centric flights of devotion, but far better than this, he laid hold of religion as a vital principle, and incorporated it in the very inmost fibres of his being. His daily life was a spontaneous development of Christian principle. Strict integrity, a high sense of honor, unwearied industry, the unostentatious but incessant sacrifice of personal ease, comfort, and taste to duty, the ready recognition of every legitimate call, charity which never failed, liberality which even exceeded the measure of ability, and all this without the smallest apparent consciousness of superior excellence-surely here was the Christian life. in rare and peculiar beauty. "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise," surely they are manifested here.

A piety thus developed in its relations to his fellowmen, might safely be assumed to rest on a firm and deep basis of evangelical faith. The springs which fed such a steady flow of Christian activity, could only be derived from the great perennial source of all good. Deep and devout was Mr. PERIT'S daily recognition of this fact, and constant was his recourse to the divine aid by which alone he could be sustained amid the daily toils and trials of life. In the family as well as in private, his petitions ascended with beautiful catholicity to the throne of grace, not only for himself and those near him, but for "the poor, the destitute, the sick, the suffering, the afflicted, the oppressed,"-all sorts and all conditions of men. His habitual attitude towards God was that of a loving and submissive child, never doubting, never repining, but ready at all times to say: "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." When clouds lowered and affliction pressed heavily upon him, his prayer was that he might be sanctified by suffering; and in the sunshine of prosperity and enjoyment, his language was,. "What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits?"

ARTICLE VIII.-PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S PROCLAMATION OF FREEDOM TO THE SLAVES.

MILITARY events are rapidly disclosing new grounds and occasions for PRESIDENT LINCOLN's Act of Liberation, illustrating its necessity, and thereby affording new proofs both of its validity and its universal applicability to the insurgent States. The insurgent leaders themselves are, by their debates and their prospective measures, becoming, so to speak, state's evidence upon this subject.

The surrender of Atlanta appears to have forced a conviction upon the Confederate Executive that the measure of arming the slaves must be seriously entertained. The revelations of the astounding speech of Jefferson Davis, at Macon, were deliberate and unavoidable; because nothing but a public disclosure of the desperate deficiencies of the military force of the rebellion could temper the sentiments of a slaveholding community to those projects in the rebel Congress for recruiting from the negro population, which the message of Davis partially offered to their consideration, without expressly favoring or naming the measure.

That slaves can be made manageable soldiers and effective fighting men, when it is their own freedom which they fight to obtain, has been settled in the world's history of war and insurrection, even in advance of the demonstration-now accepted as complete which the negro regiments of the existing Union armies have, in various battles and assaults, brilliantly supplied. The fighting capabilities of the African were especially tested and established by the insurrectionary wars of St. Domingo, in the course of which the extemporized forces composed of this material overpowered and defeated successively, the French army, the combined armies of Spain and England, and finally the battalions-thirty thousand strong-of the first consul Napoleon, aided by the presence and cöoperation of sixty vessels of war. It is related that these insurrectionary troops

threw themselves persistently and overwhelmingly upon the practiced batteries of the Europeans. Not only there was proven a capacity to fight, but an ability to command, as well; for that remarkable leader-and afterwards civil Governor-Toussaint l'Overture, to quote no other instance, was both a slave himself and born of slave parents.

But these prodigies of achievement by the Haytien troops were not the product of an enthusiasm inspired in the individual soldier by the expectation of personal emancipation merely, but by the promise of universal and interminable freedom for his entire congenital class-for children, wife, brothers, and the fellows of his race-to be elevated together to the condition and privileges of self-regulating human beings. Such, also, is the expectation and the all inspiring motive, held out by the President's Act of Liberation, to the negro regiments of the Union armies, and by them thoroughly understood and accepted.

This, therefore, expresses the main purpose which the Act of the President was intended to effect, and which it certainly has effected, to wit:-the appropriation and sequestration to the military force and benefit of the United States of that vast moral power and social motive which the promise of freedom could alone supply to the millions of slaves in the insurgent States, and-so far as social elevation to the race is concernedeven to the free negroes of the Union. It is, and was intended to be an Act, which, so far as known to and trusted by the slaves, will constitute or confirm them as a military resource for fighting materiel to the United States, and not to the Rebellion. And, although it is possible that the Executive may not have attended sufficiently to means that might be improved for acquainting the slaves, universally, with the edict of their emancipation, yet to-day, and to-morrow, and ever after, whereever the Rebellion meets that Proclamation it will be as a paralysis to any military reliance upon the enslaved population.

Obvious and all important as this main purpose of the President's Act is seen to have been and to be, not only has the Act itself been denounced persistently by the opponents of his administration, as an assumption of power not warranted by the Con

stitution, but also its efficiency and its extent, as an authoritative measure, have been brought in question by some of those who approve, most unreservedly, the President's purpose. There is no hesitation manifested in the Proclamation itself, respecting this authority, nor any indefiniteness of defining it. The opening and the closing announcement of the Act, we quote, as follows, omitting the preamble:

"Now, therefore, I, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, in time of actual rebellion against the authority and Government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on the first day of January, etc., etc.

"And upon this Act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God."

The war powers thus asserted by the President, in virtue of the Constitution, by which he is created Commander-in-Chief, are none the less potent that they have slumbered in our history unfamiliar to political logicians and to the popular apprehension;-neither are they the less far-reaching that "military ne cessity" is a phrase heretofore but little studied, and, until of late, scarcely heard of. Its signification, however, is as old as civilized warfare. Almost a generation has gone by since that consummate statesman, John Quincy Adams, startled the slave power in its security by declaring in the House of Representatives that the guarantees of the Constitution would disappear before the military necessities that might arise out of a servile insurrection or a war, even to a cession of the territory,—an assertion which he subsequently amplified to the extent of maintaining that in such event a military commander would be competent to manumit the slaves. This doctrine of Mr.

*"From the instant that your slaveholding States become the theatre of a war— civil, servile, or foreign war-from that instant the war powers of Congress extend to interference with the institution of slavery in every way by which it can be interfered with, from a claim of indemnity for slaves taken or destroyed to the cession of States burdened with slavery to a foreign power."-Speech of J. Q. Adams, May 26th, 1836.

Again:

"But when the laws of war are in force, what, I ask, is one of those laws ? It

Adams was novel to the nation and scarcely credible, but it was listened to without any attempt for its subversion, from that time to this, or, at least, without any attempt forcible enough to have made itself remembered.

Again, this same doctrine, long before Mr. Adams brought it to notice, held a historic notoriety among the records of war in our own hemisphere. Besides the South American experience of liberation, the Haytien insurrection, before alluded to, had been terminated in 1793, by an Act of French Commissioners, afterwards ratified by the French National Assembly, upon no justifying ground but that of military necessity. When thus consummated, the Act remained valid against opposition, and with so great stability that a legislative French decree and the will of Napoleon, with his sixty ships and thirty thousand soldiers, could not reverse it.

If, notwithstanding these evidences, the war powers attributed by Mr. Adams to the military commander appear too excessive to be acquiesced in, let it be further considered that while the act of President Lincoln has long been open to the view and scrutiny of civilized nations, the statesmanship of Europe, with its ample disposition to infer invalidity and objection against the measures of this country, has taken no legal exception to the sufficiency of "military necessity" as the ground for the President's Act, but only an incredulous view of this nation's ability to carry the Act into effect by suppressing the rebellion. All the war powers which the usages of civilized communities and the law of nations give to a military commander are, of course, and by eminence, conferred by the Constitution upon the President in the article which makes him Commander-in-Chief.

If a yet further conviction is required as to the reality of the

is this:-That when a country is invaded, and two hostile armies are set in martial array, the commanders of both armies have power to emancipate all the slaves in the invaded States. Nor is this a mere theoretic statement. Slavery was abolished in Columbia, first, by the Spanish General Morillo, and, secondly, by the American General Bolivar. It was abolished by virtue of a military command given at the head of the army, and its abolition continues to be law to this day."-Ibid, April, 1842.