that that God, whose truth we represent in this conflict, will be with us, and we exhort our churches and people to put their trust in God. . . . We ministers and elders of the Presbyterian Church give them our benediction and assurance, that we shall fervently and unceasingly implore for them the care and protection of Almighty God."

The Protestant General Assembly, assembled in Newark (1864), declared: "That the time has at length come in the providence of God, when it is His will, that every vestige of human slavery among us should be effaced, and that every Christian man should address himself, with industry and earnestness, to his appropriate part in the performance of this great duty."

The Presbyterians of the South asserted: "The Presbyterian Church in the United States has been enabled by Divine grace to pursue an eminently conservative, because a thoroughly scriptural policy, in relation to the subject of slavery. It has planted itself upon the Word of God, and utterly refused to make slaveholding a sin, or non-slaveholding a term of communion."

The Assembly of Baptists, gathered from the various northern states, met at Brooklyn, New York, May 1861, and resolved: "That the doctrine of secession is foreign to our Constitution, revolutionary, suicidal,-setting out in anarchy, and finding its ultimate issue in despotism."

The Baptists of Alabama announced, November 1860: "We declare to our brethren and fellow-citizens, before mankind and before our God, that we hold ourselves subject to the call of the proper authority in defence of the sovereignty and independence of the state of Alabama, and of her right, as a sovereignty, to withdraw from the Union."

And in Georgia they resolved, April 1861: "We consider it at once to be a pleasure and a duty to avow, that both in feeling and principle, we approve, indorse, and support the Government of the Confederate States of America."

The Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church issued, in 1862, a pastoral letter, and in it they quote as binding authority from the "Homilies of the Fathers of the Church,' on "Willful Rebellion," passed in England in 1737: "He that nameth rebellion, nameth not a singular and not one only sin, as is theft, robbery, murder, and such-like, but he nameth the whole puddle and sink of all sins against God and man; against his country, his countrymen, his parents, his children, his kinsfolk, his friends, and against all men universally; all sins against God and all men heaped together, nameth he that nameth rebellion."

Bishop Hopkins says in his protest in reply to this:"When the American Colonies revolted, and Rev. William White became the first chaplain of the revolutionary Congress, I do not see the slightest movement in our mother Church to condemn his course or that of the ministers that acted with him. The Bishop of London was the Diocesan of all the clergy in the Colonies, and had the undoubted right to suspend or to depose them, if the act of secular rebellion had been a proper ground for ecclesiastical denunciation. But that, in every age, has been regarded as a subject for the action of the State, and I doubt whether an instance can be found in the whole range of church history, where an ecclesiastical court has tried a man for secular rebellion."

The Methodist clergy said to Abraham Lincoln, May 1864: "We regard this dreadful scourge now desolating our land and wasting our nation's life, as the result of a most unnatural, utterly unjustifiable rebellion, involving the crime of treason against the best of human governments and sin against God."

The Confederate clergy, made up of all the Christian churches, said in 1863: "As an excuse for violence, our enemies charge, that the Confederate States have attempted to overthrow the best government on earth, and call us traitors, rebels. We deny the charge. It will appear singular when men reflect upon it, that so many intelligent and Christian people should desire to withdraw from the best government on earth. And we need not discuss the kindness of those, who so generously propose to confer on us, by force of arms, the best government on earth."

And of Lincoln's proclamation they say: "Nothing but war! cruel, relentless, and desperate war! We solemnly protest, because, under the disguise of philanthropy, and the pretext of doing good, he would seek the approbation of mankind for a war that promises to humanity only evil, and that continually. . . . The condition of the slaves here is not wretched, as northern fictions would have men believe, but prosperous and happy; and would have been more so, but for the mistaken zeal of abolitionists."

We will not quote further. Enough has been given to show the entire anarchy that prevailed then in America upon every public question. Connect therewith the fact, that the public men between 1861-76 were, as compared to those of 17801810, of a very low type, there having been a steady decline in the calibre of those at the head of affairs. Then reflect, that while mobs were vociferating: "This is the best govern

ment the world ever saw!" good and wise Americans were hanging their heads in shame over the scenes that were going on around them. And who wonders any more, that fatalism had possession of public conduct? Both governments, the North as well as the South, had inefficient administrations; both wasted twice as many men and means as should have been, and both adopted about the same measures, viz: forced loans ; corrupt conscriptions; false taxation; insecurity to life and property. Such was the order of the day in both sections. The writer hereof lived north before and during the war, and we say this as an eyewitness of things there. No expostulation with friends or foes availed, for the ready reply was: "This is fate!" "It could not have been avoided!" A greater falsehood was never uttered. We know whereof we affirm. The war was not fate, it was-crime; and it came because fatalism was then public opinion, and was voted into the ballot-box. Its true atrociousness came out, when Mrs. Surrat, an innocent woman, and Wirtz, a friendless foreigner, were hung for crimes committed by others, simply because public frenzy needed an immolation. They were, however, not the only victims of fatalism!

We do not agree with Byron, that success is the true touchstone of men's actions; but we admit, that by it, as a general rule, public men are judged. It has been the criterion as to the men, whose character we have to pass upon in this chapter.

No society has suffered more from trials and executions for treason, than that of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the three mother-countries of the largest portion of the population. of these United States; and as the public mind of this country moves in British grooves of thought, it is proper, that our inquiries into the American doctrine of treason should be preceded by a brief cursory review of that of England.

In that country treason entered not only political but also social life, through the doctrine of "petit treason," and it has colored British feelings to a larger degree than those of any other people. And this is still the case, though the public disposition is less intense than formerly. One of the main reasons for the older cruelties, existed in the peculiar historic development of the British Isles, which made partisanism always pass for patriotism. England never had up to the eighteenth century a government that loved all its people, nor did all the people ever love the respective governments. In Scotland and Ireland hatreds of the English invaders were superadded to those pre-existing at home. There was, therefore, never a time when there was any thorough feeling of allegiance; and every treason trial had in it large grains of injustice; because they were prosecutions of opposite partisans. A man might be false to his country, and not be guilty of treason; and he might be true to it, and be found guilty of

treason. Shakespeare gives the motive of this thing in the words:

"Hate'st thou the man thou would'st not kill?"

This is the reason, why the country that had, in truth, the fewest traitors had the most treason trials. England long desired to get clear of this anomaly in her politics. She first mitigated the cruelty of the executions by doing away with the burdle on which the victim was drawn to the gallows, the taking out the entrails and burning them while yet warm, the cutting off the culprit's head, the disposition of it by the king, the quartering of the body, the forfeiture of the estate, and the corruption of blood. But still the main thing-the killing of political opponents-would be as rife as ever to-day, if wise men had not since found ways for disintensifying political hatreds.

"The Declaration of Rights," really the capitulation, which William III. had to accept in 1689 to get the crown; the Union Act with Scotland 1707, and the Acts of Succession 1701 and 1705, enabled the British nation to execute under Walpole one of those half solutions of British politics, for which England is proverbial. They consist in sticking to the old and yet establishing something new. We refer here specially to the new subjection of the royal Cabinets to parliamentary majorities, and yet the retention of the old rule, that "the_king cannot intend to do wrong." It exempts the king from impeachment and trials for his life (treason), and establishes ministerial responsibility. The dynasty became thereby practically the minor and remoter question; that of a change of ministries the major and ever-present. And thus the body of the people still had their objects of admiration or hatred, and could act their innate spites or adulation out in politics, without subjecting her public men to fears of being tried for treason. The rack, the headman's axe, the gibbet, were hid out of sight, and defeats at the polls and in parliament, with personal abuse, ugly outcries, often too brickbats, clubs, &c., took their place. And that really means, that the sacred (?) right of being disaffected towards government existed on condition, that the disaffection shall not go beyond these bloodless means, and that amidst dislikes there shall be loyalty to the king. The old treason statutes remained in the main, but they were a little amended and much forborne. And both parties agreed to this, not knowing but what they might yet want them. The Church went through a similar compromise when, feeling guilty at its bloody persecutions, it inserted into its death-warrants for burning heretics: ut quam clementissime et citra sanguinis effusionem puniretur? The