile the rightfulness of our own opinions and measures in no wise depends upon the wrongfulness of those of anybody else, nor has any natural connection with it. The first thing is C 141 3 to know our own business and the next to mind it. We think that the Abolitionists are laboring in their proper vocation, and are happy to think that there are others doing the same. CANADA _L HE gathering of money is the only thing that withdraweth the hearts of Englishmen from the prince/ said Sir Thomas More nearly three centu ries and a half ago, and the saying is as fresh still as if it had been made by a poet instead of an un- der-sheriff. Among the Spanish race, revolution has almost supplanted the bull-fight as a popular amuse ment, in France it is a kind of recognized make shift for election, in Germany it is arrived at by something like a chemical analysis, but among the Anglo-Saxon family it continues to be an explosive gas generated in the dark void of the empty pocket. The desideratum of English statecraft would seem to be a kind of Davy s safety-lamp with which the adven turous ChanceUor of the Exchequer might descend to glean the last particles of ore from that long- worked mine without danger of being blown out of office. A fall in public securities is the change whose fear perplexes English monarchs, and the hand which writes mene, mene on the walls of Downing Street is that of the Reporter of the Stock Market. C As long as x remains an unknown quantity, the oretic demonstrations make small impression upon the mind of John Bull, but let him understand that x and bread and butter are equal terms, and he is awake at once. In regard to Canada, John has been slowly coming to the conclusion that, whatever else it might be, it was certainly expensive. But here another quality of his mind becomes active, namely, his pride. He is one of the largest landholders on the planet, and he is fearful lest he should lessen his consideration among his fellows by giving up even a piece of territory which is draining his pockets. The physical strength of England is Saxon chiefly, but the hard, sharp Norman intellect stamped itself easily and durably upon the yielding clay of the softer conquered race. In the common law of England the Saxon element predominates, but pub lic opinion is largely Norman. The Norman was a robber, and stealing was in his view honorable if the object were a kingdom or a province, and the theft were accomplished by violence and demanded courage for the perpetration. He was the Colonel Blood of the middle age, too much of a gentleman and soldier to pick a pocket, but not above the grander larceny of crowns. He could endure any hardship but that of getting an honest livelihood. Though the strength and greatness of England have C 144 ] for centuries rested mainly upon trade, yet trade has not hitherto achieved for itself the prestige of en tire respectability in the English mind. The British Merchant is the toast of public dinners, but no sooner has the British Merchant acquired a fortune, than he sets about contriving how he shall save his children from the contamination of the paternal caste. He gets his sons into public office, into the Church, the Army, or the Bar. Some kind of a living upon others they must have, something that approaches the Norman standard of respectability, honorable plunder. The Colonies are dear to England as matters of pride, disconnected from any sordid idea of profit, and as supplying offices for young men of what are oddly enough called good families, by which those are meant which have not been generally distin guished for the purity of their public and private morals. Canada is especially dear as a trophy won from her ancient enemy, France. But England is beginning to have some dim appreciation of so vul gar and tradesmanlike a thing as the balance-sheet. The figures and statistics of the calculating Saxon force themselves upon her attention more and more. Glory must nowadays bring an indorser with her to the Rothschilds. England is fast finding out that her colonies are dear in another sense. The question is C 145 J one between pride and expense, and it asks no super natural power of prophecy to foretell how it will be eventually settled. What length of time must elapse before the empty pocket starves her into concession is a point of obscurer speculation. At any rate the question of the separation of the North American Provinces from the Mother Coun try has now fairly begun to be discussed on both sides of the ocean. That it would be wise in Eng land to yield gracefully, we think is beyond a doubt. If it be the mission of the English race to plant the germs of self-government in every quarter of the globe, it is most desirable that the different portions of that race, wherever settled and however governed, should be able to communicate everywhere the entire moral force of a great united nation. The ties of ancestry and of a common past, so rudely snapped between the Mother Country and the Thirteen Col onies by the American War of Independence, are beginning to reunite themselves. Every steamer car ries and fastens a spider-thread of sympathy and interest, each invisible, but the sum of which will at last rebind firmly together the little Island and the Daughter it had disinherited and disowned. It cannot be but that the experience of seventy years has made England wiser and that she will be slow to estrange another child. VOL. II. C 146 ] As to the probability o the separation of the Canadas from Britain, speculation is useless, since time and circumstance will decide the question soon. We are not inclined to think, however, that such a movement as that lately begun in Montreal will go backward. Here, at least, there is manifest destiny. England is no longer the only central sun of an Anglo-Saxon system. The great fragment which wandered off, a separate planet, and has become the United States, begins to pull, with gradually increas ing force, the nearer satellites. Canada gravitates toward the larger and more neighboring body. This is not the manifest destiny of aggressive rapine, as in the case of Texas, but obedience to the attraction of natural laws. But, setting aside for the present the attraction of the American Kepublic, it is at least certain that the centrifugal force of the Provinces is steadily increas ing and carrying them farther and farther from the British centre. Interest draws the Colonists of Eng lish descent in a direction opposite to predilection and habit. And, even supposing an undiminished loyalty in these, there must be taken into account the presence of a neutral body in a large subjugated population, which has retained its language and tra ditions, and whose vis inertice must be overcome by an intenser loyalty on the part of the rest. [ 147 3 In case of separation, two plans have been pro posed, independence and annexation to the United States. Here again the French element in the popu- lation must be considered. If not numerous enough to set up for themselves, they would certainly offer very perplexing material to be worked into the fab ric of the new Kepublic. This with other circum stances of convenience and interest would certainly lead to a proposal for annexation. The proposal once made, annexation may be looked upon as a certain event. As enemies of Slavery, we should consider it an event to be desired. It will give greater preponder ance to the Free States, and infuse into the veins of the Kepublic fresh blood uncorrupted by the scrofula of slavery. The mere proposal of it will do what principle and conscience have never yet been strong enough to accomplish, and divide the national par ties into a northern and a southern organization. It will unite whatever of Anti-slavery there may be at the South with the northern party, thus giving it more confidence and strength and preparing it to receive more radical ideas. But it will do a great deal more than this, and al ready the well-trained noses (of wax) of the editor hounds who hunt down the prey for the old parties begin to snuff the lion crouching hard by. In case C !48 3 of annexation the first question to arise will be as to the consenting of the new States to that clause in the Constitution which provides for the surrender of fugitive slaves. This will be rather a perplexing affair to our hitherto prosperous politicians. We shall get some new ideas on the however-bounded- ness of our glorious country. How fearful will our Democrats become of a rupture in our peaceful re lations with England, our Whigs how careful for the strict maintenance of treaty stipulations ! We shall find that the area of freedom can only be ex tended Southward, and shah 1 discover the enormous difference twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee when the breath of freedom and not that of slavery fills the pipe. The constitutionality of annexation has been set tled by recent precedent. Or rather it has been settled that what the slave power demands is always constitutional. Should Canada apply for admission to the Union, we shall have an opportunity of learn ing whether the Constitution is capable of becoming pliable under the hands of Freedom. Any event is desirable which shall exhibit the Southern oligarchy in its true light, and which shall reduce the slave holders to a more odious and contemptible minority. Therefore we hope before long to hear the knock of Canada at the door of the Confederacy, and to see C the inhospitable confusion produced within by the advent of so awkward and unseasonable a visitor, at the moment, too, when we were expecting Miss Calif ornia with a slave to carry her parasol. CALIFORNIA VJONTRARY to the well-founded apprehensions of a large majority of the opponents of Slavery, Califor nia has adopted a Constitution excluding the curse of human bondage from her borders. If we may be lieve the Whig newspapers, the abolitionists are dis appointed at this result. Since the election of General Taylor, it has been discovered that these unhappy Ishmaelites make a trade of Anti-slavery, a reproach which comes somewhat ungracefully from those (at least) who professed a willingness to join the Free Soil party if it were only sure of success. It is a re proach, moreover, which we who live in Mr. Palfrey s district find it hard to comprehend. We cannot conceive how any trader should be able to make his political fortune out of an abolition venture, unless by some such happy contingency as enabled Lord Timothy Dexter to enrich himself by sending warm ing-pans to the West Indies. Abolitionists are not so unanimous that it is safe to speak for more than one of them at a time. We know one, certainly, who is sincerely thankful for C the result of the Convention in California, hampered as the slavery restriction is with a spirit of foolish and inhuman exclusiveness toward the African race. But the experience of an abolitionist is not such as to render him childishly confiding. In America the poet s saw is reversed, and it is slavery s battle which, " Though seeming lost, is ever won." From year to year we grow more nervously sus picious of Trojan horses and are especially fearful when either of the great political parties offers us anything in the way of gift. With regard to Cali fornia the Whigs occupy very much the same posi tion which Caleb Balderstone did to Mr. Gilder and his advancement as Queen s cooper. Though he had no concern in it whatever, he was very willing to claim the merit of the appointment after it was made. We are as ignorant as a " Washington Cor respondent " of the object of Mr. Butler King s mission, but he was certainly an odd person to select as an Anti-slavery propagandist. There is no want of charity in supposing that General Taylor will at least be lenient toward Southern institutions, and accordingly we already hear rumors that California is to be divided into four states, two north and two south of the Missouri Compromise line. Ominously enough, the name of Mr. Clay is mentioned in con- [ 152 3 nection with this movement of Mr. Clay, the re presentative American man on the subject of slav ery. Abolitionists must be upon the watch. They should not regard the exclusion of Slavery even from the whole of California as an Anti-slavery tri umph. It is no such thing, but merely Freedom holding her own. The game of Mr. Calhoun and the advocates of Slavery has always been to demand a great deal more than they cared about getting. This worked well in two ways. They gained the credit of conceding all above the point they were really anxious to attain, and, at the same time, Northern doughfaces could make their peace with their constituents by assuming to have gained all that they had merely not basely surrendered. Be yond a doubt this will be Mr. Calhoun s course in regard to California. He will resist the admis sion of that territory as a free state to the last mo ment, and at last consent to divide it equally between freedom and slavery, playing Mr. Clay, the apostle of compromise, as the last trump-card. Mr. Calhoun is a cunning jockey. He asks twice as much for his horse as he means to take, and finally persuades his unlucky victim (who does not want the ani mal at all) to buy it for twice its worth, because it is such a bargain. But these horses of his are, like those of Diomed, foddered with human flesh, n 153 3 and the North has bought too many of them already. On the other hand it is possible that it is not the half of California, but the whole of New Mexico, which Mr. Calhoun intends to struggle for. And, if this be the case, we confess that we have little hope of seeing him defeated. Nothing is to be expected of the Democratic party, who have lost office and are willing to regain it at any expense of their cardi nal principles, nothing from the Whigs, whose com plexion could hardly be heightened by a blush for any new piece of treachery. When men have been treacherous, and the evidence has been found in their pockets, they hate more than anything else the cause which they have betrayed. It is really amusing to see the Whigs forced to capture and spike their own Anti-slavery batteries which they erected against the Democrats. Affirming that their President and his cabinet are Anti-slavery, they use their utmost endeavor to keep out of Congress every Anti-slavery Whig. We can only compliment their honesty at the expense of their intelligence. If the aim of Pre sident Taylor s administration be to keep slavery out of the territories, and the Democrats in Congress are not to be relied on, why make a point of sacrificing every member who would add one to the chances of attaining an end so ardently desired by the adminis- C 154 H tration ? We commend to the serious reflection of the Whig party the following stanza from Cole ridge s " Devil s Walk : " " Down the river did glide, with wind and with tide, A pig with vast celerity ; And the Devil looked wise as he saw how, the while, It cut its own throat : * There ! quoth he, with a smile, Goes England s commercial prosperity. " It seems to us that there is a pretty analogy here with the political prosperity of the Whigs, only that in their case the satire is heightened by the poor creature s cutting its throat in an attempt to swim up Salt River instead of down. It is fortunate for the cause of Right and Free dom that the Whigs have not succeeded against Gid- dings as they have (hitherto) against Palfrey. It is well that there should be one watchful eye in Con gress to detect, and one fearless tongue to expose, any trick which the party at present dominant may attempt to play upon the nation. The more fully the hollowness and duplicity of either of the great par ties is exposed, the better. The Whigs might have defeated the annexation of Texas as a slave state, if they had thrown themselves boldly upon the Anti- slavery side of the question. But, having made a Constitutional point of it, and that having been de cided against them, Texas will afford a precedent C 155 U and apology for New Mexico and Santa Fe. Let Abolitionists, meanwhile, continue to sow the seed of abhorrence of slavery as a moral and not a polit ical question, and they may be certain that, like the Scotch gardener s trees, it will be growing while they are sleeping. GENERAL BEM S CONVERSION T, HOSE who have consistently maligned the cause of order and constitutional freedom in Hungary have extracted what poisonous acid they were able from Bern s assumption of Mahometanism. This acid they would fain apply as a test whereby to ap prove the heroic Magyars plated ware and not pure metal. The systems of such persons must be so con stituted as to secrete venom from mother s milk. We confess that we see nothing very extraordinary in Bern s conduct. He had lived in every Christian territory of Europe except Russia. He had in his own person experimentally tried the Christianity of all Christendom. If he had no country, it had been taken from him by Christian princes. If he were an Ishmaelite, he had been made so by those who pro fess the religion of Jesus. He had seen his country women scourged in Christian market-places with Christian knouts, and his friends starving in Chris tian exile or entombed alive in Christian dungeons. They were most Christian Majesties who demanded of the Turk that he should violate the sacred rites C 157 ] of a hospitality as old as the human heart, by deliv ering up the suppliants who sate at his gates to the justice of Haynau and the Orthodoxy of Nicholas. Bern might have addressed the Sultan in the words of Coriolanus to Aufidius, " Now this extremity Hath brought me to thy hearth ; not out of hope Mistake me not to save my life, . but in mere spite, To be full quit of those my banishers, Stand I before thee here. Then if thou hast A heart of wreak in thee, that wilt revenge Thine own particular wrongs, and stop those maims Of shame seen through thy country, speed thee straight, And make my misery serve thy turn ; so use it That my revengeful services may prove As benefits to thee, for I will fight . with the spleen Of all the under fiends." Had Bern turned renegade for the mere sake of saving his own life, he should have taken (as there is already a Keshid Pasha in Turkey) the title of Wretched Pasha. But it was the ghost of murdered Poland which beckoned him to the Turkish Camp, that ghost which for the last forty years has glided ominous into the vacant chair whenever the Mac- beths of Austria, Prussia, and Russia have held council or festival. Revenge is as good a Christian as Persecution. TURKISH TYRANNY AND AMER ICAN T, HE last European steamer brings us what is said to be the final determination of the Turkish Gov ernment in regard to the Hungarian exiles. The Sultan will not be the Czar s jackal, but only his jailer. " Allah forbid," says the pious Ottoman, " that I should break the law of the prophet ! I will not only not surrender these unhappy fugitives who have sought my protection, but I will so far extend the rites of hospitality, that they shall remain my guests for life." " Will you walk into my parlor ? Said the spider to the fly." There needs no farther proof that the Turk has be come thoroughly Occidentalized. We shall not be surprised to hear before long that he is an attendant on stated preaching. He certainly behaves very much like a Christian. We see no escape for Kos- suth and his fellow fugitives, unless their jailer has daughters enough to give all of them a chance I 159 3 at the good fortune of Gilbert h Becket and Lord Bateman. Doubtless this conduct of the Sultan will excite the reprobation of nearly all Christendom, although the Turk, being no reader of newspapers, is not likely to be much influenced by public opinion. Probably, as is usual in such cases, the occupants of glass houses will be the most eager to throw stones. Brother Jonathan will be among the first to begin the experiment of lapidation. Already we see our editorial brethren picking up their smoothest and hardest pebbles, though we think that the strongest arm among them will hardly contrive to get his mis sile over the three thousand miles of ocean. With a longer or shorter parabolic curve, each makes its momentary splash and sinks forever. We will say this for Brother Jonathan, that his first impulses are commonly right and generous. But, before he commences oculist, he should bethink himself that there are beams enough in his own eye to answer the demands of half the lumber-yards of Europe. It is very weU to be indignant at the " ex tradition " of Kossuth and his friends, or rather at the Czar s demanding it. Extradition is as good a word as another to pick a quarrel out of, but the act implied in it would stink as foully in the nostrils of all honest men though wrapt up in the lavender 1 16 3 of choicest phrases. Suppose the Czar should send to President Taylor an autograph letter of somewhat the following purport : " To our well-beloved cousin Zachary, President of the North American Republic, Defender of the Punic faith (toward Mexico), Hered itary lord and owner of Cuffee, Sambo, Juno, &c., &c., Greeting : We, Nicholas, Emperor, &e., being conscious that we are subject to the like infirmities as our fellow mortals, and being at present especially afflicted with a tender conscience in regard to the failings of our neighbors, do most heartily recipro cate the solicitude of our most excellent Brother Jonathan in behalf of our health and well-being, and desire to know whether it be true (as we have, with pain, heard) that the Constitution of our said brother is suffering from the effects of poison ad ministered in the year of God 1787 in the following form, to wit : Article IV., section 2, paragraph 3 " ? This would be rather an awkward missive to an swer. We do not think that Brother Jonathan is worse than his neighbors, only he has got into the habit of setting himself up to be unco guid. It is only a month or two since he read in the papers, seeming to think it rather a good joke than other wise, a story something like this. A taker of Da guerreotype likenesses in Indiana was applied to by a colored man to take a miniature of him to be sent C to his betrothed. Discovering in some way that his sitter was a fugitive slave, he hired him as a servant, and, under pretence of going to Philadelphia, took him to Kentucky and betrayed him to his former master, receiving for this constitutional act the stip ulated reward. Truly the sun, which shines alike upon the just and the unjust, and which took the portrait that served for the poor runaway s identifi cation, was never before made the accomplice of so base an act. We wish that the name of this paltry betrayer might be made known, that in it we might be supplied with a synonym for the meaner and baser kinds of treachery. It would be unjust to de grade Judas, or Arnold, or Gorgey, to such com panionship as this. Now, good Brother Jonathan, can you rise chuck ling from a story like this to hearten the Sultan against the demands of Russia ? What, as Whittier has said somewhere, " Would not the burning answer come From Turbaned Turk and bearded Russ, Go, free your wretched slaves at home, Then turn and ask the like of us ? " Why, " extradition " is only the diplomatic word for what some of our sister States do every day in the week, for what we consent to for the sake of pre serving the unity of the great Whig or Democratic C l62 3 party. We cannot admit Kossuth into our Valhalla and shut Toussaint and Madison Washington out of it. This is one great curse of our system of Slavery, that it compels our great statesmen into a dishonest connivance with it, and keeps out of politics all who are too upright to be accessories in such a crime. It chills the eloquence of our great orators with a sense of painful inconsistency. When we read Webster s fine denunciation of Nicholas, where he speaks like a lawyer inspired, we cannot help thinking of the Capitol steps at Richmond, and of the schoolmaster who sets no disagreeable lessons. Too literally does our Daniel come to judgment. Is that good inter national law between Russia and Turkey which is bad between Virginia and Massachusetts ? Interna tional law is a good phrase, but what is the worth of international law without an international tribunal which can be appealed to for its enforcement? In ternational law has been of use to diplomatists some times in arranging matters where matters of dollars and cents were concerned, but in questions of jus tice it has always been the law of the strongest. Mr. Webster seemed tacitly to acknowledge that it was merely the public opinion of nations, and he wished to have the force of this brought to bear upon the Czar by excluding him from the rights and courtesies C of the civilized world. This is very well in itself, but should we wish to have the same rule applied to ourselves ? Even as regards such of our State Governments as practically nullify that article of the Constitution which requires the surrender of escaped slaves, the parallel with the conduct of Turkey is tolerably exact. They do not, it is true, agree to shut up the fugitives in a fortress and keep them harmless for life. But there are dungeons not built with stone and mortar as dark as any in Turkey. There are boundaries harder to climb over than fortress walls, and restraints as galling as those of iron fetters. The colored man in the free States, whether a fugi tive or not, finds the avenues to every social and political distinction shut fast against him. It has even been decided lately by the Secretary of State that he is not a citizen of the United States. The Indiana taker of Daguerreotype likenesses is an or nament of society sufficiently important to have the " aegis of the Union " held over him in case he should leave the country (as we hope he may), but Frederick Douglass is, according to Mr. Clayton, nothing at all. He is neither denizen, nor citizen, nor an all-other-person-including-Indians-not-taxed. He is absolutely and literally annihilated. Verily we must set to work upon the beam that is in our own eye! THE SOUTH AS KING LOG w. HEN King Log first made his avatar among the frogs, he invaded his future dominion with such a splash that even the oldest croakers, to say nothing of the pollywogs, fancied that his ligneous majesty was a cross-grained piece of Kingship that would maintain order not without a certain stolid severity. The deep-voiced seniors of the swamp prophesied of a closer adherence to ancient wont, and of a return of those always legendary days when age was rever enced, experience valued, and religion cherished. Certain pollywogs, who had not yet doffed their tails, which, like Plato s trails of glory, they had brought with them into their amphibious world, and who had formed an association of young frogdom with strong radical tendencies, and a plan of pro viding every niarish citizen with a tussock and a lily- pad to himself, augured martial law and the sup pression of clubs. Accordingly, for a day or two, the Nestors chanted jubilate, expecting the forma tion of a cabinet, and the liberals cast about to find a Brutus, who would solve all doubts by sudden t and secret thrust of bulrush. Those of the juste milieu were not wanting to the occasion, and, mount ing as an appropriate rostrum the floating rail of a fence, proposed the settlement of all difficulties by a compromise which should satisfy all parties by yield ing just what they did not wish for to each. Mean while his royal woodenness lay quiet, keeping his designs closely to himself. Vainly did choruses of ardent loyalists sing the new national anthem, God save great Log the First, every evening in front of the royal residence. At last a committee of both houses was deputed to wait upon the King and hum bly desire him to summon a ministry. The address was honored with no sign of recognition, fears be gan to be entertained that all was not right, and the royal leeches being called in, gave a verdict of Coma produced by a superabundant presence of sap in the brain. Kemedial measures were tried without effect, the awe inspired by the royal descent wore gradu ally off, the late majesty was openly declared a blockhead, and his remains were treated with down right contumely, and Humbug! resounded in all varieties of intonation from one end of marshland to the other. Precisely such a King Log is the Southern threat of Disunion, thrown down periodically to scare the croakers in our political morass, only this year it has C 1663 descended with more force, and the wake set in mo tion by the plunge has spread itself in wider circles. The quarrel between the North and the South re minds one of that famous duel in the " Pickwick Papers/ when the antagonists only met as both were endeavoring to escape a meeting. But, in the mean time, the pretended fear of dissolution is to be made the fulcrum upon which to rest the lever of reac tion against freedom. Mr. Clay makes his third ap pearance in his famous part of Mr. Facingbothways, to propose a middle course, which simply means that the North shall sit down, with what grace it may, between the two stools. One would think that two experiments upon the hardness of the floor would leave no need for the confirmation of a third. The South has certainly by this time squared all old scores in the way of wooden nutmegs and white-oak cheeses. Missouri and Texas were not ill done, but it will be long ere the North gets any spice out of the one, or any caseine out of the other, though there has been grating enough and to spare. We are now to have a wooden ham traded off upon us in our bargain about New Mexico. Intimidation and wheedling have been mingled in very adroit proportion. First a grain of dissolution, then a grain of assurance that the Wilmot Proviso is of no practical importance. Mr. Winthrop writes C 1673 home that the present Congress will outlast the Union, and yet runs away from a chance to vote against a resolution whose passage is to lead to an immediate disruption. " Under which King, Be- zonian ? Speak, or die ! " Which horn of his own dilemma will Mr. Winthrop choose as the most com fortable to be gored with ? Whether is Disunion not fraught with national ruin, or does the Wilmot Pro viso not bring us in danger of it? There is one consolation, which is that the memory of whosoever elects the fence to sit on will be retributively ridden upon the rail he was so fond of by Posterity. It is curious to observe how diverse a morality obtains in political matters from that which governs in the other affairs of life. The editor of the Bos ton " Daily Advertiser," a man universally respected for private virtue and integrity, and whose word would be esteemed solid as a bond by any of his fellow citizens, indulges the readers of his journal with the following odd Kilkenny-cat-isms (" Adver tiser " of February 9th) : "MR. ROOT S RESOLUTION. Some newspapers and some letter writers attach a degree of importance to the vote by which Mr. Root s resolution was laid on the table, on Monday, in the House of Represen tatives, which we cannot think it deserves. The reso lution was a proposition to instruct a committee C 168 3 with regard to an abstract question, a question, too, which in more practical forms was certain to come up before the House, and it was laid aside. If by our own voice we could have passed the resolution, and secured a prudent action under it, that voice would have been given it, and we can well see why the Massachusetts members voted against laying it upon the table ; but we do not see that the result is a very important one, or that the vote indicates in one way or the other anything very definite with regard to the slavery question. " The following was the resolution as finally amended by Mr. Root : " Resolved, That the Committee on Territories be instructed to report to the House, with as little delay as practicable, a bill or bills providing a territorial government or governments for all that part of the territory ceded to the United States by Mexico by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, lying eastward of California, and prohibiting slavery therein. " It will be observed that this is a distinct enun ciation, in a disagreeable form, of one part of a general proposition which it is hoped may be made a subject of compromise. While other statesmen are engaged with the whole subject in dispute, Mr. Root selects a part, and hurries in an order, not to ask a committee to consider the propriety of a particular C 169 3 course, but to instruct them to report a bill, with a proviso annexed, which proviso it is known is ob noxious to nearly half at least of the members of the House. "All the Massachusetts members present voted against laying the resolution upon the table, and so did right. But if any of them supposed that by its passage the great question of the session was to be settled, or if Mr. Boot thought that in pressing his resolution he was doing anything more than to throw a firebrand into the national councils, we mistake its purport, force, and effect." This editorial comments sufficiently upon itself without any glasses of ours. A few days later the editor proposes that a public meeting shall be held in Boston to proclaim devotion to the Union, in other words, to protest against the Wilmot Proviso. A few years ago, in looking up the history of the Missouri Compromise, we had occasion to refer to the files of the Boston " Repertory," edited, we be lieve, by the same gentleman who now conducts the " Advertiser." We have not those files at hand, but if we can trust our recollection, the ground taken by the " Repertory " was that the admission of Mis souri as a slave state would add to the already undue preponderancy of the South in the national politics. We think the same argument equally conclusive c: 1703 now (to leave the higher ethical view out of the ques tion) against a Compromise in the case of the terri tory acquired from Mexico. But this is not the only, or the chief, importance of the Proviso. Without it, any of the new states, though they might enter the Union with satisfactory constitutions, could amend them so as to establish slavery at any moment, whereas, as long as the Proviso remained in force, the holding of a slave would be illegal, and the mat ter would be decided as formerly in Massachusetts by a suit before the proper tribunals. Moreover, when any affair, private or public, is to be settled, wisdom and justice are always found to be coincident at last. Righteousness and expediency turn out in the end to be identical. How lasting was the truce patched up by the Missouri Compro mise ? The admission of Texas with a pro-slavery Constitution, did that tend to allay the Anti-slavery agitation ? It is surely time that our legislators should learn to look forward beyond the limit of a session or a presidential term. It is no wonder that an apt compromise cannot be found, since between right and wrong there is no possibility of compro mise. Justice exacts her dues more slowly of nations than of individuals, but she always contrives to get payment of the uttermost farthing from both. COMPROMISE JLF there were a Saint Compromise, it would be his image that ought to be stamped upon the Coins of our Republic. Our very existence as a Nation at all is due, we are told, to a compromise, and one of a somewhat ignoble sort, not between God and Satan, but between Trade and Slavery. So that Satan and Mammon were represented at the formation of the Compact, but not God. Since the sticking together of the Union, this patron Saint Compromise has in tervened on several occasions to preserve the work of his clients. This patching up of expedients is justified by a system of reasoning falsely termed Common Sense. Everything, they say, is the result of Compromises. Conventionalism is a Compromise between the indi vidual and Society. Respectability is a Compromise between Virtue and Vice. Nay, life itself is a Com promise between Health and Disease. We are taught to believe that half a loaf is not only better than no bread at all, but better than any amount of bread. Now this is not truly Common Sense at all, for [ 172 n that is the result of experience and practical saga city teaching the best means of reaching a desired point, not a makeshift for getting half way to it. Facts are things to which we must all make up our minds, however distasteful they may be to us. No matter what our own hurry must be, we must con sent that Destiny shall not make advances per saltum, but with an almost inappreciable slowness. The most vehement Reformer must endure that his very existence shall depend upon that of his opposite pole, the unyielding Conservative. We must either get out of the way of facts or be run over by them, like the old philosopher who denied the existence of matter. One of these tough facts is the presence and force of Evil, Unwisdom, Satan, or whatever we choose to call it, in human affairs. We may say what we please, there it is, and we must make the best of it. A great part of valuable human activity is wasted in the futile work of building barriers against the In evitable. This, then, is the true problem to find out what the Inevitable is. It is inevitable that when two forces join at an angle, a new direction is generated proportioned to the relative quantities of force. And this is the truth on which is based the fallacy that Compromise is the dictate of Common Sense. Practical wisdom, it is said, lies in the nat- C 178 ] ural ground, the balance between opposite poles. In spite of this, nevertheless, all that mankind has ever recognized as uncommon sense has been that which has come bluntly and face to face against whatever was established theory or usage. The difficulty is that all our Compromises have been no compromises at all, at least in this sense. They have rather realized the old meaning of the word, which implied a Conspiracy. They have not been modifications springing from a meeting of the two antagonistic principles of Good and Evil, but Con spiracies by which Good has been uniformly be trayed. In the great game which began with the birth of the Constitution, Slavery has all along played with loaded Dice. She has put on the mask of Destiny, and acted the part so well that our Statesmen have always taken defeat for granted be forehand. Slavery, being an acknowledged evil, the very permission to exist was at first a concession and a surrender. This was called a Compromise. Then Slavery desired to extend itself and treachery al lowed it. This was called a Compromise. Again the monster felt the pains of hunger, and Texas was thrown to it. This was called a Compromise. Now, affairs have thriven so well that Freedom sits an outcast and a beggar at the gates of her own an- C 174 3 cestral dwelling. And this is also called a Compro mise. Better strangle at once that " bird of our Country " of which our orators are so fond of talk ing, than let her go on hatching eggs of all manner of unclean birds. It is hardly a year since the Northern Whig presses were vying with each other in their zeal for the Wilmot Proviso. The universal Whig Dough of the Country, fermenting with the yeast of an ex pected victory, forgot for a moment that it was Dough. Nothing was too bad for that sour and heavy Democratic batch which could not rise. Now that aspiring Dough is flat and lifeless. Even Gen eral Taylor ivas in favor of the Proviso, and North ern Whigs were seduced to vote for him upon that pretence. Let a man cheat his neighbor out of a few hundred dollars and he goes to the State Prison. But to what Penitentiary of public contempt shall a Party be consigned, which obtains a President under false pretences ? When the eye of the People be comes clairvoyant, it will behold, we fancy, certain unconscious gentlemen working in Congressional Committees, clad in symbolic suits of blue and red perpendicularly halved, such as are the uniforms in some other public institutions. The Wilmot Proviso was truly a Compromise. It allowed the South to keep all that it had hitherto C unjustly gained, but declared that it should steal no more. Our statesmanship, which has brought itself more and more into accordance with that of Europe, was desirous of reproducing an American type of that greatest of Old World humbugs, the Balance of Power. Accordingly, we are now told that the beam must be kept exactly even between the Free and the Slave States, in other words, that when we make a hole for our great cat to go through, we must also make a still greater for the little cat not yet littered. All history is the record of a struggle, gradually heightening in fierceness, between reason and un reason, between right and wrong. Of what good is it that we can put off the evil time a century, which is but a day in the history of the human race ? Our statutes are subject to revision in that higher Con gress where the laws of Nature are enacted. " Trent shall not wind him with so deep indent," exclaim our Glendowers. " He must, he will, you see he doth," answers the progress of events. This very neutral ground of Compromise is that which is trampled at last by the Contending Forces of the good and evil principle. Our legislators might as well try to stay Niagara with a dip-net, or pass acts against the law of gravitation, as endeavor to stunt the growth of avenging Conscience. Do they think C *76 3 that the Union can be stuck together with mouth- glue, when the eternal forces are rending it asunder ? There is something better than Expediency, and that is Wisdom, something stronger than Compro mise, and that is Justice. MR. WEBSTER S SPEECH JLF there were a Pepys now living in Boston and snapping up for his diary all those unconsidered trifles of street and personal news which do not get into print, but which nevertheless make History, he would record a great many facts that would give clews to the investigations of the future annalist. He would note down that Mr. Webster received the cue for his extraordinary speech from a private meeting called together by certain gentlemen to concoct reaction against the Anti-slavery movement in particular, and to screw down the brakes upon the too rapid progress of Destiny in general. He would state, that, as the defection of Gorgey was talked of in London before it took place in Hun gary, so that of Mr. Webster was counted on in State Street while the Honorable Senator himself was innocently writing home to his friends to inquire how strong a form of Anti-slavery the Massachusetts stomach would bear. He would state as a certainty that the passage in Mr. Webster s speech relating to Mr. Hoar s mission was not delivered in the Sen- n 178 ] ate, but was an after-thought sent on for insertion in the Boston edition. So much by way of previous history. Now in re gard to the speech itself. It has been characterized, like most of Mr. Webster s speeches, as " a masterly effort." Some of them have been masterly suc cesses, but this, we sincerely hope and believe, was an effort. We think we notice in the course of it one or two scarce-concealed gulps, as the Oregon speech was swallowed. And it was, moreover, the effort, not of a Senator representing Massachusetts, but of an advocate holding the brief of State Street. It is a matter of debate in the newspapers whether or no Mr. Webster is sustained by the public senti ment of Boston. It seems to be forgotten that the distinguished Senator represents an undivided half of the Bay State. He has remembered that he was the delegate of Boston, but has apparently forgotten that Bunker Hill and Concord have also their share in him ; nay, it seems to have slipped from his mind that he represented Daniel Webster the man no less than Daniel Webster the aspirant for the Presidency. We have touched upon the first great objection to the speech, and it is a fatal one. It is the plea of a lawyer and an advocate, but not of a statesman. It is not even the plea of an advocate on the side which he was retained to argue. We have heard C 179 ] enough of Democratic defalcations ; here is a great Whig defalcation which dwarfs them all, for it is not money which has disappeared in this instance, but professions, pledges, principles. Men do not de fend themselves in advance against accusations of inconsistency, unless they feel an uncomfortable sense that there is some justice in the charge. This feeling pervades a greater part of Mr. Webster s speech like a blush. While Mr. Webster s private correspondents in Boston were spreading the trem ulous intelligence, not without due awe of the result, that he was about to swoop " Like an eagle, And bolt his cloudless thunder on the heads " of Southern cacklers, behold, he quietly descends and takes his perch beside them on the roost like any tame villatic fowl. Mr. Webster begins by what may be considered an apology for Slavery in the abstract, as it is called, although we must confess that after diligent inquiry, we have been unable to discover where that particu lar kind of servitude exists now, or has ever existed. We do not exactly see what Greek, Roman, or Jew ish Slavery has to do with the Wilmot Proviso, but as Mr. Webster has seen fit to bring them in, it may be worth while to set him right in his facts. It was not " the ingenious philosophy of the Greeks which C found, or sought to find, a justification for it (Slav ery) precisely upon the grounds which have been assumed for such a justification in this country ; that is, a natural and original difference among the races of mankind, the inferiority of the black or colored races to the white." It was simply an ingen ious philosopher among the Greeks, Aristotle, who did so ; and he, like the rest of his countrymen and like the Chinese of the present day, considered all foreigners as barbarians, drawing quite another line between those fit and those unfit for Slavery than that of color. Plato in his Republic makes a distinc tion only in favor of the non-enslavement of Greeks. There is proof enough of the fact that the Greeks did not consider intellectual inferiority to be gradu ated by the chromatic scale of complexion. Does Herodotus paint the Egyptians as ourang-outangs a race which the profoundest ethnologists consider to have been of the Negro type ? And for what did Pythagoras visit India, and Plato Egypt ? The greater part of the slaves in Greece, who were not subjugated natives like the helots in Sparta, came from Asia Minor. While the Greek republics were mere clans of squabbling savages, there were dark- skinned empires upon the Nile, from the dregs of whose philosophy and religion the Greeks drank and were inspired. Mr. Webster says that he " sup- C l81 3 poses " (for in this speech every phrase seems to sit upon the fence) that no injunction against the insti tution of Slavery is to be found in the " teachings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ or of any of his apos tles." We will not stop to inquire what the Gospel of Christ, in contradistinction to that of his apostles, may be, but only ask if incest is anywhere forbidden in the New Testament? Or, if not, whether that want of express prohibition be in any sort an excuse for the crime ? Punch, says the Newgate Ordinary, is nowhere spoken ill of in Scripture. In order to appreciate fully the fallacies of the speech, it must be borne in mind constantly that it is not a discourse upon the question of Slavery, but an argument against the application of the Wilmot Proviso to New Mexico and California. Now what has all this stuff about Greek and Roman Slavery, and nowhere forbidden in the Gospels, to do with this question ? Nothing whatever, except to serve as a lenitive to the public conscience, that it may re lax a little in its anxiety concerning the smuggling of human bondage with all its concomitant horrors into the New Territory. There is no doubt, however, in point of fact, that the early Christians discoun tenanced Slavery, as they did also war. One of the Fathers, indeed, expressly condemns it. But if the practice of the Church were in its favor, what then ? C 182 ] The Church countenanced many practices which would not be tolerated now. The first Council of Toledo (A. D. 400) permitted the keeping of concu bines, and every one knows for what, in later times, the clergy paid the tax of couillage. Perhaps it is more to the purpose, as concerns Mr. Webster the lawyer, to allude to the fact that the extinction of serfage in England was due to the boldness and per severance with which the lawyers insisted on having the laws so construed as to favor liberty. But, if Mr. Webster were really in search of a scriptural prohibition of Slavery, we think he might find it in that commandment which forbids us to covet any thing that is our neighbor s. For, if we may not do that, then a fortiori we may not covet our neigh bor himself. Mr. Webster, having endeavored to make Slav ery a little less odious by showing that it existed among two pagan nations, and among the Jews, a race notoriously blind to the spiritual aspect of the Law whereof they were depositaries, goes on to say that honest differences of opinion exist at the North and the South upon this subject. One might have expected here some cursory glance at the moral side of the question, which has, as we shall see presently, a decided bearing even upon his own view of the case. But it is precisely this ethical part of the C 18 3 3 argument which Mr. Webster is anxious to keep out of sight, or, if it will suggest itself, to depreciate. He merely alludes to the fact that there are such diversities of sentiment, and then goes on to ridicule Northern "fanaticism" without an allusion to its antagonist principle at the South. He says of them that " they deal with morals as with mathematics, and they think what is right may be distinguished from what is wrong with the precision of an alge braic equation." We confess that with regard to our treatment of those who practice what we con sider sinful, it is a very hard thing for us to define the precise point where charity ends and connivance and complicity begin. But we should like to know how many of the religious sects in this country be lieve that ignorance of the moral excuses the trans gressor any more than ignorance of the laws of the land ? Mr. Webster says, " if their perspicacious vi sion enables them to detect a spot on the face of the sun, they think that a good reason why the sun should be struck down from heaven." This is simply non sense, besides being a very faulty comparison. For no vision, however perspicacious, can detect spots in the sun, and none but an insane man would wish to destroy the sun, even if he could detect such spots, because everybody who is not stark mad knows that we have no control over the sun whatever. But C surely if there were a gas-lamp in front of a man s door, and the glass were so foul that it gave no light, he might very reasonably desire to have it washed. The Constitution is a thing subject, under certain conditions, to the reforming will of the people. He says that " they (the fanatics afore said) forget how many vices and crimes, public and private, still prevail and that many of them, public crimes especially, which are offences against the Christian religion, pass without exciting particular regret or indignation." Nothing can be more ab surdly untrue than this. Mr. Webster, before un dertaking to make a speech, was bound to master his subject. In debating this question, nothing could be of more importance than an accurate understand ing of the sentiment which lies at the bottom of Northern Anti-slavery. Of all men in the com munity the Abolitionists are the least oblivious of these things which Mr. Webster says they forget. Mr. Webster would probably be surprised to know that, if his argument in regard to our Constitutional obligations have any cogency at all, it will be espe cially pleasing to the most ultra of these Northern fanatics, the Disunionists, who have long insisted upon the necessity of being limited to a precisely similar view. Mr. Webster next traces the growth of Slavery C 185 3 (in itself an entirely sufficient argument for the enactment of the Proviso) and proceeds to give the history of the annexation of Texas. We shall con sider this, and what he says about Mr. Mason s bill, together, because his argument on both cases hinges upon the due performance of a contract. But first a word in regard to Mr. Webster s personal attitude toward annexation. If Abolitionists forget certain things, as he affirms that they do, there are others of which their memory is uncomfortably tenacious, and in regard to which they might jog Mr. Web ster s own recollection, which seems to be a little drowsy. Who was it that asserted the annexation of Texas under any circumstances to be unconstitu tional? And how is that constitutional in 1850 which was not so in 1845 ? Mr. Webster says that he "went home to Massachusetts and proclaimed the existence of this purpose (annexation), but I could get no audience, and but little attention." A contribution to history as valuable and authentic as any of Bishop Turpin ! There was a distinguished gentleman of Massachusetts who promised to attend a certain Convention in Faneuil Hall, whither the announcement of his speaking on a particular sub ject would have summoned the largest audience ever assembled there, but who was summoned away sud denly to New York. Can Mr. Webster remember how he was ? C When we come to the question of the perform ance of a contract, it becomes plain why the speaker has avoided all allusion to the ethics of the matter. Or, it may be, that, as is often the case with law yers, the nearer and lower duty occults the farther and greater. If the Constitution be a contract be tween the North and the South, and if the legisla tive provision for making four new slave States out of Texas be so also, then we suppose these con tracts are to be governed by the same rules which prescribe the duties of individuals in similar cases. Now, if there were an express understanding to a certain effect between the contracting parties, certi fied by abundant witnesses, that understanding would surely be held to modify the obligations of the con tract. Now there was an understanding, as Mr. Webster himself states correctly, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, that Slavery would be extinguished by the suppression of the slave-trade. This is all that gives any meaning whatever to Mr. Madison s objection to the insertion of the word " slave " in the Constitution. But, above and be yond this, every contract to do an immoral act is void db initio. The return of fugitives is clearly an immoral act by the showing of that very Gospel which Mr. Webster admits to be an authority when he intimates that it nowhere condemns Slavery. But C 18 ? 3 Mr. Webster, while he would enforce the perform ance, by the North, of the contracts as respects Texas and the return of fugitives, says not a word of Southern duties and obligations. Not one word, for the passage in his speech which refers to the im prisonment of free colored seamen was not spoken in the Senate, but sent on to be inserted in the Bos ton edition of his speech. Was it a Senator from South Carolina, or from Massachusetts, who was speaking? Surely a lower bid for the Presidency has never been made than this. But how is it about the Wilmot Proviso? Mr. Webster has two reasons to assign against its pass age. One is that it is useless, and the other that it is irritating to the South. If it be useless, why was our advocate in favor of it in the case of Oregon ? Why did he claim such a mere ~brutum fulmen as " his thunder " ? An inaccuracy in fact, by the way, like his " proclaiming " in 1843 the design to annex Texas. Why, the Abolitionists had already bored the community to death with it. Dr. Chan- ning had " proclaimed" it years before, and John Quincy Adams. But who knows that the Proviso is useless ? Mr. Webster says that it is, and that Slav ery is excluded from New Mexico by the law of nature and of physical geography. Excellent good words, but where is the proof? Why, it is Mr. C 1883 Webster s opinion. But Mr. Webster has held opin ions against the Tariff and in favor of the Tariff, in favor of the Wilmot Proviso and against it. If Slav ery should get into New Mexico (and let us remem ber that it has been asserted all along by the South ern men in Congress that it would have got into California but for the fear of the Proviso), it would be no particular satisfaction to be told that Mr. Webster thought it never could. Mr. Webster would not, he says, reenact the laws of God. Why, all human laws are an attempt at that very thing. It is just in proportion as the laws of society or of the State diverge from that intention that confusion and anarchy are produced. The use of the Proviso is to set a definite limit to the Extension of Slavery, to put upon record the will of the People that they must have no more of it. Mr. Webster s argument, or rather assertion, that the laws of nature and God will keep Slavery out of New Mexico is puerile. Slavery everywhere exists in spite of those laws, not in accordance with them. Mr. Calhoun s plea in defence of Slavery rests not upon any assumption that cotton could not be cultivated as well by black freemen as by black slaves. Quite otherwise; he would maintain the institution because it fosters pride, the habit of command, a state of aristocracy, and other such C 189 ]] Christian virtues. Mr. Webster is scrupulous about reenacting the laws of God, and we wish he had felt as much delicacy about those of Satan. Mr. Webster, we have said, avoids carefully all the moral points of the argument. He falls in with the common assumption that this is a question of politi cal preponderance between the North and the South. Nay, he goes even farther and would reduce it to a mere matter of sectional prejudice, the result of habit and education. Had it been a question of political supremacy, it would have been no disgrace to Mr. Webster to have remembered that he came from the North. Had it been a matter of prejudice, it would not have lessened his repute for wisdom if he had retained some prepossession in favor of free dom. Had the North been as faithfully and ener getically represented at Washington as the South has been, the limit would have been set, and quietly set, to the extension of Slavery long ago. But it is not a question between the North and the South. It is a struggle between the South (we had almost said Calhoun) and the spirit of the Nineteenth Century after Christ. But Mr. Webster would not press the Wilmot Proviso lest it irritate the South. Was he equally considerate when South Carolina nullified on account of the Tariff ? Is Slavery the only thing whose sensitiveness is to be respected ? Freedom has C been thought by some to have her finer feelings also. Did Mr. Calhoun stop to inquire whether Freedom had a system of nerves when he introduced resolu tions prohibiting the employment of free colored men in the national vessels? Mr. Webster might have remembered that a Senator represents fidelity, justice, probity, honor, no less than the mercantile and manufacturing interests. He should have con sidered that the duty of a Statesman lies in pre paring his age and his country for the inevitable progress of events, not in contriving expedients for putting it off from day to day, renewing, as it were, with a constant accumulation of interest the pledges we have given to Fate, and crowding back into a deluge by an exaggeration of petty obstacles that current of events which might otherwise have flowed full, indeed, but still between the banks of recog nized order. It is of the first importance that the mind of the country should be cleared of this confusion of the two terms South and Slavery. If we may believe Mr. Calhoun, it is the South which has all along been a sufferer by the legislation of the country. The system of aggression, he says, began under the Confederation, and has continued to the present day. There has never been a time when Slavery has not been the governing interest (we should rather say c disaster) of the Union. The exclusion of Slavery from the North Western territory, or from any other territory, is no wrong done to the South, but only a preservation of equality between her and the North. The admission of Slavery would have been an entire exclusion of the North. But, admitting for the purpose of the argument, Mr. Clay s doctrine that what the law makes property is property, the Wilmot Proviso merely leaves matters even between the two sections. The slaveholder may turn his " property " into money before emigrating to Cali fornia or New Mexico, just as the Northern freeman is obliged to do with his. But Slavery prohibits the entrance of that kind of capital which makes the true riches of a State, freemen, the masters only of strong arms and skilful hands. We may as well correct another of Mr. Webster s mistakes or perversions of fact before we close our article. As if to make his speech a perfect cabinet of cant, he has a specimen of that sort which attrib utes to the Abolitionists the cessation of all freedom of speech at the South in regard to the evils of Slav ery. He refers in confirmation of this absurdity to the Virginia Convention of 1832 and the denuncia tions of Slavery by several distinguished delegates to it. Then he tells us that the Anti-slavery agitation commenced in 1835, and wishes to know whether C !9 2 !3 any one can speak as freely in the Old Dominion now. If Mr. Webster should ever chance to see a file of " The Liberator," he would find the imprint of the first number bearing the date of January 1, 1831, and the " Genius of Universal Emancipation " had been previously published for several years in Wash ington and Baltimore. The truth is that Slavebreed- ing is more profitable, and therefore more orthodox, in Virginia now than then. Mr. Webster might have obtained this information from that very paper of Mr. Upshur s which he refers to. To every think ing man it must be apparent that an increase of severity and watchfulness from year to year is an essential incident of the slave-system. As numbers increase, as hope, desire, and intelligence are inde finably diffused as by the atmosphere of the time, tyranny must grow ever more suspicious and more alert. If Slavery were as unprofitable to slaveholders individually as it is to the States in which it exists, not all the fanaticism of all the Abolitionists would suffice to keep down discussion. There is a Yankee proverb about people who bite off their noses to spite their faces, but this kind of amusement is too expensive for a continuance. Slavery is profitable to slaveholders in many ways, but especially as it has enabled them to maintain that political suprem acy which Mr. Webster is willing to extend and C 193 3 strengthen. It would have been as well for him to have awakened earlier to the evils of the exaspera tion springing from those insults to which one sec tion of the country is subjected by another. He tells us that there are complaints of the North against the South, but that he " need not go over them par ticularly." Why not? What else was he sent there for? Does he sit in the Senate of the United States to defend Massachusetts from insult and her citizens from outrage, or to look out for the Pre sidential chances of Daniel Webster? If it be an insult to the South to have Slavery excluded from New Mexico, why was it not an insult to the North to have Freedom forever forbidden to enter Texas ? It is said that Mr. Webster s speech is sustained by the public sentiment of Boston, and we believe it. It is sustained by numbers who have always wished to say the same thing, but have never dared to. When a struggle like the one now going on rends and rifts the foundations of political parties, dormant old fogies are wakened and brought to light, with ideas and principles as naturally antediluvian as those of toads split out of granite. But Mr. Web ster is not sustained by Massachusetts. There are some who really believed the professions of the Whig leaders and that the Wilmot Proviso would be safe in the keeping of their party. Safe as free- VOL. n. C dom in the keeping of Austria, as a younger brother in the guardianship of the Grand Turk ! If Mr. Webster s speech should not find any one to confute it in the Senate a hard task, for as sumptions and tergiversations are not easily replied to it will not be without answerers abundant and conclusive. It will be answered by every generous instinct of the human heart, by every principle which a New Englander has imbibed in the Church, the Schoolhouse, or the Home, but especially by those inextinguishable sentiments which move men s hatred of treachery and contempt for the traitor. ANOTHER WORD ON MR. WEB- STER S SPEECH _1_N the comments which we made a fortnight ago upon Mr. Webster s speech, we dwelt not upon his inconsistencies with himself, but upon his inconsist encies with truth. We should have felt no regret at his contradicting himself, if he would have done it in the manner which he seems to think so ludicrous in Senators Dix and Niles. There is a kind of incon sistency over which, we are told, there is joy in Heaven. We doubted the accuracy of Mr. Webster s state ment with regard to the ground on which the Greek Philosophers defended Slavery, we should rather say accounted for it. We have since read what Aris totle says upon the subject, and find that we were right. Aristotle shows that there were those who condemned Slavery altogether as being contrary to natural right, and then put the rights of the master upon the same foundation with Carlyle, namely, Might. This he does rather as if he were summing up what might be said on that side, than as if he were stating or defending opinions of his own. C 1963 The theory, after the elimination of everything unessential, reduces itself to this that it is the nat ural law for the wiser to be master of the less wise. It will appear at once that it is a non seguitur to say that this involves an ownership, or that one of the terms of the relation is the " beneficent whip." The government, we may admit; the mode of it is a totally different question. The Sun governs the planets of its system without the aid of the lash, and we cannot help thinking that unwisdom is properly subjected to wisdom in a manner more akin to an eternal law of gravitation, than to the sudden and violent appli cation of physical force. PSEUDO-CONSERVATISM J_ F this country may claim any advantage over Eu rope, it is surely not in externals, but in its political ideas and in the greater freedom for their develop ment. It is the world of Experiment. The Elements of our social condition have not so hardened as that new combinations are impossible without disruption. The great currents of routine and tradition set not so strongly through settled channels that the ship of state cannot be kept off the lee shore without coming to an anchor, to remain stationary while the cables hold, or until some stronger gale drives it among the breakers. Our growth is not merely that of the poly pus, but every new organization which springs out of us and gradually detaches itself from us, contains in itself original elements, based either upon expe rience, or upon theory, to be tried and rejected, or added to the definite formula of political science. Freedom of autochthonic development is our peculiar privilege and safeguard, and the touch of Europe brings only disease and vice to us as to the islanders of the South Sea. C 98 ] But there is among us a class who seem always to forget that the important word America must form one term of all our political equations. They read European histories, reviews, and newspapers, and apply to our affairs whatever principles they succeed in extracting from them. It is not seldom the case that Greece and Rome, even, furnish their wisest saws and most modern instances. The courses and periods of Commonwealths are not to be predicted with that mathematical certainty which will give us within a hair s breadth the place of a planet at any given time. Human nature, it is true, must always be the basis of our calculations, but we must first carefully examine under what novel conditions it may act or suffer, and make full allowance for dis turbing and accelerating forces. Nevertheless, these well meaning persons would introduce by force into our Body Politic a certain antiseptic ingredient which they call Conservatism, much in the same way that timber is injected with chemical substances to keep it from rotting. They forget that it is only dead wood which is treated in this way and that Nature has provided in the sap and its unhindered circulation the surest preservative for the living tree. Nothing that is alive and healthy needs any as sistance toward its own conservation. All such pre cautionary measures are at best but mummy-making, C and prolong decay without preventing it. The Chi nese offer the readiest example of a nation embalmed alive, and the result does not encourage imitation. Commonwealths need a decent apparel of constitu tions and laws, but do not need to be clothed in strait-jackets. Our surest safeguard in America is that we are the busiest people in the world, and that every drop of our blood is in rapid circulation. We said every drop, but there is one spot of stag nation, and it is to the maintenance of this just as it is that the efforts of our self-styled conservatives are directed. If our timid friends would only con fine themselves to raising money for the erection of pillars to keep the sky from falling, or to calling public meetings to preserve the precession of the Equinoxes, we should never meddle with them. But they not only claim for themselves this holy name of Preservers, they also stigmatize as Destructives all who will not join them. We wish to have the titles applied so that they will no longer be nicknames but designations. The true Conservative is he who strives to form some just augury of the Inevitable and to make ready for its coming, who does all in his power to give affairs such a direction that the Future may en ter as a Fulfiller and not as an Avenger. In history he seeks a lesson and not the old clothes to dress a C 20 3 scarecrow in. But we are a people of yesterday, without a past, without traditions, who feel no re verence for laws which are the work of our own hands, and must be taught it ? Often said, but none the truer though a wilderness of parrots repeat it. People respect laws passed by themselves because they are commonly the result of a need previously felt. The statute-books are gauges marking the pop ular level of intelligence at successive periods. Laws become a dead letter precisely in proportion as they become unrepresentative and fail to embody the lat est wisdom of the people. It is as impossible to re- enact a foregone state of opinion as to bring General Taylor back to life by a resolve of Congress. More over, Truth is not of yesterday, is not without a past, nor without traditions, and laws made in ac cordance with living principles have a way of mak ing themselves respected. The fact that stones are hard and that fire will burn is not yet made a part of the regular course of teaching in our Common Schools. The Fugitive Slave Bill is at present the favorite text of our political Talmudists. Here is an oppor tunity for us to sacrifice ourselves to our convictions of the sacredness of Law. An odd kind of vicarious martyrdom this, where William and Ellen Craft go to the stake, and we rise phoenix-like from their c 201 n ashes as Secretaries of State, Ambassadors or Col lectors with ten thousand a year. Such flames under gone by proxy are not so scorching, we fancy, as those of Smithfield. This way of employing a vice- martyr is an invention worthy of the age which gave birth to the electric telegraph. Suppose the position and the salary should also be enjoyed by substitute ? That is strangely enough called Law which com pels anarchy and renders illegality permanent. But it is the Law, we are told, and therefore we must obey it. Besides, it is no worse than the law of 93. Small consolation, when we consider that an interval of fifty-seven years divides them. Excellent friends, you forget that the Time When materially affects the aspect of all human actions. You must intro duce a bill at the next session of Congress repealing and abolishing the Nineteenth Century. It is that which really stands in your way, and gives you so much trouble. It is that which has got into the legs of the slaves and the heads of the constituencies. We can understand a man who affirms his belief that Slavery is the natural condition of any part of mankind, but when one tells us that he believes Slav ery to be wrong and unnatural and at the same time would support a law intended to preserve it, we are at a loss. His notion must be that God and Destiny 202 ] can be bound by a string of Caucus resolutions. It comes to mind now, also, for the first time, that we have traditions and a past. Men are yet alive who felt the first thrill of that fateful Declaration, who can remember that famous war carried through " upon a preamble." There are descendants among us of those who sheltered Goffe, Whalley, and Dix- well ominous names, recalling the history of that King who resisted the progress of Events, who maintained privilege and prescription till the axe cut through life and prerogative together. Mr. Webster has been filling the newspapers lately with certificates of the efficacy of his famous Union Pill and Gunpowder Cement. He warrants his pat ent medicine as a conservative, but of what ? Why, the pill will enable a man to enjoy for years his ex cellent bad constitution ; it will maintain every one in the quiet profession of his time-honored boil ; it will secure the prolonged activity of our he reditary scrofula. And the Gunpowder Cement ? That needs no testimonials, for everybody knows what gunpowder will do. " Resolved," say the London Aldermen, " that we will have, and of right ought to have, our an cient stenches and foul gases." Providence calls no public meetings and passes no resolutions that the Aldermen hear of, but by and by quietly comes C in the Cholera. So it will be here. Preserve the Union by throwing coals into whatever is explo sive in it, inculcate reverence for the Constitution by mumbo-jumboing forever before that part of it which is wholly unrevered, and in good time enter Insurrection and Disruption. Mr. Webster repeats everywhere ^Esop s fable of the bundle of rods, and he might select a very handsome fagot as an illus tration from those which Time has in pickle for him. But if he has ever been into a shop he must have seen the pack-thread snap by being too tightly drawn around the parcel, and perhaps it might profit him to turn over in his mind this little fact in connection with the fable. We did not get rid of George III. to enthrone a Constitution as pigheaded as he. If we are to live we must grow. The oak- tree planted in the flower-pot, as Goethe says of Hamlet, must burst it or die. END OF VOLUME II THIS EDITION IS PRINTED AT THE RIVERSIDE PRESS CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS AND COM PRISES FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE COPIES OF WHICH FIVE HUNDRED ARE FOR SALE JVb. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. LD 2lA-60m-2, 07 (H241slO)476B .General Library University of California Berkeley I U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES CDD5EflEflSb