THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

THE civil war in America is over; the armies have gone

home; the passions have subsided; and though the ashes still glow, though the time when an impartial history can be written has not arrived, we may try to understand the real import of the conflict-the real significance of the victory—and to read, as far as mortal eyes may read, the counsels of Providence in this the great event of our age.

This great struggle, like most of the great struggles in history, was complex in its character. In some measure its character changed as it went on. On the Southern side most were fighting for Slavery, but some for State Right. On the Northern side some were fighting against Slavery, but many were fighting for the Union. At the North the Anti-Slavery sentiment grew more predominant towards the close, both because the moral feeling of the people had been stirred and elevated by the struggle, and because they saw more clearly that Slavery was the root of the political evil, and a root from which, unless it was plucked up, the same evil would always grow. At first the majority would have compromised with Slavery for the sake of the Union, the source, as they deemed it, of their greatest blessings, the object of their fondest and most hallowed associations. If there is a nation which would readily

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consent to disruption for a moral object, let it cast the first stone at them for their weakness. But at the last Presidential election, the question being distinctly put to the people whether they would compromise with Slavery for the Union, the people answered by a great majority that they would not. Then the victory was given into their hands. Let the nation which can boast of virtue pure and unalloyed, which has needed no pressure of circumstances to force it into the right way, no suffering to purge its vision that it might clearly discern good from evil, no chastisement to teach it the will of Heaven-let this nation, I say again, cast the first stone. To the American people the Union was not empire only, but immunity from hostile neighbourhood and standing armies; it was the pledge not of power only, but of liberty and peace.

That Slavery was the cause of the war, who can sincerely doubt? Secession broke out and had its focus in the centre of Slavery, spread wherever Slavery prevailed, was most intense where Slavery prevailed most. It did not extend to the free districts of the South, Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, the inhabitants of which were dragged into the Confederacy by force. It exactly followed the wavering line of slavery in the mixed States, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. The secession ordinances proclaimed as the ground, and the sole ground, of the revolt the rights of Slavery, threatened by Northern abolition. The Southern prophets all prophesied of a vast slave empire as the reward of success. Visions of such an empire, stretching from the grave of Washington to the hills of Montezuma, filled the minds of Secessionists, as visions of a perfect Christian society and of a reign of Christ on earth filled the minds of the Wycliffites and the Puritans, as

visions of a Brotherhood of Man filled the minds of enthusiasts on the eve of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the Anti-Slavery sentiment was called forth at the North as strongly as the Pro-Slavery sentiment at the South. And the immediate result of the victory has been the downfall of Slavery, not in the United States only, but everywhere and for ever.

The theory that the war arose from a divergence of commercial interest, that it was a struggle between free trade producers on one side and protectionist manufacturers on the other, though skilfully devised for the market of English opinion, was defective in two respects. It did not fit the facts, and the cause it assigned was inadequate to produce the effect. It did not fit the facts; for the Western States were producers as well as the Southern, and the Western States, notwithstanding the predictions of their imminent secession, were as true as the New England States to the Union, and as staunch for the war. The cause which it assigned was inadequate to produce the effect, for when did a mere divergence of commercial interest rend political bonds so powerful, or lead to such a civil war? It is too true that the manufacturers and ironmasters of the North are still in the gall of Protection, that they still resist those economical laws of Providence in the observance of which other nations are blessed, and that for them now, as formerly for our protectionists, writers are found to veil barbarous cupidity in the language of patriotism and science. The same tendency is seen in our colonies, and ignorance is its chief root. Perhaps this quarrel between manufacturer and producer may have contributed to the disruption as a secondary cause, but it was as a secondary

cause only. No mention was made of it in the manifestos of the seceding states.

The struggle was one between Freedom and Slavery. But it was something deeper than this. It was a struggle between Christianity and all that is most hostile to Christianity. Christianity had founded a great community in the New World. Slavery came up against that community, as Mahometanism, with its polygamy, its fatalism, its exterminating ferocity, came up against European Christendom ten centuries ago; and, like Mahometanism, it has been overthrown. The Powers of Good and Evil, in forms perhaps more sharply defined than they had worn in previous encounter, have fought for that New World, and the Power of Good has conquered.

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I went to the United States believing, I returned firmly convinced, that not democracy in America, but free Christianity in America, was the real key to the study of the people and their institutions. Democracy is a political arrangement, dealing, like all political arrangements, with the shallower interests of man. It would be reversing the order of causation to deduce from it the deeper parts of the character of the people.

I mean by Christianity nothing sectarian or narrow. I mean by it the spirit of Christian society-the spirit which has hitherto alone shown itself capable of animating and sustaining a real community; for the spurious communities of heathen antiquity were oligarchial communities of masters tyrannising over a people of slaves. I mean the spirit which is present in many a champion of humanity, who, since Christianity has been degraded by superstition and allied with social injustice, would scarcely call himself by the Christian name, but who is nevertheless