THE CONTEST IN AMERICA By JOHN 8TUART MILL KEFBINTED FROM PHASER'S MAGAZIM: BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY MDCCCLXII I (RIVERSIDE. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY H.O. HOUGHTON THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. The cloud which for the space of a month hung gloomily over the civilized world, black with far worse evils than those of simple war, has passed from over our heads without bursting. The fear has not been realized, that the only two first-rate Powers who are also free nations would take to tearing each other in pieces, both the one and the other in a bad and odious cause.. For while, on the American side, the war would have been one of reck- less persistency in wrong, on ours it would have been a war in alliance with, and, to practical pur- poses, in defence and propagation of, slavery. We had, indeed, been wronged. We had suffered an indignity, and something more than an indignity, which, not to have resented, would have been to in- vite a constant succession of insults and injuries from the same and from every other quarter. We could have acted no otherwise than we have done: yet it is impossible to think, without something like a shudder, from what we have escaped. We, the emancipators of the slave — who have wearied every Court and Government in Europe and America with our pro- 4 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. teats and remonstrances, until we goaded them into at least ostensibly cooperating with us to prevent the enslaving of the negro — we, who for the hist half century have spent annual sums, equal to the revenue of a small kingdom, in blockading the Afri- can coast, for a cause in which we not only had no interest, hut which was contrary to our pecuniary interest, and which many believed would ruin, as manv among us still, though erroneously, believe that it has ruined, our colonies, — tee should have lent a hand to Betting up, in one of the most com- manding positions of the world, a powerful repub- lic, devoted not only to slavery, hut to pro-slavery . propagandism — should have helped to give a place in the community of nations to a conspiracy of slave-owners, who have broken their connection with the American Federation on the sole ground, osten- tatiously proclaimed, that they thought an attempt would he made to restrain, not slavery itself, hut their purpose of spreading slavery wherever migra- tion or force could carry it. A nation which has made the professions that England has, does not with impunity, under how- ever great provocation, hetake itself to frustrating the ohjeets for which it has heen calling on the rest of the world to make sacrifices of what they think their interest. At present all the nations of Europe have sympathized with us ; have acknowledged that we were injured, and declared with rare unanimity, that we had no choice hut to resist, if necessary, by THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 5 arms. But the consequences of such a war would soon have buried its causes in oblivion. When the new Confederate States, made an independent Power by English help, had begun their crusade to carry negro slavery from the Potomac to Cape Horn ; who would then have remembered that England raised up this scourge to humanity not for the evil's sake, but because somebody had offered an insult to her flag? Or even if unforgotten, who would then have felt that such a grievance was a sufficient pal- liation of the crime \ Every reader of a newspaper, to the farthest ends of the earth, would have believed and remembered one thing only — that at the criti- cal juncture which was to decide whether slavery should blaze up afresh with increased vigor or be trodden out — at the moment of conflict between the good and the evil spirit — at the dawn of a hope that the demon might now at last be chained and flung into the pit, England stepped in, and, for the sake of cotton, made Satan victorious. The world has been saved from this calamity, and England from this disgrace. The accusation would indeed have been a calumny. But to be able to defy calumny, a nation, like an individual, must stand very clear of just reproach in its previous conduct. Unfortunately, we ourselves have given too much plausibility to the charge. Not by any- thing said or done by us as a Government or as a nation, but by the tone of our press, and in some degree, it must be owned, the general opinion of 6 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. English society. It is too true, that the feelings which have been manifested since the beginning of the American contest — the judgments which have been put forth, and the wishes which have been ex- pressed concerning the incidents and probable event- ualities of the struggle — the bitter and irritating criticism which has been kept up, not even against both parties equally, but almost solely against the partv in the right, and the ungenerous refusal of all those just allowances which no country needs more than our own, whenever its circumstances are as near to those of America as a cut finger is to an almost mortal wound, — these facts, with minds not favorably disposed to us, would have gone far to make the most odious interpretation of the war in which we have been so nearly engaged wit!) the United States, appear by many degrees the most probable. There is no denying that our attitude towards the contending parties (I mean our moral attitude, for politically there was no other course open to us than neutrality) has not been that which becomes a people who are as sincere enemies of slavery as the English really are, and have made as great sacrifices to put an end to it where they could. And it has been an additional misfortune that some of our most powerful journals have been for many years past very unfavorable exponents of English feeling on all subjects connected with slavery: some, probably, from the influences, more or less direct, of West Indian opinions and interests: others from THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. <7 inbred Toryism, which, even when compelled by reason to hold opinions favorable to liberty, is al- ways adverse to it in feeling ; which likes the spec- tacle of irresponsible power exercised by one person over others ; which has no moral repugnance to the thought of human beings born to the penal servi- tude for life, to which for the term of a few years we sentence our most hardened criminals, but keeps its indignation to be expended on " rabid and fanat- ical abolitionists " across the Atlantic, and on those writers in England who attach a sufficiently serious meaning to their Christian professions, to consider a fight against slavery as a fight for God. Now, when the mind of England, and it may almost be said, of the civilized part of mankind, has been relieved from the incubus which had weighed on it ever since the Trent outrage, and when we are no longer feeling towards the Northern Americans as men feel towards those with whom they may be on the point of struggling for life or death ; now, if ever, is the time to review our position, and consider whether we have been feeling what ought to have been felt, and wishing what ought to have been wished, regarding the contest in which the Northern States are eng-affed with the South. In considering this matter, we ought to dismiss from our minds, as far as possible, those feelings against the North, which have been engendered not merely by the Trent aggression, but by the previous anti-British effusions of newspaper writers and stump g THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. orators. It is hardly worth while to ask how far these explosions of ill-humor are anything more than might have been anticipated from ill-disciplined minds, disappointed of the sympathy which they just- ly thought they had a ri^ht to expect from the great anti-slavery people, in their really noble enterprise. It is almost superfluous to remark that a democratic Government always shows worst where other Gov- ernments generally show best, on its outside ; that unreasonable people are much more noisy than the reasonable ; that the froth and scum are the part of a violently fermenting liquid that meets the eyes, but are not its body and substance. Without insisting on these things, I contend, that all previous cause of offence should be considered as cancelled, by the reparation which the American Government has so amply made ; not so much the reparation itself, which might have been so made as to leave still greater cause of permanent resentment behind it ; but the manner and spirit in which they have made it. These have been such as most of us, I venture to say, did not by any means expect. If reparation were made at all, of which few of us felt more than a hope, we thought that it would have been made obviously as a concession to prudence, not to princi- ple. We thought that there would have been truck- ling to the newspaper editors and supposed fire-eaters who were crying out for retaining the prisoners at all hazards. We expected that the atonement, if atonement there were, would have been made with THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 9 reservations, perhaps under protest. We expected that the correspondence would have been spun out, and a trial made to induce England to be satisfied with less ; or that there would have been a proposal of arbitration ; or that England would have been asked to make concessions in return for justice ; or that if submission was made, it would have been made, ostensibly, to the opinions and wishes of Con- tinental Europe. We expected anything, in short, which would have been weak and timid and paltry. The only thing which no one seemed to expect, is what has actually happened. Mr. Lincoln's Gov- ernment have done none of these things. Like honest men, they have said in direct terms, that our demand was right ; that they yielded to it because it was just ; that if they themselves had received the same treatment, they would have demanded the same reparation ; and that if what seemed to be the Ameri- can side of a question was not the just side, they would be on the side of justice ; happy as they were to find after their resolution had been taken, that it was also the side which America had formerly de- fended. Is there any one, capable of a moral judg- ment or feeling, who will say that his opinion- of America and American statesmen, is not raised by such an act, done on such grounds ] The act itself may have been imposed by the necessity of the cir- cumstances ; but the reasons given, the principles qf action professed, were their own choice. Putting the worst hypothesis possible, which it would be the 10 THE CONTEST IX AMERICA. height of injustice to entertain seriously, that the con- cesaion was really made solely to convenience, and that the profession of regard for justice was hypoc- risy, even so, the ground taken, even if insincerely, is the most hopeful sign of the moral state of the American mind which has appeared for many years. That a sense of justice should he the motive which the rulers of a country rely on, to reconcile the pub- lic to an unpopular, and what might set-in a humili- ating act ; that the journalists, the orators, many lawyers, the Lower House of Congress, and Mr. Lincoln's own naval secretary, should be told in the face of the world, by their own Government, that they have been giving public thanks, presents of swords, freedom of cities, all manner of heroic hon- ors to the author of an act which, though not so in- tended, was lawless and wrong, and for which the proper remedy is confession and atonement ; that this should be the accepted policy (supposing it to be nothing higher) of a Democratic Republic, shows even unlimited democracy to be a better thing than many Englishmen have lately been in the habit of considering it, and goes some way towards proving that the aberrations even of a ruling multitude are only fatal when the better instructed have not the virtue or the courage to front them boldly. Nor ought it to be forgotten, to the honor of Mr. Lin- coln's Government, that in doing what was in itself right, they have done also what was best fitted to allay the animosity which was daily becoming more N THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. J J bitter between the two nations so long 1 as the question remained open. They have put the brand of con- fessed injustice upon that rankling and vindictive resentment with which the profligate and passionate part of the American press has been threatening us in the event of concession, and which is to be mani- fested by some dire revenge, to be taken, as they pretend, after the nation is extricated from its pres- ent difficulties. Mr. Lincoln has done what depend- ed on him to make this spirit expire with the occa- sion which raised it up ; and we shall have ourselves chiefly to blame if we keep it alive by the further prolongation of that stream of vituperative elo- quence, the source of which, even now, when the cause of quarrel has been amicably made up, does not seem to have run dry. 1 Let us, then, without reference to these jars, or to the declamations of newspaper writers on either side of the Atlantic, examine the American question 1 I do not forget one regrettable passage in Mr. Seward's letter, in which he said that " if the safety of the Union required the de- tention of the captured persons, it would be the right and duty of this Government to detain them." I sincerely grieve to find this sentence in the dispatch, for the exceptions to the general rules of morality are not a subject to be lightly or unnecessarily tampered with. The doctrine in itself is no other than that professed and acted on by all governments — that self-preservation, in a State, as in an individual, is a warrant for many things which at all other times ought to be rigidly abstained from. At all events, no natiou which has ever passed " laws of exception," which ever supended the Habeas Corpus Act or passed an Alien Bill in dread of a Char- tist insurrection, has a right to throw the first stone at Mr. Lincoln's Government. \Q THE CONTEST IX AMERICA. as it stood from the begiofaing ; its origin, the pur- pose of both the combatants, and its various possi- ble or probable issues. There is a theory in England, believed perhaps by some, half believed by many more, which is only consistent with original ignorance, or complete sub- sequent forgetfulness, of all the antecedents of the contest. There are people who tell us that, on the side of the North, the question is not one of slavery at all. The North, it seems, have no more objec- tion to slavery than the South have. Their leaders never say one word implying disapprobation of it. They are ready, on the contrary, to give it new guarantees ; to renounce all that they have been contending for ; to win back, if opportunity offers. the South to the Union by surrendering the whole point. If this be the true state of the case, what are the Southern chiefs righting about ? Their apolo- gists in England say that it is about tariffs, and similar trumpery. They say nothing of the kind. They tell the world, and they told their own citi- zens when they wanted their votes, that the object of the tight was slavery. Many years ago, when General Jackson was President, South Carolina did nearly rebel (she never was near separating) about a tariff ; but no other State abetted her, and a strong adverse demonstration from Virginia brought the matter to a close. Vet the tariff of that day was rigidly protective. Compared with that, the one in THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. \$ force at the time of the secession was a free-trade tariff. This latter was the result of several succes- sive modifications in the direction of freedom ; and its principle was not protection for protection, but as much of it only as might incidentally result from duties imposed for revenue. Even the Morrill tariff (which never could have been passed but for the Southern secession) is stated by the high au- thority of Mr. H. C. Carey to be considerably more liberal than the reformed French tariff under Mr. Cobden's treaty ; insomuch that he, a Protectionist, would be glad to exchange his own protective tariff for Louis Napoleon's free-trade one. But why dis- cuss, on probable evidence, notorious facts X The world knows what the question between the North and South has been for many years, and still is. Slavery alone was thought of, alone talked of. Sla- very was battled for and against, on the floor of Congress and in the plains of Kansas ; on the sla- very question exclusively was the party constituted which now rules the United States : on slavery Fre- mont was rejected, on slavery Lincoln was elected ; the South separated on slavery, and proclaimed sla- very as the one cause of separation. It is true enough that the North are not carrying on war to abolish slavery in the States where it legal- ly exists. Could it have been expected, or even per- haps desired, that they should \ A great party does not change suddenly, and at once, all its principles and professions. The Republican party have taken 14 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. their stand on law. and the existing constitution of the Union. They have disclaimed all ri^-ht to at- tempt anything which that constitution forbids. It does forbid interference by the Federal Congress with slavery in the Slave States ; hut it does not forhid their abolishing it in the District of Colum- bia ; and this, they are now doing, having voted, I perceive, in their present pecuniary straits, a million of dollars to indemnify the slave-owners of the Di>trict. Neither did the Constitution, in their own opinion, require them to permit the introduction of slavery into the territories which were not yet States. To prevent this, the Republican party was formed, and to prevent it, they are now righting, as the slave-owners are lighting to enforce it. The present government of the United States is not an Abolitionist government. Aholitionists, in America, mean those who do not keep within the constitution ; who demand the destruction (as far as slavery is concernedj of as much of it as pro- tects the internal legislation of each State from the control of Congress; who aim at abolishing slavery wherever it exists, bv force if need be, but certainly by some other power than the constituted authorities of the Slave States. The Republican party neither aim nor profess to aim at this object. And when we consider the flood of wrath which would have been poured out against them if they did, by the very writers who now taunt them with not doing it, we shall be apt to think the taunt a little mis- THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. \ 5 placed. But though not an Abolitionist party, they are a Free-soil party. If they have not taken arms against slavery, they have against its extension. And they know, as we may know if we please, that this amounts to the same thing. The day when slavery can no longer extend itself, is the day of its doom. The slave-owners know this, and it is the cause of their fury. They know, as all know who have attended to the subject, that confinement within existing limits is its death-warrant. Slavery, under the conditions in which it exists in the States, ex- hausts even the beneficent powers of nature. So incompatible is it with any kind whatever of skilled labor, that it causes the whole productive resources of the country to be concentrated on one or two products, cotton being the chief, which require, to raise and prepare them for the market, little besides brute animal force. The cotton cultivation, in the opinion of all competent judges, alone saves North American slavery ; but cotton cultivation, exclu- sively adhered to, exhausts in a moderate number of years all the soils which are fit for it, and can only be kept up by travelling farther and farther westward. Mr. Olmsted has given a vivid de- scription of the desolate state of parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. once among the richest specimens of soil and cultivation in the world; and even the more recently colonized Alabama, as he shows, is rapidly following in the same downhill track. To slavery, therefore, it is a matter of life and death to 16 THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. find fresh fields for the employment of slave labor. Confine it to the present States, and the owners of slave property will either be speedily ruined, or will have to find means of reforming and renovating their agricultural By Stem; which cannot be done without treating the slaves like human beings, nor without so large an employment of skilled, that is, of free labor, as will widely displace the unskilled, and so depreciate the peeuniarv value of the slave, that the immediate mitigation and ultimate extinction of slavery would be a nearly inevitable and probably rapid consequence. The Republican leaders do not talk to the pub- lic of these almost certain results of success in the present confiict. They talk but little, in the existing emergency, even of the original cause of quarrel. The most ordinary policy teaches them to inscribe on their banner that part only of their known prin- ciples in which their supporters are unanimous. The preservation of the Union is an object about which the North are agreed ; and it has many ad- herents, as they believe, in the South generally. That nearly half the population of the Border Slave States are in favor of it is a patent fact, since they are now lighting in its defence. It is not probable that they would be willing to fight directly against slavery. The Republicans well know that if they can reestablish the I nion, they gain everything for which they originally contend- ed ; and it would be a plain breach of faith with THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. yi the /Southern friends of the Government, if, after rallying them round its standard for a purpose of which they approve, it were suddenly to alter its terms of communion without their consent. But the parties in a protracted civil war almost invariably end by taking more extreme, not to say higher grounds of principle, than they began with. Middle parties and friends of compromise are soon left behind ; and if the writers who so severely criticize the present moderation of the Frce-soilers are desirous to see the war become an abolition war, it is probable that if the war lasts long enough they will be gratified. \\ ithout the smallest pre- tension to see further into futurity than other peo- ple. I at least have foreseen and foretold from the first, that if the South were not promptly put down, the contest would become distinctly an anti- slavery one ; nor do I believe that any person, ac- customed to reflect on the course of human affairs in troubled times, can expect anything else. Those who have read, even cursorily, the most valuable testimony to which the English public have access, concerning the real state of affairs in America — the letters of the Times correspondent, Mr. Rus- sell — must have observed how earlv and rapidly he arrived at the same conclusion, and with what increasing emphasis he now continually reiterates it. Jn one of his recent letters he names the end of next summer as the period by which, if the jg THE CONTEST IS AMERICA. war has not soooer terminated, it will have assumed a complete anti-slavery character. So early a term exceeds, I confess, my most sanguine hopes; hut if Mr. Russell be right, Heaven forbid that the war should cease sooner; for it' it lasts till then, it is quite possible that it will regenerate the Amer- ican people. It", however, the purposes of the North may he doubted <»r misunderstood, there is at least no question as to those <>t the South. They make no concealment of their principles. As long as they were allowed to direct all the policy of the Union ; to break through compromise after compromise, encroach step after step, until they reached the pitch of claiming a ri^ht to carry slave property into the Free States, and. in op- position to the laws of those States, hold it as property there ; so long, they were willing to re- main in the I nion. The moment a President was elected of whom it was inferred from his opinions, not that he would take any measures against slavery where it exists, hut that he would oppose its establishment where it exists not. — that moment they broke loose from what was. at least. a very solemn contract, and formed themselves into a Confederation professing as its fundamental principle not merely the perpetuation, hut the in- definite extension of slavery. And the doctrine is loudly preached through the new Republic, that '■ " ' ■■- THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. 19 slavery, whether black or white, is a good in itself, and the proper condition of the working classes everywhere. Let me, in a few words, remind the reader what sort of a thing this is, which the white oligarchy of the Soutli have banded themselves together to propagate and establish, if they could, universally. When it is wished to describe any portion of the human race as in the lowest state of debasement, and under the most cruel oppression, in which it is possible for human beings to live, they are com- pared to slaves. When words are sought by which to stigmatize the most odious despotism, exercised in the most odious manner, and all other compari- sons are found inadequate, the despots are said to be like slave-masters, or slave-drivers. What, by a rhetorical license, the worst oppressors of the human race, by way of stamping on them the most hateful character possible, are said to be, these men, in very truth, are. I do not mean that all of them are hateful personally, any more than all the Inquisitors, or all the buccaneers. But the position which they occupy, and the abstract excellence of which they are in arms to vindicate, is that which the united voice of mankind habitu- ally selects as the tvpe of all hateful qualities. I will not bandy chicanery about the more or less of stripes or other torments which are daily requi- site to keep the machine in working order, nor discuss whether the Legrees or the St. Clairs are gO THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. more numerous among the slave-owners of the Southern States. The broad tacts of tin- case suf- fice. One fact is enough. There are. Heaven knows, vicious and tyrannical institutions in ample abundance on the earth. But this institution is the only one of them all which requires, to keep it going, that human beings should be burnt alive. The calm and dispassionate Mr. Olmsted affirms that there has not been a single year, for many years past, in which this horror is not known to have been perpetrated in some part or other of the South. And not upon negroes only ; the /' them for several vears. the abolition question will by that time have settled itself. For assuredly Congress will very soon make up its mind to declare all slaves free who belong to persons in arms against the Union. When that is done, slavery, confined to a minority, will soon cure itself; and the pecuniary value of the negroes be- longing to loyal masters will probably not exceed the amount of compensation which the United States will be willing and able to give. The assumed difficulty of governing the Southern States, as free and equal commonwealths, in case of their return to the Union, is purely imaginary. If brought back by force, and not by voluntary com- pact, they will return without the Territories, and without a Fugitive Slave Law. It may be assumed that in that event the victorious partv would make the alterations in the Federal Constitution which are necessarv to adapt it to the new circumstances, and which would not infringe, but strengthen, its democratic principles. An article would have to be inserted prohibiting the extension of slavery to the Territories, or the admission into the Union of any new Slave State. Without any other guarantee, the rapid formation of new Free States would ensure S8 THE COSIEST IS AMERICA. to freedom a decisive and constantly increasing majority in Congress. It would also be right to abrogate that bad provision of the ( Constitution (a necessary compromise at the time of its first estab- lishment) whereby the slaves, though reckoned as citizens in no other respect, are counted, to the ex- tent of three fifths of their number, in the estimate of the population for fixing the number of repre- sentatives of each State in the Lower House of Congress. Why should the masters have members in right of their human chattels, any more than of their oxen and pigs I The President, in his Mes- sage, has already proposed that this salutary reform shonld be effected in the case of Maryland, addi- tional territory, detached from \ irginia, being given to that State as an equivalent : thus clearly indicat- ing the policy which he approves, and which he is probably willing to make universal. As it is necessary to be prepared for all possibili- ties, let us now contemplate another. Let us sup- pose the worst possible issue of this war — the one apparently desired by those English writers whose moral feeling is so philosophically indifferent be- tween the apostles of slavery and its enemies. Sup- pose that the North should stoop to recognize the new Confederation on its own terms, leaving it half the Territories, and that it is acknowledged by Eu- rope, and takes its place as an admitted member of the community of nations. It will be desirable to take thought beforehand what are to be our own THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. gg future relations with a new Power, professing the principles of Attila and Genghis Khan as the foun- dation of its Constitution. Are we to see with in- difference its victorious army let loose to propagate their national faith at the rifles mouth through ( Mexico and Central America? Shall we submit to see fire and sword carried over Cuba and Porto J Rico, and Hayti and Liberia conquered and brought back to slavery \ We shall soon have causes enough of quarrel on our own account. When we are in the act of sending an expedition against Mexico to redress the wrongs of private British ► subjects, we should do well to reflect in time that the President of the new Republic, Mr. Jefferson Davis, was the original inventor of repudiation. Mississippi was the first State which repudiated, Mr. Jefferson Davis was Governor of Mississippi, and the Legislature of Mississippi had passed a Bill recognizing and providing for the debt, which 1 Bill Mr. Jefferson Davis vetoed. Unless we aban- don the principles we have for two generations con- sistently professed and acted on, we should be at war with the new Confederacy within five years about the African slave-trade. An English Gov- eminent will hardly be base enough to recognize them, unless they accept all the treaties by which America is at present bound ; nor, it may be hoped, even if de facto independent, would they be admit- ted to the courtesies of diplomatic intercourse, un- less they granted in the most explicit manner the * 3Q TEE CONTEST IN AMERICA. right of Bearch. To allow the slave-ships of a Confederation tunned for the extension of slavery tn come and go free, and unexamined, between America and the African coast, would be to re- nounce even the pretence of attempting to protect Africa against the man-stealer, and abandon that Continent to the horrors, on a far larger scale. which wen' practised before Granville Sharp and Clarkson were in existence. Hut even if the right of intercepting" their slavers were acknowledged by treaty, which it never would he, the arrogance of the Southern slave-holders would not long submit to its exercise. Their pride and self-conceit, swelled to an inordinate height by their successful struggle, would defy the power of England as they had al- ready successfully defied that of their Northern countrymen. After our people by their cold disap- probation, and our press by its invective, had com- l bined with their own difficulties to damp the spirit of the Free States, and drive them to submit and make peace, we should have to tight the Slave Stales ourselves at far greater disadvantages, when we should no longer have the wearied and exhaust- ed North for an ally. The time might come when the barbarous and barbarizing Power, which we by our moral support had helped into existence, would require a general crusade of civilized Europe, to extinguish the mischief which it had allowed, and we had aided, to rise up in the midst of our civi- lization. THE CONTEST IN AMERICA. $\ For these reasons I cannot join with those who crv Peace, peace. I cannot wish that this war should not have been engaged in by the North, or that being engaged in, it should be terminated on any conditions but such as would retain the whole of the Territories as free soil. I am not blind to the possibility that it may require a long war to lower the arrogance and tame the aggressive ambi- tion of the slave-owners, to the point of either re- turning to the Union, or consenting to remain out of it with their present limits. But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can sufter. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things : the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing ivorth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical in- justice ; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their $0 THE CONTEST IX AMERICA. ever renewing right for ascendancy in the airs of mankind, human beings must be willing*, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other. I am far from saying that the present struggle, on the part of the Northern Americans, i> wholly of this exalted character ; that it has arrived at the >tagc of being altogether a war for justice, a war of prin- ciple. But there wai from the beginning', and now is, a large infusion of that element in it; and this is increasing, will increase, and if the war lasts, will in the end predominate. Should that time come, not only will the greatest enormity which still exists among mankind as an institution, receive far earlier its coup de yrrice than there has ever, until now, appeared any probability of; hut in effecting this the Free States will have raised themselves to that elevated position in the scale of morality and dignity, which is derived from great sacrifices con- sciously made in a virtuous cause, and the sense of an inestimable benefit to all future ages, brought about by their own voluntary efforts. THE END.