rupture, in the minutes of the committee of thirty-three which met from the 11th of December, 1860, to the 14th of January, 1861, there was not a word, a single word, on tariffs or imposts, and that all turned there solely on the maintenance and guarantees of slavery? Is it true, yes or no, that the ultimatum presented by Jefferson Davis in the name of the southern States demanded, formally, that property in man by man, property in slaves, should be assimilated throughout the extent of the United States to any other property, and be declared inviolable? Is it true, yes or no, that in the new constitution which the Confederate States have given themselves, after the rupture was consummated, there are three clauses expressly and solemnly designed for sanctioning and perpetuating slavery? Is it true, yes or no, that the insurrection has closely followed the frontier lines of slavery; that its intensity has borne exact proportion to the intensity of slavery therein; that, for example, in Virginia, in the principal and most known of the Confederate States, all the portion of the State where landed wealth was based on slave-breeding took up ams, while that portion where agriculture was pursued by free labor took scarce any part in the war? Is it true, yes or no, that since the beginning of the war and after their first successes, the language publicly and officially held by southern orators and writers prociaimed more than ever the absolute necessity and the eternal lawfulness of slavery? That a hundred ministers of different sects, gathered in conference at the capital of the new confederacy, Richmond, declared that the abolition of slavery was an usurpation committed in detriment to the plans of God; that the Richmond Inquirer, the Moniteur of the confederacy, of the 28th of May, 1863, printed these words: "For the three maxims of the republican motto, liberty, equality, fraternity, we expressly mean to substitute slavery, subordination, and the government. There are races born to serve, as there are races born to command. Our confederacy is a mission sent by God to reestablish these truths among the nations ?" That another Virginia journal, the Southside Democrat, expresses itself in terms which recall language we have heard too often since 1848: "We detest all that bears the epithet of free, even to, and comprising therein, free blacks; we detest free labor, free association, free thought, free will, free schools?" In fine, is it true, yes or no, that the vice-president of the new confederacy, Stephens, in his speech on the 21st of March, 1861, at Savannah, thus explained why it is that he follows the end and aim of that confederacy: "Our constitution has settled for all time the peculiar institution which has been the immediate cause of the rupture and of the revolution; it declares that African slavery as it exists among us is the condition proper for the black amid our civilization. Our government is founded on this great moral and physical truth, that the black is not the equal of the white, and that slavery is his natural condition. Our confederacy is thus constituted on a basis in strict conformity with the laws of nature and the decrees of Providence. It is by conforming the government and all else to the eternal wisdom of the laws of the Creator that we best serve humanity. Therefore, we have made the stone which our first builders rejected the corner-stone of our new edifice?"

These hideous blasphemies have been heard by God; recorded in the books of his judg ment, they have not long awaited the receipt of the punishment they deserved. The reader will remark the almost absolute identity of the official language of this second personage of the insurrection, with that of the miserable assassin of Lincoln, whose crime I am very far from being willing to impute to the confederates, but who has none the less hoisted their flag, held their principles and their phraseology. In the letter of November, 1864, in which he announces the purpose of risking his life in an attempt on the person of the chief of the abolitionists, he wrote these words: "I regard the slavery of the blacks as one of the greatest blessings for them and for us that God ever accorded to a nation protected by his grace.” We see, then, that the transatlantic pro-slaveryists have left to their partisans in Europe the care of disguising their cause by representing them as strangers to the maintenance of slavery. They have scorned this simplicity or this hypocrisy. They have opened their heart to its core, and spoken the truth with dogged eloquence. The disdain which northern people evince, under every circumstance, toward free blacks residing among them is insisted on, and, in support of this, anecdotes, more or less serious, are cited. Suppose they are all true, what will be the result? That in some portion of the northern population morals are not so high as the laws, and that the north has itself had something to expiate. Time alone can bring about the changes desirable in this respect; and time itself will with difficulty produce a thorough fusion of races so distinct. The most thorough negrophilists will probably always say, as did a Frenchman, a friend of the blacks, "We are willing to have them for brothers, but not as our brothers-in-law." Meanwhile, the laws of the north guarantee to the blacks all the rights, all the civil and political liberties which the whites enjoy. And it is to maintain these laws, or rather to modify them in the interest of the blacks, to snatch some poor fugitive blacks from the bolts and bars of their masters, that the north has run the risks of a terrible war which has brought it within a hand's breadth of destruction. Besides, if the negroes are so ill treated, so unhappy at the north, how happens it we have never heard of a single black who wished to leave the north for the south, whilst every day we see southern slaves flying northward, and that, to stop them and carry them back to the self-styled paradise of negroes, the odious laws against fugitives which brought on the civil war, the providential destruction of the peculiar institution, were necessary. The whole may, then, be resolved into two simple questions. If, in the war just ended, the south had been victorious, can it be supposed that slavery would have been abolished by the conquerors? No;

the most audacious would not dare to maintain that. But it is the north which has prevailed, and has not this conqueror decreed abolition, and is he not resolved to maintain it? Yes; that is enough to settle the question in the view of candid men. What must be admitted is, that at the beginning of the war abolition was not in the northern programme. Immediate and absolute emancipation was not resolved on until the progress of events, and, above all, the imprudent arrogance of the south, intoxicated by its first victories, made it clear to all eyes that the maintenance of slavery was the source of the political and social evil which the civil war had revealed in all its intensity. Therefore, it is in this we must admire the direct, mysterious, and unforeseen action of Providence. It has caused civil war to end in a result which no one dreamed of in the beginning; it has used even the hands of the offenders to provoke and render necessary the chastisement which was due to them.

Yes, it is in this that we should reverence the hand of God. How, not recognize it amid this wonderful concurrence of circumstances, where everything reveals a direction of human affairs superior to all the calculations and all the purposes of man?

If the southern people had acted with moderation or common prudence, slavery would be still existing, and perhaps would have endured still for centuries. The north has never pretended to impose emancipation, immediate, or even gradual, on the south. Far from it; the north had made excessive concessions to the south, concession even culpable, in voting for and giving effect to a law for the extradition of fugitives. No condition, no compromise, was too much for it.

It is well enough known that it was not the north which began the war; it is known that it has only maintained it in self-defence. With the exception of Brown alone, the most ardent of northern abolitionists had never employed or called in the aid of other arms than persuasion, the pulpit, the press, pacific, moral, and intellectual propagandisms. The people of the south, on the contrary, have always appealed to force, to violence, to war. Even before the war they everywhere took the initiative in acts of violence. Let us repeat it, they only had need of a very moderate dose of prudence to assure indefinite duration to their crime. They would not have it so. They have always pushed everything to extremes. When the Missouri compromise, in 1820, traced across the soil of the great republic a line of demarcation between slavery and freedom, in guaranteeing to them south of that line the peaceable possession of this shameful property, that did not satisfy them. In 1850 they exacted and obtained that atrocious law which authorized the pursuit of fugitive slaves into free States. Even that sufficed them not. They needed to obtain, moreover, in 1859, through the famous Dred Scott suit, a decree of the Supreme Court which recognized in every owner of slaves the right to transport his slaves throughout the extent of the territory of the republic. In gaining that famous suit they have, thank God, lost slavery. Blinded by their avaricious egoism, they have themselves fallen into the abyss. By force of exactions and of violences they ended by compelling their too facile, their too complaisant fellowcitizens, to make head against them and crush them. They notoriously prepared, boldly announced, and spontaneously declared the civil war of which they have become the victims. From 1856, the time of the contested election between Frémont and Buchanan, they announced publicly that if the abolitionist Frémont were elected the Union would not endure an hour after his inauguration. During the four years' presidency of their candidate, Buchanan, they substituted conspiracy for provocation. Masters of the government, having for Secretary of War of the United States the same Jefferson Davis who has since been president of the insurgent confederacy, they had everything prepared to secure a disloyal advantage in the future strife by confiding the command of the fortresses and arsenals of the republic to pro-slavery officers. Thence their first success, which so singularly led astray and deceived European opinion. The 6th of November, 1860, the designation of electors charged to elect a new President of the republic announced that for the first time a republican, or, in other words, an abolitionist, would become the chief of the executive power. A month afterward, the 20th of December, 1860, before an act or a word from the new power, South Carolina raised the banner of separation, which twelve other States hoisted afterward. During the four months which passed before the installation of Lincoln, the southern States assembled in convention, then in separated confederation, armed the local militia, laid hands on the public money, on the federal funds--at their leisure organized revolt. The admirable Lincoln said to them in his first message of March 4, 1861, My fellow-citizens, you who are dissatisfied, in your hands, and not in mine, is the choice of civil war. The government will not attack you. There will be no conflict unless you are the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven which obliges you to destroy us, whilst I have taken the most solemn oath to preserve, to protect, to defend the Union." To this touching, this generous appeal, the southerners replied by giving the signal for that impious war, in which, by the just judgment of God, they have met the ruin of their dishonored cause.

The American legislature waited not for the conclusion of the war to decree the abolition of crime. On the suggestion of President Lincoln, and by the majority necessary to alter the Constitution of the United States, there was introduced in that Constitution an amendment importing that all voluntary or involuntary servitude should cease to exist in the United States. Lincoln and Congress thus invoke the heavenly blessing on the banners of the Union, and God from the heights of heaven responds to this appeal, to this return to the eternal law. The war, which languished through four years in sad and uncertain alternations

at once changed in character. A new spirit, an invincible spirit, inflamed the generals and soldiery of the north. The march of their arms became irresistible. The fortune of war, capricious thus far, no longer ceased from smiling on this great free people, who came forward to decree the irrevocable enfranchisement of four millions of slaves. The strategy, until then always superior, of the southern chiefs, becomes powerless. The circle of iron formed by the northern forces draws more close, and finally completely shuts in around the hearthstones of the rebellion. That rebellion, once so proud and so strong, totters to its fall. All is in disturbance and confusion around it. At length the day of justice comes; the catastrophe breaks forth: Richmond is taken; the south is crushed. God ratifies the decree of Congress by victory-victory as complete as unforeseen--an irrevocable victory.

Oh, Providence-generous, luminous, ingenious Providence! It was a black regiment that first entered the capital of the insurgents-that Richmond, so long impregnable. These despised blacks, emancipated by victory, march at the head of the liberating army. They are greeted by the acclamations of their brethren, the black slaves they come to deliver and raise to their level. Are they going to avenge the wrongs of ages done to their race and to themselves? Are they going to allay, at the cost of white men and white women, their resentment of crimes and infamies, inseparable from slavery, which their fathers and their brothers, their sisters and their mothers, were so long subject to? No, no! For the fulness of happiness and of honor, these slaves of yesterday penetrated the capital of the slaveholders, took possession of it, became and remained its masters, and not a shadow of excess, not a shadow of reprisal, occurred to tarnish their victory. I attest the story. The sun never shone on a grander or more consoling spectacle.

III.

Is there need, after all that precedes, to refute at length the pretence set up by the apologists of the south, of seeing in their clients the representatives of federal law, of the cause of weak States, and even of that decentralization which begins to find favor in the bosom of European democracy? I declare for myself that were this pretence well founded; if, as one day was said by the secretary for foreign affairs of England, Earl Russell, with his proverbial imprudence, if it was true that the south fought for independence, and the north for domination, the south would have a partisan more decided, more sympathizing than myself, I am convinced that the friends and supporters of liberty should favor throughout the world the cause of the weak States so recently and nobly defended by Mr. Thiers in the legislative body. The true greatness of a people is measured, not by the extent of its territory or the sum of its population, but by its liberty and its morality. But history unhappily demonstrates that, with the single exception of England, the liberty of nations decreases and perishes in the direct ratio of the increase of their territory and population. Intelligence and public morality too often follow the same proportion. I wish and hope the United States will give, like England, a fresh contradiction to the cruel result of the teachings of the past, and will show that liberty can co-exist with material greatness. But, at the risk of shocking those among Americans with whom I sympathize the most, I avow that I fear for them the perils of centralization, of unity and indivisibility, which are the natural basis of monarchic or military despotism. While reserving every question of right, and without approving any rebellion, I would look upon not only without alarm and without regret, but with confidence and satisfaction, the division of the immense extent of the existing republic into several States of unequal extent, but equally free, equally republican, equally Christian. American liberty thus split up into several homes of life, of thought, and of action, would possess far different guarantees of duration, and would only better exercise over the rest of the world an influence as fruitful and salutary as that of the immortal lesser states of ancient Greece, or of the Christian and municipal republics of the middle ages.

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But there are some things that speak more loudly to every true heart than the experiences of the historian, or the distrusts and partialities of the politician; it is justice, it is humanity. Is it to defend justice and humanity that the southern States broke the federal tie which incorporated them with the great republic? No, certainly; it was to trample under foot the one and the other. In default of public law, of natural law, had they at least a right or even a legal pretext for insurrection? No! A thousand times no! The primary constitution of the insurgent colonies of 1777 guaranteed the absolute sovereignty of each new State, and confined itself to establishing a federation of independent republics. But the Constitution in force, that made in 1789 by Washington, and by the men who dared to restrict liberty, because they were sure they would not destroy it," substituted for this collection of soVereignties absolutely independent, one people, one sole and whole people, not centralized and uniform like ours, but composed of several States, but within, as well as without, bound to strict obedience of certain obligations established by the fundamental compact. It was never foreseen nor admitted by any one that this compact could be broken at the will of one only of the contracting parties. No people, no state, no community could exist if each of its members might withdraw at will, and without provocation, from the associated body. While admitting, in all its dangerous extent, the modern such as has been proclaimed on one side and the other in the recent debate on the Roman question, by Mr. Thiers, as well as by Mr. Rouber-that is to say, the right to be well governed; and if not, the right to change one's government, it is still necessary to prove that there has been bad government,

that there has been oppression in such manner as to render the rupture of the social tie more necessary and lawful than its maintenance. Certainly, separation might be lawful, like insurrection, but in certain rare and extreme cases. Has such a case presented itself to the southern States? Evidence, universal conscience, says no, a thousand times no. It is impossible for them or their apologists to produce any proof whatever, a single one, of the slightest attempt made against their independence.

Where are their griefs, their troubles, their sufferings? They may be defied to cite a right violated, a property wasted, a liberty smothered, or even lessened. Yes; which? Is it religion? No! Is it the press? No! Is it association? No! Is it election? No! Education? No! Property? No, not even the property of man in man, until now that after three years of revolt and civil war, they have in some sort compelled the lawful and sovereign authorities of the republic to decree its abolition. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the history of the relations of the north with the south resembles, even in the slightest degree, those violent and oppressive measures which constrained the seven Catholic cantons of Switzerland to form about twenty years ago the sunderbund, so unjustly, so cowardly, so miserably crushed in 1847. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has furnished them even with the shadow of a pretext to break the federal tie, and refuse not merely to obey in certain extreme cases, but even to acknowledge the powers lawfully constituted. There has been, thousands of times, reason to say that good care must be taken not to assimilate the States which compose the Union to our existing departments, or even to our ancient provinces. Each of those States has and should have an executive power, and two elective chambers, a magistracy, courts of justice, codes of law, a police, a fiscal administration of its own-in fine, a special constitution, voted for and sanctioned by the people of each State. This is what constitutes the true foundation of American liberty. But, have all these fundamental bases been respected by all the southern States until the war broke out? Yes; it is impossible, absolutely impossible, to deny this. The northern States had neither made nor attempted to make the slightest encroachment on the legislative independence of the southern States, even in respect of slavery, until war had been declared by the south.

But outside of this local and, so to speak, personal soverignty of each State, there is under the Constitution of the United States a general sovereignty personified in the President, the Senate and House of Representatives, which is located at Washington. Have the northern people exercised this general sovereignty to the detriment of southern interest? No, yet once again; and had they so desired they could not have done so, because the south forestalled them by beginning the war before the north had seized the power.

Let us again, in two words, recapitulate the true state of this question so singularly misunderstood or unknown. The southerners, determined, at any cost, not merely to maintain but to propagate slavery, had succeeded, with the concurrence of their friends, the domocrats of the north, in securing for more than thirty years the majority in the federal legislature, and the election of the quadrennial President of the republic. The day on which, for the first time, by means the most lawful and most regular, by the purely moral movement of public opinion, the majority, elected of representatives of the people and of presidential electors, passed from them, on that day they broke the federal compact and raised the standard of revolt. They became insurgents because they no longer felt themselves to be masters, because they foresaw that perhaps the authorities sprung from the new elections would not only modify property in slaves in the slave States, but the laws which authorized the pursuit of fugitive slaves into the free States. So long as, with complicity of the northern democrats, they retained a majority in Congress and had the President on their side, they held the Union to be unassailable. When the wave of public opinion turned against them; when they found that the north would very probably no longer consent to remain the accomplice and instrument of slavery; when for the first time they saw the lawful majority pass over to the side of the republicans, or abolitionists, then, but then only, they declared the Union impossible and took up arms to destroy it. It is absolutely just the same as if the French socialists had drawn the sword in 1848, after the election of Prince Louis Bonaparte to the presidency; or in 1849, after the elections to the legislative assembly. It is also precisely that which those wished to do who were of the conservatory of arts and trades of the 13th June, 1849. We know what France and the world have thought of that enterprise whose authors fell the first victims, and unpitied of any. Let us then dismiss the argument drawn from this pretended zeal of the south against the united despotism of centralization; let us dismiss it to rejoin the argument which pretends to make of slavery a question foreign to the origin of the war. Let them go together to ingulph themselves in those limbos where sleep, buried forever, unavailable lies and refuted sophisms.

IV.

What is most annoying in these sophisms is to see them above all repeated and propagated by the English with an inveteracy which the victory of the north will certainly cool, but which none the less has derogated from their good sense, good faith, and national honor. Nowhere, as is known, has the cause of the north aroused an enmity more profound, more universal, more sustained. It is asked through what rancor of sovereignty dispossessed, through what prejudice of caste, or what family enmity, they have been enabled to forget to such degree their own antecedents, their

traditions, the most inveterate good or bad. With what face can they who strove with all their might against the colonial insurrection which transformed their provinces into sovereign States-they who repressed with inexcusable cruelty the insurrection in Ireland in 1798, and, with a severity excessive, although legitimate, the revolt of the Sepoys in 1858; with what face can they reproach their American cousins for the energy of the measures employed against the insurgents of the south, and the principle even of the war maintained by the constituted authorities of the republic against the aggression of the confederates? But, above all, how can they, abolitionists pre-eminently, they whose susceptibility on the subject of the slave trade gave birth to the right of visit and so many other complications with us, and with all the maritime nations-they who gave with an unheard of disinterestedness the first signal of emancipation of the negro race at the expense of their own West India Islands; how dare they be renegade of their own glory by suspecting, denouncing, decrying the motives which have guided the American abolitionists? How is it they do not perceive that they thus expose themselves to giving a pretext to the very numerous detractors who have accused them of not having undertaken the work of emancipation except as a matter of calculation, and of having renounced it as soon as the speculation turned out badly? There is in this one of those sad mysteries which the history of the greatest nations occasionally presents, and before which posterity stands amazed as much as contemporaries. Let us hope, beside, that the question now is of only momentary aberration, and let us recall to them this bright page in their own history so well written by one of the Americans they calumniate. "Other nations," says Channing, "have acquired imperishable glory in defence of their rights, but there was no example of a nation which, without an interest, and in the midst of the greatest obstacles, espouses the rights of another, the rights of those who have no claim except that they also are human, the rights of those who are the most abased of the human race. Great Britain, under the load of a debt without parallel, with crushing burdens, contracted a fresh debt of one hundred millions of dollars to give liberty, not to Englishmen, but to degraded Africans. It was not an act of policy, it was not the work of statesinen. The Parliament only recorded the edict of the people. The English nation, with one heart, one voice, under one strong Christian impulse, and without distinction of rank, of sex, of party, or of communion, decreed the liberty of the slave. I do not know that history records an act so disinterested, so sublime. In the course of ages the maritime triumphs of England will occupy a space narrower and narrower in the annals of humanity, and this moral triumph will fill therein a wider and a brighter page." At all events, if the cause of the north and of emancipation in America has encountered only adversaries among the governing classes in England, in the native land of Burke and of Wilberforce, it must be admitted that it has there always been openly and energetically sustained by some of its best known orators and political men, and in the first rank by Messrs. Cobden and Bright; and it should especially be remembered that the manufacturing population of Lancashire, and of the great industrial centres, have exhibited lively and persevering sympathies with American abolitionism. But these populations are precisely they that will suffer most from the consequences of the war, which, in favoring the United States, has interrupted the production of cotton. Nothing can be more admirable, however, than the attitude of the English artizans during the whole continuance of this crisis, so fatal to the interest of the English manufactures, which has not yet ended. The labor of the blacks in the United States gave them bread by producing the raw material of that branch of industry out of which they lived. They, nevertheless, have never imagined, never pretended, like some publicists and some preachers, that negroes were intended by Providence to be always slaves, in order to be the purveyors for European industry. Until the balance be readjusted by the introduction of the cotton culture in Egypt, where it has freed and enriched the Fellahs, and in southern Italy, where it has served, in a manner so strangely unforeseen, the interests of Italian unity, the crisis produced by the interruption has perhaps been the most severe that has ever affected European industry. The English workmen have endured this crisis, which still continues, with most magnanimous patience. They have experienced the last extremes of hunger, without any outburst, any disturbance having happened to realize the prophecies of those who had counted on their distress to obtain from England the recognition of the southern States and consolidation of slavery. They have suffered without a murmur, without any display of military force having become needful to restrain or intimidate them, without any public right being suspended, without the slightest restriction of the liberty of the press or of publicly assembling; the millions of hungered and suffering beings have maintained an heroic calin and resignation. Compulsory inaction, distress, and hunger had everywhere taken place in that vast hive of English spinning mills, of work, of ease, of economic progress, and of domestic well being. The profusion of public and substantial aid prodigally given by the disinterested sympathies of their neighbors and their countrymen to these innocent victims of the war in America seemed only as a drop of water in the ocean of this distress. And yet, not only no riot, no public disturbance broke out, but at the numerous meetings, and in the various public notices which marked this crisis, so severe and so prolonged, no symptom of irritation was manifested against the upper classes, or against the government of the country. Enlightened by a good sense which shows the incontestable progress made through the spread of primary instruction since the sanguinary riots of 1819, the workmen in those English districts which constitute the greatest industrial centre of the world readily comprehended that the calamity from which they suffered was not to be imputed to the Queen, nor the