Our Civilians. They have also a patriotic duty, though not so perilous, yet of equal importance with that of our brave soldiers. The efforts of those gallant men in defense of the Constitution against rebel traitors in arms will have availed but little if, after all their hardearned victories, they returned to find the Constitution desecrated and destroyed by civilian traitors in official stations—to find free speech, free press, free ballot, jury trial, and legal supremacy all gone, with liberty in its last agony, under a ruthless despotism. But, rest assured, gallant countrymen, your brethren at home, whom you have left in charge of the ballot, will by no supineness, no unpatriotic apathy, permit such disastrous calamity to you and themselves. They are resolved to chase the traitor Destructives, the Constitution-breakers, from the political sanctuary; reinstate the revered, the matchless, the all-glorious Constitution our wise fathers gave us in its rightful supremacy; vindicate man's competency to self-government; silence the malignant sneers of the European absolutists at the imputed failure of the "Model Republic;" and launch the good ship Republican Liberty once again on a prosperous career of enduring glory and renown. VOL. II.-4 CHAPTER II. THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT. PUBLISHED JULY, 1864. THIS false dogma has no basis of fact, nor is it sustained by any rational teaching of political science. The "irrepressible conflict" phrase, with its sequent dogma, was the invention of a fire-eater, to promote disunion. This tendency was so obvious, that when Messrs. Lincoln and Seward borrowed the phrase and publicly propagated the dogma, for the purpose of sectionalizing the North into a political party to gratify their ambition, they brought their loyalty to the Union into doubt or suspicion. When first promulgated by them, the dogma received the sanction of no disinterested, intelligent men. By all such it was viewed as a mere hypocritical pretext of inordinate ambition, as a very thin, attempted disguise to their personal aims. Its disunion tendency was so obvious, that their advocacy justly brought them under the suspicion of pursuing their aim, reckless of disunion. Their close affiliation with those abolitionists who had the atrocious frankness to avow their hate for the Union and Constitution, as "covenants with death and leagues with hell," increased this suspicion. Regardless of the warning of wiser and better men, that they would infallibly cause civil war if not disunion, they pursued their selfish aim to the accomplishment of the prediction; and, in excuse for their crime, they have incessantly dinned the dogma into the public ear. Since they have openly abolitionized themselves by avowing abolition, and not restoration of the Union, as the main object of the war; since they with their whole party have shown vengeance, not reconciliation, to be the main object, the dogma has been reiterated with new industry, with increased dogmatism. It is their main justification for the obviously disunion tendency of their measures and their blood-thirsty pursuit of diabolic vengeance. If the dogma were based on any sound theory or actual experience, it ought to have had its exemplification where free and slave labor have their longest line of contact. It is there the very crush of the conflict would have ensued. The Ohio River is that line of contact. Yet no other border between States can show on both sides a more harmonious, rapid, prosperous growth, or a better mingling of the feelings of good neighborship. The inhabitants of the southern border of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have never yet manifested any serious general dissatisfaction with negro slavery as prejudicial to them. Abolitionism has been mainly confined to the northern parts of those States, where the inhabitants have no opportunity by observation to obtain information on the subject, and where by no possibility could they feel any evil effect from slave labor south of the Ohio. The most unanswerable disproof of the dogma is to be found in the unprecedentedly rapid growth of our whole country in wealth and population. This growth has been progressing with even accelerated rapidity during the last twenty or thirty years, while abolitionists and secessionists were giving the slave question every possible agitation. This incontestably proves that all the country needed for an unabated continuance of national prosperity, was to save it from fanatic empiricism and the charlatan experiments of raw or selfish politicians. All the country needed was to be let alone in its well-doing. But this did not suit the personal aspirations of Lincoln, Seward, etc. Hence the preaching of the new evangel of "the irrepressible conflict between free and slave labor," "the house divided against itself must fall," "the country must become all free or all slaveholding," etc. Hence, also, the civil war. Their sinister aid to secessionists and abolitionists in exciting sectional jealousy has caused that widespread sectional alienation and defection from Union love, whose result is the war. Though there is no truth in the alleged conflict between free and slave labor while kept apart in separate States, yet it must be admitted that there is such conflict between white and black labor. This is shown too plainly for denial by the legislation of free States prohibiting the immigration of free negroes, and by those mob violences driving back the attempted influx of "contrabands," despite that legislation. This, however, is not a consequence of the slave institution, for it only occurs after the slaves have been set free. It is the sole consequence of the repugnance of the whites to the blacks-the strong, natural repugnance of race. Nature, for wise purposes, while dividing the human family into different races of differing color, language, and physique, has implanted a strong repugnance of race to race. This repug nance breaks forth whenever the white laborer finds the negro interloping and competing with him for employment, and affords the only instance, in our country, of conflict between two classes of labor. If the dogma were true, then it is strange that they who preach it do not perceive what a strong justification it would afford the South for attempting disunion, and what a persuasive argument it would offer to the slaveholding border States to aid in the attempt. All the present and future interests of the South are so inextricably interwoven with the slave institution, that its defense against immediate abolition is in some measure a necessity. This would be comparatively true even if the blacks were exported; but their presence after emancipation would intensify the injury of impoverishment from robbery, causing a never-ceasing conflict between white and black labor, intensified by all the abhorrence of race to race. As said by Jefferson, "the South has the wolf by the ears, and can't let go her hold." This she cannot do, however uncomfortable her position, while holding on. Such a community of whites and blacks would enjoy such comfort as might be supposed to ensue between a coupled wolf and bear. But the dogma is not true. The Union can be restored, with a renewed lease of life, under the Constitution as it is, leaving the slave question where it was found, under the exclusive control of the several States. Whatever of sin there was in keeping up negro slavery was confined to the Southern States, those of the North having no legitimate right to interfere with or control the subject. Whatever of "moral, social, or political evil" it caused was inflicted exclusively upon the States where it was allowed. So far as its operation extended to the North, it was an unmixed benefit, giving to the products of Northern free labor a most commodious, bountiful market, without any taste of the "moral, social, or political evil." As a cause for political jealousy, it could not be raised to the dignity of even a plausible pretext while there were eighteen free States, with only fifteen slaveholding, and a corresponding preponderance of free State population. All the antagonism, mutual hate, and mutual abuse of abolitionists and fire-eaters could never have aroused a sectional alienation at all perilous to the Union, if in an evil hour ambitious Northern aspirants, "urged on by an inordinate greed of official power and plunder," had not organized the Free-soil or Republican party on the basis of avowed hostility to an institution closely connected with the peace, happiness, and prosperity of the fifteen slave States. This they did, despite the earnest, reiterated warnings of President Fillmore and other eminent statesmen, that their success in sectionalizing the North, for their benefit, into a preponderant sectional Northern party, by playing upon the universal prejudice against or repugnance to slavery, must inevitably result in the organization of an opposing sectional party at the South; the conflicts between the two leading unavoidably to civil war and disunion. They were further told that it was irrational to suppose that fifteen States would submit to being debarred from all participation in the administration of the Government by the success of a party upon such an inimical, narrow basis. Furthermore, they were told, amid the concurring applause of Northern audiences, that if things were reversed, the people of the North would not submit to the dominating proscription of such a Southern party. Knowing, as these men did, that, taking the nation as a whole, full two-thirds of it were unalterably opposed to abolitionism; that a million and a half if not a majority of the loyal voters of the North were so opposed, their precipitation of the nation into the abolitionizing of the war, and so closing the door to reconciliation, was a moral crime only a degree less than that of the Southern leaders in precipitating the attempt at disunion through civil war. The illustrative disproof of the "irrepressible conflict" dogma may be greatly strengthened by a comparison of the relative situations and experience of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in reference to negro slavery. The former is separated for some hundreds of miles from three slave States by nothing but a mere geographical line, causing the closest contact with negro slavery, subject to all the deleterious effects of the institution, if such there be to any but the whites among whom it is actually located; yet there has |