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capital value of their slaves in the shape of forced labour, one might have shuddered at the cynical contempt for human rights and morality such a step would have manifested, but one must have admitted that it was an able and daring act of State craft. General Banks deprives us even of this excuse for his astounding "orders." The same proclamation that makes the negroes serfs in the sense of forcing their labour from them under severest penalties, actually converts the whole white population into Political Serfs, depriving them of all volition and independence, and refusing them the protection of the law except on the condition of abject submission to the Government. Here again Banks has transcended his Russian prototypes. Not. Nicholas, nor Alexander, even dared such extremities against the Poles, as this Republican American has proclaimed his determination to practise against his own free fellow-citizens. Let the reader digest, among others, article 24 of this manifesto of tyranny. Its brutal logic has never been attempted before, even in the most fearful cases of triumphant mid-day despotism. Its pretence to

lay a basis of political ethics in defence of stark, staring tyranny, renders it a greater insult to humanity than if this man had simply and boldly asserted the Right of Might. And what a splenid device to lure the Southerners back to the Union. Equality with their own slaves would almost be preferable.

"If this act of General Banks is impolitic as regards the Southerners, what shall we say of its probable

effect on public opinion all over the rest of the world? What estimate can henceforth be formed of the dignity and power of the government of the Northern States of America, if the deliberate act of the Chief Magistrate can thus be contravened by a subordinate officer of the State? And what will Europe now say to the prolongation of the quarrel. Of those who hold out for non-interference, even in the most friendly spirit, a large proportion, perhaps the majority, are influenced by the belief that after all the cause of the South, in so far as it is the maintenance of slavery, is an unholy one. But these thinkers will no longer have the strong moral and religious motives they now have to range themselves against the South. They will not be so blinded by fanaticisims not to see that General Banks's serfdom is nothing less in fact, and very little less in name, than the slavery so pompously abolished by Abraham Lincoln. European philanthropy, then, will no longer feel itself enlisted on one side only. The stakes are even. The North is fighting quite as much for the enslavement of the negro as did the Southerner when he commenced the struggle, only that the Northerner is now fighting at least in Louisiana-not only to conquer and enslave his white brother, but also to re-enslave his black-quondam protégé. General Banks, by this atrocious act of compounded criminality and fatuity, has served the South as well as many battles gained would do. The tide. of pubilc sentiment only wanted some such freshener. When next the French Emperor-directly or vicariously

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-talks about attempts to put an end to the civil war, English opinion-European opinion-will not be so slow, as heretofore, to follow his lead. Even Russia, with her serfs emancipated, must feel ashamed of her anomalous political association with these re-enslavers of a liberated race-these cheats of the blacks and tyrants over the whites."

"Are you republicans!-away!

"Tis blasphemy the word to say.

You talk of freedom? Out, for shame!
Your lips contaminate the name.
How dare you prate of public good;

Your hands besmeared with human blood?
How dare you lift those hands to heaven,
And ask, or hope to be forgiven?
How dare you breathe the wounded air,
That wafts to heaven the negro's prayer?
How dare you tread the conscious earth,
That gave mankind an equal birth?
And while you thus inflict the rod,
How dare you say there is a God
That will, in justice, from the skies,
Hear and avenge His creature's cries? "

J. R. BALME.

NON COMEATIBUS.

To the Editors of the Liverpool Mercury.

GENTLEMEN,-A fight once occurred in Kentucky, when a State warrant was obtained against one of the combatants; on seeing the constable he fled through a corn field and over a creek into a swamp, where he climbed into a stump and drew his bowie knife in readiness for defence. When the officer came up to the stump the defendant exclaimed, "Now, Mr. Constable, you want to take me, and I give you fair warning, that if you attempt to climb this stump I'll take you. The constable, who had been about the courthouse long enough to learn some of the technical terms used in returning writs, went back to the squire's (or magistrate's) office, and endorsed upon the warrant, "Non est inventus, through fieldibus, across creekum, up stumpum, non comeatibus."

When the present terrible war broke out in America, all parties, whether ecclesiastical or political, had abandoned the use of the right means for the attainment of the right end, so far as slavery and colourphobia were concerned, whilst the overwhelming masses of the

people, both in the churches and states, were in complicity with these monstrous evils and crimes. In the Liberator a speech is published, delivered by Wendel Phillips, Esq., at the New England AntiSlavery Convention, May 30, 1860, in which he said, "There is no political anti-slavery existing at this moment. There is no movement in the political arena that calls itself anti-slavery. Of course you know there is none in the church. You know very well that, unfortunately, the ballot-box is a great deal ahead of the communion table in its knowledge of ethics; and as we find no anti-slavery at the ballotbox, we cannot expect to find any at the communion table." The Rev. M. D. Conway, in a sermon delivered at the First Congregational Church, Cincinnati, October 23, 1859, said "An immortal child of God, a brother of Christ, may pause at my door, the demon of hunger may be gnawing at his vitals, his naked back, yet quivering with cruel marks, may call for oil for the wound and shelter from the blast, and the General Government says, Close your hands, tighten your purse strings, slam your door in his face; the crueller you are the more virtuous I will hold you; · the more pitiless, the more patriotic. Nay, it has gone further, and declared the most helpless, already still more helpless-those already unprotected-to have no rights which men are bound to respect. And yet there was a deeper pit in the national Inferno to which it could descend, and thither it went, covering the principle that slavery could be extended and free

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