teach or to preach in public or in private any thing in its favor. She condemns as unworthy of the Christian name not merely those who reduce, or maintain that there is no wrong or crime in reducing men naturally free to slavery, as the writer would seem to imagine, but all who engage in or defend, or venture to maintain that the traffic in blacks is permitted under any pretext or color whatsoever, and without any reference to the fact that the blacks brought from Africa and sold into slavery were born naturally free or in servitude. The question whether the negroes are freemen or slaves in Africa, the writer will see, if he examines the bull of the pope, has no bearing on the lawfulness or unlawfulness of the traffic. The notion which some entertain that the church in her prohibition of the traffic, simply prohibits the reduction of nien naturally free, is not correct; she prohibits the entire traffic in blacks, or, what is ordinarily understood by the African slave-trade. The writer, however carelessly or loosely he may have expressed himself, could not have intended to justify or in any sense apologize for that infamous traffic, and therefore be condemned by his church as unworthy of the Christian name. Every friend he has must be indignant at finding such a charge brought against him, and we could do no less than attempt to clear him from it.

The writer differs from us in regard to the policy of calling to our aid in suppressing this wicked rebellion the slave population of the South; and so do many others. We think them wrong, very gravely mistaken in their policy, if they are really in earnest to put down the rebellion, and save the integrity of the nation. Not otherwise do we believe it possible to save the national life, and secure a peaceful and glorious career for American civilization. But we can believe that these people are as honest in opposing as we are in advocating the liberation of the slaves, and, as far as they wil engage in downright earnest to defend the Union, and crush out the rebellion, we are ready to accept them as loyal citizens, and to work heartily with them. The life of the nation is at stake, and the salvation of that is now our supreme law. We must, in the forcible language of Cromwell, "secure the being of the commonwealth, before proceeding to discuss its well-being.

THE STRUGGLE OF THE NATION FOR LIFE.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for January, 1862.]

MANY worthy people regard war, especially a civil war like that which is now raging in the American Union, as the greatest calamity that can befall a nation, and so great is their horror of war that they seem willing to purchase peace at any price, even by national dishonor and national degradation, yet war is rather the effect of evil than the evil itself. The real evil is in the causes that precede and lead to it. In our case it is the effort of the sound part of the nation to expel a disease long since contracted, and was gradually but steadily approaching the seat of life, and threatening us with complete dissolution. To the eye of enlightened patriotism our condition as a people is less deplorable to-day than it was four years ago before the

which

war broke out.

for a

War is never lawful for its own sake, and can be rightfully undertaken only for the sake of a true and lasting peace; but, when necessary to that end, it is not only justifiable, but sacred and obligatory. It is a severe remedy desperate disease, what physicians call an "heroic" remedy, therefore good, but one which in certain cases must be resorted to, if recovery is not to be despaired of. Without it, we had no chance of prolonging our national With the slave interest in full power in nearly one half of the Union, and by its combinations ruling the councils of the nation; with Young America, reckless and destitute of principle, managing our politics at the North under the lead of Fernando Woods and New York Heralds; the laxity of morals becoming almost universal in

life.

with

politics and business, in public life and private; with the growing tastes and habits of luxury and extravagance prevalent throughout the land, we were well-nigh a lost people; our destruction as a nation was, if no change came, only & question of time, and thoughtful and far-seeing men were beginning to despair of the republic. The impending ruin, in the ordinary providence of God, could be averted only by the war which has broken out, and is now raging. We deplore with all our heart the causes which made the war

necessary and inevitable, but we do not and cannot grieve that it has come, or lament the sacrifices it compels us to make.

War is a less calamity to a nation than the effeminate and luxurious tastes and habits generated by a long peace and its attendant exterior prosperity. It can never be so fatal to a nation as the loss of virtue, courage, manliness, and love of glory, which we had suffered during the thirty years preceding the outbreak of the present rebellion, and which renders it yet doubtful whether we have the moral qualities requisite to restore the Union, and preserve our national existence. What is the loss of blood or treasure in comparison with the loss of country or of national life? What are all the losses war can occasion in comparison with the possession of our manhood, and of those self-denying and self-sacrificing virtues which war demands and seldom fails to develop? Indeed, we look upon the war as our only means of salvation, as sent in mercy to a privileged people to enable them to be a living people, a great, heroic, and chivalric nation, fitted to receive and fulfil the holy mission of proving what is the nobility of man when and where he is free to be himself. Better to be moved by the inordinate love of glory than by the inordinate love of gain or sensual pleasure, and far nobler are the qualities of the soldier than those of the demagogue or even the shopkeeper.

Instead of sighing over the calamities of the war, its disarrangement of business, its interruption of ordinary pursuits, or its expenditures in money and in life, we should bring our minds up to the high thought that there are nobler things than these and far more worth living for. No man ever rises to the dignity of true manhood who has not hovering before him an ideal above all things of this sort, and in whom there has not been developed the power of heroic self-abnegation, and of wedding himself to a cause that transcends all the goods of time and sense, and of counting no loss, no toil, no suffering, no sacrifice in its defence or promotion. Such a cause is religion, and first on the list of those honored on earth and in heaven stand her martyrs. Next to religion, and never separable from it, is the cause of our country, and humanity honors, next to her saints, the brave and heroic soldier, next to her martyrs for the cause of God, those who nobly fall in battle for the honor, dignity, and defence of their country. The church agrees with the human race in all ages in her esti

mate of the soldier, and bestows peculiar privileges on those who fall in fighting for a just and sacred cause. Let not modern scepticism or mistaken philanthropy attempt to reverse the verdict of the church and of humanity. He who marches to the battle-field, and pours out his life in defence of his country is the brother of him who marches to the stake or the scaffold, and gives his life for his faith. In both it is the heroism that the world loves and worships, the forgetfulness of self, the power of self-sacrifice, the devotion to the great, the noble, the true, the good. The heroism, in the true and nobler sense of that soul-stirring word, which the war for religion or for country generates or develops is worth more to a nation than all it costs, for, without it, no nation is really a living or an advancing nation. When a nation has ceased to produce heroes, as a religion when it has ceased to produce martyrs, it has culminated, is on its decline, falling or fallen into the dead and putrid state of Turkey, India, or China, and has no longer a work for either God or man.

If we are wise, we shall accept the present civil war as a much needed and a salutary discipline, necessary to arrest us in our downward career, and to recall us to the virtues of our heroic fathers. We shall even accept it with thankfulness, as giving us the opportunity of rivalling, and even surpassing them in glory. It gives us the opportunity to prove ourselves men, and to achieve greatness for ourselves. Our fathers won us a country, we can now prove that we are able to defend, preserve, and ennoble a country. We can now prove that the race has not degenerated in this New World, and that man here is still man in all his vigor, in all his proud daring, and in all his noble deeds. We of the free states have been taunted by the slaveholding South with being cowards and poltroons, with being ready to sacrifice honor, dignity, and glory, for the sake of trade and its profits, and poltroons in our politics we have been; we can now prove that if we have been ready to make any sacrifice, even that of honor, to prevent the dissolution of the Union, it has not been through sordidness or cowardice. Our honor, our very manhood as a free and living people are now at stake, and must be redeemed. We must wipe ont the disgrace of our past concessions, our past crouching to the "Barons of the South," and prove that those concessions were not wrung from a timidity that springs from a want of manhood or from insensibility to national honor

or national glory; that we have not crouched because we wanted spirit to assert, or strength to defend our own rights and dignity, but because we loved the Union, and are now ready to make any sacrifice to preserve the integrity of the nation. This we can and must now prove. We are now called upon to prove that there still lives and burns in our hearts the spirit of our fathers; that we have the old American energy and indomitable perseverance that won this continent from the savage and the forest, that forced the proud mother country to acknowledge our independence, framed the federal constitution, and made us a nation full of promise to the future of the world.

But to do this we must take the matter in earnest, and understand and feel that the war is a reality, and that it must be conducted on war, not on peace principles. The amiable speculations of our late "peace-inen," and the charming sentimentalities of well-meaning philanthropists, with which we wiled away the "piping times of peace," for the want of something more amusing, interesting, or spirit-stirring, must be laid aside for the present, for we are now face to face with the stern realities of war. The real, not the mimic stage is now before us, and the actors are actors in real, not mimic life. The tragic deeds are doing, not merely represented before our eyes. They are real, not pasteboard soldiers that pass and repass before us, and the charge sounded is a real charge to a real battle, in which the life of a nation, perhaps the whole future of humanity, is at stake. We are not sitting at our ease in the parterre or a private box, and witnessing a theatrical battle. There is no artifice, no phantasmagoria, no painted scenery here; it is all real, sternly, terribly real. The reality itself is before us, and we must meet it with a sternness, a gravity equal to its own. It is real blood, not red paint that flows, and real lifewarm blood must still flow, and flow in torrents. We must have not only the courage to be killed, but we must have for brave and generous souls the harder courage to kill,---not simply to bear, but to do harm, to strike the enemy in his tenderest part our quickest and heaviest blows. War demands not the passive virtues alone; it demands the active virtues, and is the work not of women, but of men,-of men wound up to the highest pitch of their manhood, acting in the terrible energy of their full masculine strength, and the whole directed with an invincible will to the beating down of every obstacle to its advance. There must be no dilly