ing up its head said, "Liberty is coming, Emancipation is coming." But how was liberty or emancipation to come? Hear him! "Now, just when mechanical England would have demanded our ports to be opened, she needs our corn more than cotton. The scarcity of food in England and France had put them on their good behaviour; and these two antagonists, liberty and God, slavery and the devil, were to fight out the matter between themselves." Both parties, therefore, profess to hold your destinies in their hands, try to prepossess you in their favour, and lift up the thread and blade in turns as Ward Beecher says, "to put you on your good behaviour!" England, therefore, say the Southerns, is bound to interfere her supply of cotton, her commercial interests, her existence demands it. England dare not interfere, say the Northerns, for if she do so, bread riots will break out, and the people of this country will be thrown into a state of starvation! One party says, we will compel you to break the peace of nations by the "grace of cotton !" And the other says, we will compel you to keep the peace by the influence of "king corn!" According to one, the British lion must wag his tail, and growl defiance to the North, or he must cease to be! According to the other, if he should do so, the lion rust die of hunger. Either way, you have got to die. Therefore, it is not so much our national existence that is imperilled in America as your own! How monstrous the delusion! What a story to tell by a people who were born to national existence with falsehood on their lips, and the fruit of robbery in their hands; and who are now undergoing a severe punishment, justly due for the enormous guilt of their crimes! What arrogancy and pride such language discovers! We are a great people ain't we! And we can't help thinking that if the interests of this country are in the hands or our American people-they are like the interests of freedom in "villainous custody." For it is impossible to "recognise in the corrupt mass of American politicians, North or South, the chosen instruments of the world's regeneration." "Whilst the Hon. Gentleman," (Roebuck), says Bright, "told them that the North was overbearing, he forgot to tell them that its government had hitherto been administered by his friends of the South." This is quite true, but not the whole truth, since that administration was with the consent of the North, and no truth looms up to our view more clearly or distinctly in connexion with the inexorable logic of facts in our American history, than this, that if our Northern people had sought to embody the original charters of her freedom in the spirit of impartial justice to all, irrespective of colour or condition, the Union would long ago have been destroyed, and slavery too. When God created the world, He said, "let there be light;" but all great parties in America, both North and South, have combined to put down agitation. Peace, peace, shouted the President from his chair of State in the White House-the governors in their annual messages-the judges from their benches-the senators and legislators from their places in the Halls of Congress the editors from their columns in the newspaper and clergymen from their pulpits; peace we have had, when there has been no peace, because it has been a false peace; the first threat of agitation to let in light upon our terrible condition, used by President Lincoln only as a "catch word," and not intended to be enforced by him, has brought the whole frame work of the Union to the ground, and laid prostrate the "Grand Republic" in ruins! How insecure were its foundations and rotten its timbers, when a political mountebank brings it down with a word which he utterred as a prediction, and disavowed it as expressing a wish or purpose on the subject of freedom or slavery! How true the words of Bishop M'Croskey of the Episcopal Church in the State of Michigan, when he said, "there was less religion and more pretence in the United States of America, than in any country of the world professedly christian !" In an Egyptian legend it is said that every five hundred years Phoenix comes to the altar of the sun, and burns himself to ashes. On the first day after this a worm springs out of the ashes on the second, an unfledged bird-and on the third the full-grown Phoenix flies away. Out of the ashes of our revolution we shall have not only a new nation in the shape of a worm, but probably many. They may creep the first day, be weak the second, but at last their free pinions will strike the air, and brood over the whole land, to be claimed by each and all as the bright heritage of freedom. Thus will the Phoenix of our revolution be prolific, and in her pangs not only give birth to "a new and better order of things," but to a higher and nobler life for her progeny! The process is trying and severe, but the fiery process was necessary in order to remove the "hindrances to the development of our social, political and spiritual well-being." All hail, therefore, to the new progeny that are to crown with freedom America's destiny. O worms, let us see you crawl out to your new life, rise up before the nations full formed and fledged, the marvel of strength and beauty. Then the air will breathe peace, and the different tribes of men will sing the anthem of peace, and no harsh words in the hallelujah chorus of peace will disturb the world's harmony like those which Wendel Phillips, Esq., in his celebrated Abingdon Speech, said, were uttered by the Rev. Moncure D. Conway, "Let the English come on, we will meet them." Neither would the hoarse voice of the auctioneer be heard "Going, going, going! Who bids for the mother's care? Who bids for the blue-eyed girl? Her skin is fair, and her soft brown hair "Going, gentlemen, going! The child is worth your bids. |