quite arbitrary. These divisions run into and blend with each other inextricably.

The distinguished French physiologist, Bory de St. Vincent, divides the race into fifteen varieties, and finds equal embarrassment in his attempt at classification. Some other eminent physiologists make out fifty divisions, but with no better success in drawing marked lines between the classes. There are black men, and red men, and yellow men, and tawny men, and white men-men of every shade of color between whiteness as of snow and jet black. The declaration of Scripture seems abundantly sustained by science, that God made of one blood all nations, that Eve is our common mother-that all the varieties of mankind now existing are the result of climate, food, habits, and what we call accidental

occurrences.

Our ancestors fled from feudal Europe, to found in this new world a pure democracy, where, under equal and impartial law, every man, whether Englishman, Scotchman, or Irishman; whether Norwegian, Spaniard, Ethiopian, Chinaman, Arab, Tartar, or Indian, should be under the protection of impartial law, and should be entitled to all the money he could earn, to all the comforts he could honestly accumulate, to all the education and culture he could attain. These principles of freedom were for a long time almost universally accepted. But gradually the small class of slaveholders at the South increased in wealth, numbers, and influence. They became the leaders of a powerful party, who boldly announced, "We are the foes of this equality of rights. We wish to see a privileged class, and a defrauded class,-lords in their palaces, and serfs in their huts; the rich, luxuriating in voluptuousness, without labor-the poor, toiling in degradation, and ignorance, and poverty, receiving none of the proceeds of their toil."

On the banks of the Rhine stands the palace of Prince Metternich, who may be considered as almost the incarnation of Austrian despotism. The grounds extend, from the lawn to the river, in a series of terraces, facing the sunny south, and blushing with vineyards. Half a century ago, there was a very brilliant party, of noble and princely guests, entertained at the palace. After dinner, Metternich stood upon a balcony, which opened from the saloon, looking out upon the magnificent panorama of the Rhine. The vineyard was filled with laborers, men and women, performing feudal service for their lord. The French Revolution was just then beginning to make its voice heard in favor of equal rights for all men. Metternich, assailing this doctrine, said, pointing to the toiling serfs:

"Behold the true philosophy of society-gentlemen in the palace, laborers in the field, with an impassable gulf between."

This is very attractive philosophy for the lord, treading velvet carpets, beneath gilded ceilings, and drinking priceless wines. But it dooms such farmers' boys, as Daniel Webster, and Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, to spend their lives digging in the ditch, when God has endowed them with energies to guide the destinies of nations. And they will not consent to this philosophy.

I was once walking through the magnificent saloons of Versailles, the most gorgeous of all earthly palaces, with an American lady by my side. As we passed through the brilliant suite of apartments, three hundred in number, with fresco, and gilding, and gorgeous paintings;-as we stepped out upon the parterre, and drove through the graveled walks of the park, originally spreading over thirty thousand acres, with groves, lawns, fountains, lakes, brooks, artificial crags, jets d'eaux, and a wilderness of statuary, my young lady friend said:

"Oh! I wish we had an aristocracy, and a king, and a court."

Silly girl! Had she lived in the days of Louis XV:, when a nation was robbed to minister to the voluptuousness of the aristocracy, she would have been a poor peasant girl, barefooted and bareheaded, in linsey woolsey frock, toiling with the hoe in the field. Her father was a poor farmer's boy, who left the plow and went to the city, and there, through the influence of the law of equal rights for all, acquired that wealth and position, which enabled his daughter, refined in manners and cultivated in mind, to take the tour of Europe.

This question of a privileged class has nothing to do with color. The slavery of the Bible, whatever its character, was not Negro slavery. The slaves were, almost without exception, white men. The slavery, which it it is said our Saviour did not condemn in the New Testament, was not Negro slavery. The slaves of the Roman empire were almost universally whites, prisoners of war. If the New Testament sanctions this slavery, then would it be right to sell into bondage every Southern prisoner taken in this war. Many a Southern gentleman might find himself scouring knives in a Northern kitchen, with some devout clergyman preaching to him affectionately the doctrine, "Slave, obey your master." This was Roman slavery. Julius Cæsar himself was at one time a captive and a slave, and was compelled to purchase his freedom.

The slavery in this country is not Negro slavery. A large number of the slaves, both men and women, can with difficulty be distinguished from white persons. The process of amalgamation has, for a long time, been going on so rapidly in the South, that, over large extents of country, the great majority of the slaves have more Caucasian than Ethiopic blood in their veins. Thousands of boys and girls, toiling in cotton-fields of the South, are the sons and daughters of Southern gentlemen of high position. Many a young lady has been the belle of the evening at Newport or Saratoga, whose half-sister, the daughter of the same father, has earned her laces and brocade, by toiling from dawn to eve in the Negro gang. Many of the most beautiful women at the South are these unfortunate daughters of aristocratic sires, in whose veins lingers but that slight trace of Ethiopic blood, which gives a golden richness to the hue. There is nothing but slavery which will so debauch the conscience, that a father will sell his own daughter, as a "fancy girl," to the highest bidder.

The great question, which has culminated in this desperate war, has been simply this: "Shall there be, in the United States, an aristocratic class, maintained by the Constitution, who are to enjoy exclusive privileges, living without labor upon the proceeds of the toil of others, while there is

a defrauded class of laborers, excluded from education, and doomed to perpetual poverty?"

This is what the slaveholders have demanded. They said that the Constitution favored freedom,-free speech, a free press, free labor, free soil, and free men, and demanded that the Constitution should be changed, to maintain the exclusive claims of an aristocratic class, and to strengthen their hold upon their slaves. The one incessant cry has been, "Abjure your democratic constitution, which favors equal rights for all men, and give us, in its place, an aristocratic constitution, which will secure the rights of a privileged class." They insisted that the domestic slave trade should be nurtured, and the foreign slave trade opened; saying, in the coarse and vulgar language of one of the most earnest advocates of slavery, "The North can import jackasses from Malta; let the South then import Niggers from Africa." They demanded the right to extend slavery over all the Territories of the United States, the right to hold their slaves in all States of the Union temporarily; that speaking or writing against slavery in any State in the Union should be a penal offense; that the North should catch their fugitive slaves, and send them back to bondage; and that the Administration of the General Government should be placed in the hands of those only, whom the South could trust, as the pledged enemies of republican equality, and the friends of slavery."

The reply of the overwhelming majority of the people of the United States was decisive. "We will not," they said, "thus change the Constitution of our fathers. We will abide by it as it is."

"Then," replied the slaveholders, "we will dash this Union to pieces. From its fragments we will construct another, whose corner-stone shall be slavery."

On the 3d of January, 1861, the Hon. Mr. Baker, of Oregon, asked the following question of Mr. Benjamin, of Louisiana, in the Senate of the United States: "If we, a free people, really, in our hearts and consciences, believing that freedom is better for every thing than slavery, do desire the advance of free sentiments, and do endeavor to assist that advance in a constitutional, legal way, is that,” I ask him, “ground of separation ?”

"I say yes, decidedly," was Mr. Benjamin's reply.

Volumes could not make the nature of the conflict more clear. The slaveholders had resolved to change the character of our government, so that the United States should be the great bulwark of slavery. The great majority of the people resolved that the spirit of the government should not thus be changed. The appeal was at first, of course, to the ballot box. There the slaveholders were defeated. By a great majority it was decided, in the election of President Lincoln, that the Constitution should remain unmutilated, and that the government should be administered with scrupulous regard to all its constitutional compromises, in behalf of the interests of freedom. "Slavery," said the Hon. Mr. Quitman, “requires for its kind development a fostering government over it. It can scarcely exist without such protection."

The Hon. Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, said, in a speech in Charleston, at an ovation given in his honor, for his brutal assault upon

Senator Sumner: "I tell you, fellow-citizens, from the bottom of my heart, that the only mode which I think available for meeting it (the issue), is just to tear the Constitution of the United States, trample it under foot, and form a Southern Confederacy, every State of which shall be a slaveholding State."

The declaration of Senator Wigfall, from Texas, in its plain Saxon utterance, is equally explicit. In a speech in the United States Senate he said:

"I am a plain, blunt-spoken man. I usually say precisely what I mean, and I also mean precisely what I say. We say that man has a right to property in man. We say that our slaves are our property. We say that it is the duty of every government to protect its property everywhere. For twenty years the slave trade was kept open by the Constitution; and if that was not a clear recognition of the right to traffic in human flesh, and buy and sell men and women, then I would like to know what would be. If you wish to settle this matter, declare that slaves are property, and, like all other property, entitled to be protected in every quarter of the globe, on land and on sea. Say that to us, and then the difficulty is settled."

The Hon. Mr. Hunter, of Virginia, detailed, in the Senate of the United States, quite minutely the changes in the Constitution with which alone the Slaveholders would be satisfied. His demands were:

1. Congress shall have no power to abolish slavery in the States or the District of Columbia, or the dockyards, forts, and arsenals of the United States.

2. Congress shall not abolish, tax, or obstruct the slave trade between the States.

3. It shall be the duty of each of the States, to suppress combination within its jurisdiction, for the armed invasion of any other State.

4. States shall be admitted with or without slavery, according to the election of the people.

5. It shall be the duty of the States to restore fugitive slaves, or pay the value of the same.

6. Fugitives from justice shall be deemed those who have offended the laws of a State within its jurisdiction, and shall have escaped therefrom.

7. Congress shall recognise and protect as property, what is held to be such by the laws of any State, in the Territories, dockyards, arsenals, forts, and wherever the United States have exclusive jurisdiction.

It will be perceived that these changes convert the United States Government into a great instrument for maintaining slavery. Its entire spirit and mission are changed. Should a clergyman in Louisiana preach a sermon upon the brotherhood of man, and thus offend the slave code, and should he escape from persecution there to the Free States, the United States would be bound to pursue him, to seize him as a felon, and deliver him up to the dungeon or the stake.

In order to secure the enforcement of these pro-slavery enactments, Mr. Hunter, speaking in behalf of the South, demanded, that the slaveholders should have "guarantees of power," to enable them, though in the vast

minority, to bid defiance to the voice of the majority. He therefore demanded that there should always be two Presidents chosen, one by the slaveholding South, and the other by the North, and that no act should be valid, unless approved by both Presidents. The number of slaveholders in the United States does not exceed three hundred thousand. The whole population of the country is thirty millions. The whole white population of the South is but about eight millions. Vast multitudes of these are poor whites, who can neither read nor write, and are in beggarly poverty. These ignorant creatures are almost entirely at the beck of the slaveholders. Thus this amendment of the Constitution, was designed to give three hundred thousand slaveholders a veto upon all the acts of the General Government. In the further carrying out of this plan, he demanded that the United States Supreme Court should consist of ten members, five to be chosen by the little handful of slaveholders, and the other half by the millions of freemen.

In the accomplishment of this end, one of the first movements was to compel, by the reign of terror, every man at the South, to support the cause of the slaveholders. Vigilance committees were organized, the mails were searched, and a system of espionage introduced, such as no despotism on earth ever before equaled. A gentleman from Hinds County, Mississippi, wrote to the Editor of the New York Tribune, the 7th of February, 1861:

"I have lived in this State twenty-five years. Yet if I should say, not openly upon the house top, but at my own table, among my family and friends congregated there, that I do not consider that the South has any real grievances to complain of, and totally oppose the secession of this or any other State from the Union, my property, my life even, would not be safe an hour. It is very certain that those who are in favor of secession have no more than a bare majority in any of the Southern States. We, the Union men of the South, call on you of the North not to desert us.”

Innumerable cases like the following appear to be well authenticated: A Connecticut man had resided in the vicinity of Eufaula, Alabama, for many years. He had acquired much real estate, and became the owner of several slaves. Being a Northern man, he was regarded with jealousy, and as the excitement of the secession fever ran high, and he found that his life was in peril, to avert suspicion he joined a vigilance committee, called the "Minute Men." As such he was compelled to assist in the hanging of six men, five mechanics and one Christian minister, all from the North.

The post office was carefully watched by the committee. A letter was taken from it to his address, from a female friend in Connecticut. It contained a sentence, reminding him of his promise to free his negroes, abjuro slavery, and return to the free North. This doomed him, by Lynch law, to death. A faithful negro woman overheard the conversation of the gang, making arrangements for his execution. She hastened through the woods at night to inform him of his peril. To be assured of the truth of her story, he returned with the woman and found the sycamore tree on which he was to be hung, with the rope already pendent from the bough. At a short distance from the tree, partially veiled by the intervening woods,