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put an end to the work of civilisation which down to that date religion and philanthropy had not unhopefully carried on. Before that time there had been only two wars between the New Englanders and the Indians in half a century. A spirit more akin to that of Eliot and Penn is now again in the ascendant, and a fresh hope dawns for the Indian tribes.

No doubt American society, like European society, has its peculiar evils. It has some which even a foreign observer sees, and many more, we may be sure, which a foreign observer does not see, but which Americans themselves know and feel, and which give birth to political and social complaints there as mournful in tone as any that are heard here. It is not by sudden and vigorous bounds, but by slow and tottering steps that humanity advances. Probably in many things the balance, here inclined too much one way, is there inclined too much the other way, and needs time and training to adjust it to the point of perfect equity. Such of the national virtues as are virtues of circumstance, have yet to be proved in a severer school; while of the faults and absurdities some at least are those of youth, and as the nation advances in years will pass away. After all America is not a new world, but the embryo of a new world. Many things deemed peculiar to it are common to all colonies, and will be modified as the colony becomes a nation. Of the energy of the people, hitherto almost absorbed in the work of reclaiming a continent, a larger share will be spared for learning, art, and science. With higher cultivation finer tastes will be introduced, vulgarity will be purged away, extravagance will be chastened, more independent intellects will arise, and the servility of thought, of which

there are just complaints at present, will cease to prevail. The restless movement westward will come to a stand. More settled habits and associations will be formed. A sounder and more effective philosophy will lay its tranquillising band on the feverish pulse of political and commercial life. If justice prevails here, Ireland will become a home to her own people, and Irish emigration will cease to flow in so dangerous a current. The volume of emigration generally will perhaps be diminished, if governments in Europe grow wiser; and the American people, as a whole, will wear less the aspect of new comers still hastening on to fresh abodes. The habits of man will be better adapted to the climate of that continent, and a limit will be set to the nervous excitability produced by it, the influence of which is at present great, and more important, perhaps, in its effects than is generally supposed. At the same time new elements and influences will come into play, as the vast federation of the North American continent, the colossal lineaments of which are at present but faintly discernible, begins to assume its perfect form. The centre of power and importance will be transferred, as it is now fast shifting, to the mighty West. The federal institutions framed for the thirteen old colonies can hardly fail to undergo some change. The infant nation has hitherto been in many things like a child in an untouched orchard of nature, filling its arms with golden fruit, and letting them drop again as it hurried on to the next bough. The boughs, though laden, will be stript in time, the boundary of the orchard will be reached, the manhood of the nation will come, and bring with it new cares and perhaps difficulties as yet unfore

seen.

But the past can never return: Feudalism, Primo

Here

geniture, State Churches, are left behind for ever. was at all events a grand experiment; here was, for the first time, a great community, founded on the free allegiance of all its members to the common good; here was a great hope of Humanity, its newest and probably its fairest hope, though hope is not fulfilment, and though they to whom it is committed are human.

But effort is the law of the world. No hope reaches its fulfilment no character, whether of man or nation, is formed without a struggle. For the American commonwealth, in its turn, a great trial was prepared.

If New England was, in the language of its founders, emphatically a plantation, not of trade but of religion; Virginia was as emphatically a plantation, not of religion but of trade. It was a plantation of gold-seekers, recruited by convicts. Afterwards there were added a few Cavaliers: but those who wish for Cavaliers should seek them rather in the poor white population of Barbadoes, whither they were exported in great numbers by Cromwell. The aristocracy of the South sprang from a different source. In Virginia and her sister States, partly from the climate, partly and principally from the character of their colonists, Slavery fixed its abode. By a fatal compromise with evil, sure, if God is strong and just, to bring down in the end a full measure of retribution, it was received into the constitution of the new Republic-received by men who had the highest doctrines of liberty and equality on their lips, and had just vindicated their own rights as freemen with the sword. But then it wore the harmless aspect of an aged and sickly man, whose life could not be brought at once to a violent close, but who would soon die in the course of nature. In those days the production of cotton by slave

labour was unprofitable. The cotton gin was invented; the production of cotton by slave labour became a source of immense profit; opinion at the South, if it had ever been sincerely in favour of abolition, (which in spite of the loud professions of Southern Republicans is somewhat doubtful), underwent a complete change. That which had before been an evil, doomed to speedy extirpation, became inevitable, good, divine. A whole group of theological and philosophical theories sprang up to prove that what covetousness desired, God had decreed; and to show what intellectual feats hypocrisy can achieve when it is stimulated by the love of gold. And soon casting off the disguise of age and mortal sickness, under which he had crept into the commonwealth, the Demon towered up in colossal strength, and laid his terrible hand on the moral life of the American people.

As Northern society was in its structure and principles essentially Christian, Southern society was as essentially anti-Christian, and at the same time and for the same reasons essentially barbarous, though it might profess, and even unctuously profess, a belief in the Christian creed; though it might keep a Christian clergy to preach Slavery; though perhaps, if Secession had won the day, it would have had an Established Church for the same purpose. In its slave code it denied the fundamental principles of Christianity. It was in a literal sense based upon iniquity. Hideous as was its cruelty, at least as hideous and as subversive of Christian morality was its lust. It denied to its victim the conditions alike of moral and of intellectual manhood. It denied him what the worst of heathen slave states had not denied him, the hope of emancipation. For the purposes of its rapacity and pride, it was systematically

effacing the image of the Creator from several millions of human beings, and this not without religious pretences, not without prayer. Almost as degrading to the poor whites as to the negro-morally, perhaps, even more degrading-it immolated the whole community to the vicious ends of a few wealthy men. Against the distinct command of Christianity, it branded labour with dishonour; and within its pale the meanest white preferred a life of penury, wandering, sponging on the great planters, to honest industry-the lot and badge of the negro slave. Instinctively hating the light which Christianity loves, as well as dreading the growth of intelligence in the slave or in the dependent white, it excluded popular education and every source of popular enlightenment; and when Secession had fairly let loose its tongue, it spoke of them openly with devilish hatred. By brutalising labour, it often blasted the fertility of the very soil which it occupied, and the forest is seen growing in Virginia over the traces of ancient cultivation. Pretending to set intellect free from manual toil and to dedicate it to higher ends, it produced no intellectual fruits whatever, except a statecraft, the sole object of which was to maintain and propagate Slavery. It could not produce intellectual fruit, because the noble aspirations which lead to the discovery of truth, the tenderness which creates intellectual beauty, could not dwell with brutality and injustice. The traveller in its realms found no books, no musical instruments, no means of culture. It generated a barbarism, the deeper because it was not original but relapsed, which met the civilisation of the Free States on the boundary line between them, like a dark element meeting a brighter, and was plainly depicted on the very faces of the Southern

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