responsibility," as they termed it, might be exercised in humanity and good faith. They believed that the improving and Christianizing of that race, even its rescue from actual Bushman savagery, could be effected only by such guardianship, and, substantially and for the present, in no other way. The settlement of 1850 was an agreement to leave that guardianship undisturbed.

The truce, from the nature of things, was treacherous and unstable. There was conviction on one side, and passion on the other. Conviction was stifled, not subdued; passion was checked, not overawed. State pride, irritable and fierce, smouldered, ready to blaze out in the war of sections. On the morning of Mr. Webster's speech of March 7th, 1850, we happened to hear at the Capitol a conversation between a Northern man of the conservative and compromising sort and a Marylander. Said this latter, "I have no interest of my own in slavery; I do not hold a single slave, and in case of a war my own State will be the first to suffer; but if you will give us no other rights, we will have the rights of belligerents." It was very hard for most of us in the North to believe that the question had come to that so soon; and no little cavil was encountered by those who considered the threat of disunion to be anything more than a card in the game, which had been played so often that it must be pretty nearly played out. We had ten years yet to wait.

Certainly it was a tremendous problem presented to one living in the midst of a slave community, -the existence of an institution at bay against all the moral and political forces of Christendom; an institution making the very foundation of their society, their laws, their system of industry, and their political strength, with the perishing of which all the great prizes of men's ambition-wealth, power, office, that rude, semi-feudal nobility which comes of the ownership of townships stocked with men must be swept away. The alternative lay between holding out in an attitude of defiance against the civilized world, fortifying, spreading, defending that condition of society against all odds; and the painful, patient, hazardous, doubtful task of meeting the case with radical remedies, the reconstruction of the whole fabric of society

on a pattern in harmony with the ideas and the conscience of the age. It is not wise or right in us to disguise the difficulty. It is not in the least a matter of wonder that fallible men chose the former way.

Whether the other way was possible, with the actually existing elements of Southern society, it is not for us to say. Assuming it to be possible, we endeavored, early in this interval of peace, to suggest in outline what course of policy might probably be followed; to sketch, in other words, the normal method by which a community might outgrow so deeply rooted a malady.* What we said then in substance had been strongly impressed upon our mind ten years before, in Virginia, in conversation with intelligent travelling companions belonging to that State; and we still think the course of events likely to take the direction then anticipated. Only, we doubt whether the history of mankind hitherto has shown the nation gifted with the wisdom, the courage, and the high tone of public morality which would perhaps have been required to carry through the processes of so vast a solution voluntarily. An autocrat, of great intellect and noble heart, may possibly have the vantage-ground to enable him to inaugurate the task; and never was autocratic power so august a thing as at this hour in the hands of Alexander of Russia. Generally, the solution must come bloodily, from the collision of hostile ideas that have put on armor and learned to handle bayonets. The steps of progress in human things are steps of conquest. The victorious idea builds its trophy out of materials shattered with strong blows, and cements it with the blood spilt from hostile veins. Certainly there was nothing in slavery, as such, to shield it from the usual fatality; and nothing in the system of society resting on it to make it peculiarly vulnerable to spiritual weapons, or plastic to Christian ideas.

So, while the future is still the realm of liberty and hope, the past is seen in the grasp of a hard necessity. Not vindictively now, in wrath or hate, as when we withstood them, but as inevitable steps in a conflict which, humanly speaking,

See Christian Examiner for September, 1854.

could not have been averted, we look back on the courses of policy that have brought us where we are. The overthrow of the Missouri Compromise, in 1854, was the logical corollary of the earlier settlement. The struggle for Kansas followed, shaped by the dire conditions of frantic life into which that element of strife had been deliberately invited. And, without the passions of that struggle,- bringing the hostile powers face to face in a limited field, just far enough away for us to see it safely while we felt the keenness and the terror of it, the nation would never be where it is now, -North and West pulsing with one great life, nerved by one great hate of treason, stirred by one grand loyalty, and pledged to defend one free republic, bounded by lake, gulf, and ocean. It is not with merely a shout of triumph, but with a sense of awe and a certain pathos, that we see the passing away of a great, proud fabric of society amid the clash of arms. In the story of the fall of dynasties, history will record among its scenes not least solemn and imposing the destruction of the slave empire of the South, in a conflict invited by its own madness, and inaugurated by its own deliberate crime.

Since the first act of war, initiated fourteen months ago, it has been very clear that the rebellious States had forfeited whatever political right they might claim for the defence and upholding of their "peculiar institution." If slavery is to be tolerated henceforth, it will not be by merit of any compromises of the past, but because no immediate issue out of it is apparent. As a dominant power in the state, its day is done. The freedom of the capital and the freedom of the Territories. takes away the fulcrum and the long end of the lever by which it had so powerful a purchase. In losing these, we fully believe what the defenders of slavery have said all along, that it has lost its lease of authority and its lease of life. It is impossible for us to share the fears which some express, lest the slave power should ever regain its political predominance, or slavery itself have anything more than a lingering, perilous, and despised estate in the future. A treacherous, vicious, undermining element it will no doubt remain in our politics, so long as it remains at all. But we believe that, when this war is over, its last great battle is fought; and that it will

die as the snake dies whose fangs are out and whose back is broken. So desperate a thing as this rebellion would not have been undertaken except for the conviction of its desperate need, combined with two things which can never be again, the preparation that came from long possession of power directed towards this end, and the sense of security that came from a great monopoly of trade. Both are forfeited in the very act of rebellion. The dream of a grand tropical empire, resting on the enslavement of the African race on a vast scale, and controlling from its imperial centre the industry of the globe, is sped. The ports of the South have not been more effectually shut up against foreign trade by our blockading squadrons, than the vagrant ambition of the South is blocked from its career of dominion by the forewarned rivalries of European states. Besides, all power rests in great part on imagination and prestige. It is the card held in the hand that commands the possibilities of the game. When that is played, and lost, the gambler cannot retrieve his fortune. The spectre of Disunion, so potent twelve years ago, has been met and laid. The fair blazons that glozed the nature of the thing have been stripped off, torn and stained, in the dusty fight. Since Manassas, and its shocking revival of medieval relichunting, chivalry is no longer a word to fascinate our cheated fancy. The aristocracy built up on human ownership lost its spell when we saw how it could steal and lie and kill. As a political power, we trust the end of the war will find it thoroughly disarmed by the loss of its three-fifths representation, and as a social power, by the forfeit of its fugitive-rendition law. If not, these will be but a poor crutch at best. The moral eminence and prestige of the slaveholding aristocracy, such as they were, are irremediably gone; while its military strength, its last resort and its loudest boast, has been fairly met and thoroughly beaten in the field of its own selection. From this time forth, the slave power in our republic, if it exists at all, does so as a subordinate thing, baffled and whipped.

We dismiss, then, from our consideration at present, any thought of the future political fortunes of the system of slavery. Such thoughts are crowded out by that spectacle which

we are witnessing, the commencement of one of those grand migrations which alter the character of vast populations and inaugurate new eras of history. The territory of the South is already occupied by more than half a million of Northern men in the flush of victory and the pride of strength. We need by no means assume that the vast landed estates of the South are going to be the prize of conquest, or the forfeit of rebellion. This would only hasten a process, which needs no such forcing to make it sure. The war will inevitably throw open a great land market. The tides of emigration will follow the track of arms. And we leave out of the account the fascination of pine-barrens, rice-swamps, cane-brakes, and bayous. A district of a thousand square miles, within a halfday's reach of Washington, lies unplanted this summer, inviting the toil of free colonists. Regiments of New England boys encamp close by the Blue Ridge, ready at a day's notice to hold the sumptuous valley below, which we remember, of a fair May afternoon, fragrant for miles with blossoming clover breast-deep. The three grand harbors of the Southern coast are occupied as the others are controlled by the most hardy and resolute of Northern men, who dictate the terms on which business shall flourish and commerce be restored. Florida, sometimes called the Italy of this continent,-in which phrase the compliment to the Everglades is possibly a little overdone, is abandoned, with all its charm of climate and its strategic coast-line, to the peaceable possession of the government that bought, cleared, and fortified it. The great Northwest has undertaken and fulfilled the contract to open the highway of the Mississippi to the sea; and so not only redeems to the nation the territory purchased and maintained for great national uses, but establishes the dominance of a free population throughout the fertile regions of the Valley and the Gulf. Nor is the grand drama wanting in its two tragic passions of terror and pity. The women and children who fled, sobbing and crying, from Beaufort, as Dupont's thunders ceased echoing off Hilton Head, were as real and as pitiful exiles as the Protestant refugees who first occupied the shores of Port Royal; while the forsaken negroes of the Sea-Island plantations have invited the fairest and ripest