men, timid almost to shrinking before disloyal men. He is afraid to touch with his little finger the "divine" institution of slavery; but has no fear of sacrificing any number of freemen and any amount of national treasure, to prevent a hair of its head from being singed. He would seem to regard it as a more imperative duty to keep the border slave states nominally in the Union, than to suppress the armed rebellion against it. We fear that he has not emancipated himself from the old slavery domination, or risen above the old notion that the government must be administered in the exclusive interest and according to the wishes of southern slaveholders. The rights and interests of millions of freemen he apparently counts for nothing in comparison with the duty of protecting the doubtful rights of slavery. This is sad, and, if persisted in, will render all the efforts and sacrifices we have made, or are making to save the Union, worse than pure loss.

We tell the president, and we desire to do so with all possible respect, that even the restoration of the Union on a policy shaped expressly to conciliate "Ole Kentuc'," or the slaveholding interest of any of the border states, would now, if possible, not be worth effecting. Why was he elected to the presidency? Why have we of the loyal states placed him in his present elevated position? No man better than himself knows, that we voted for him, at the risk of civil war and the dissolution of the Union, because we were determined that the slave interest should no longer shape the policy and govern the councils of the nation. It was this determination on the part of the freemen of the East, the North, and the West that took Mr. Lincoln from his lawoffice, and made him president. He was not elected to preserve slavery, nor to abolish slavery; but he was elected to emancipate the administration and the republic itself from the domination of the slave interest; and we protest, therefore, in the name of those who elected him, against the perpetuation of that domination, even though confined to the slave interest of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Slavery may or may not continue to exist, but we insist that the government shall cease to be administered in its interest, or under its dictation. The government must be administered in the interest of freedom and loyalty. If not, better yield to the secessionists at once, and take Jefferson Davis for our president. We will not pour out our blood and our treasure, we will not send the flower of our youth and the glory of our manhood to rot in camp, die on the battle-field, or

VOL. XVII-15

languish in southern dungeons, for the sake of bringing the Union again under the domination of southern slaveholders, and of exposing ourselves to be again insulted and bullied, or cheated out of our rights and our manhood by the Davises, the Toombses, the Hammonds, the Masons, and the Slidells. We have resolved that our government shall be emancipated, whatever becomes of slavery and its worshippers. This is what we beg the administration to bear in mind. We should be glad to believe that the president has not forgot ten it, and that he is prepared to assert his own independence of the slave power, and that of the government, for we tell him never will there, and never can there, be a reunion of the separated states under the domination of the slave interest.

We have no concessions to make to Kentucky, or to any other border slave state. The slaveholders have rebelled against the Union, and by so doing have absolved the Union from all obligations to protect slavery in either loyal or disloyal states. If Kentucky, the native state of the president, will not remain in the Union, unless permitted to dictate its policy, and make her slave interest its law, then let her be treated as a rebel state, and coerced as we are coercing the other rebel states into loyalty. We will no more consent to allow Kentucky than South Carolina or Georgia to impose her slave policy upon the government. We of the free states intend to assert and maintain our own freedom, our own rights and dignity, and to be something else hereafter in the government of the country than the mere lackeys of southern slaveholders. We are fighting to vindicate our own rights, and our government must recollect that in this contest it is bound to take our rights, the rights of freemen, into the account. We wish the administration to consider that we of the free states have accepted the issue tendered us, and that we will spend our last dollar and our last life before we will suffer this Union to.be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to preserve the infamous institution of negro slavery; and before the slave interest shall ever again shape the policy of the government, or dominate in its councils. If Mr. Lincoln has not learned this yet, he will, perhaps, learn it before the close of the present session of congress. We have been in bondage to the capital invested in slavery long enough; we have long enough cowered and crouched under the lash of slaveholding dictators, afraid even to say our souls are our own, lest we should endanger the peace and safety of the Union. We will do it no longer. By the memory of our fathers who

fought at Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Monmouth, Yorktown, whose blood yet courses in our veins, we have sworn we will not. Timid, weak, narrow-minded, pettifogging politicians may quake at these words, or shrink from them as meaning something, but their day is gone. There is a spirit rising in the free states, that does not believe in "the divinity of slavery," or that all other interests must be sacrificed to it; and, what is more to the purpose, that does believe in freedom, that it is right, is law, and before it slavery must and shall give way. Events march, as we said three months. ago, and they are marching with fearful rapidity. We are all carried along with them. To many of us what six months ago seemed the extreme of rashness now appears timid, tame, and cowardly. The government, if it would guide events, must march with them. The president, we perceive, marches, slowly indeed; but, nevertheless, he marches, and his message proves that he is at least some steps in advance of where he was at the close of the extra session of congress. He will probably march at a more rapid pace by and by, and perhaps catch up with public opinion.

We do not want the war waged or prosecuted for the abolition of slavery; but we do insist that it shall not be waged or prosecuted for the protection of slavery, and its reinstatement in power. Slavery has rebelled, and let it pay the forfeit. We have no confidence in the wisdom, we had almost said in the loyalty, of the statesmen who insist that the government has any further obligation toward it now, than to brush it aside, if found in its way. We do not suppose the president is any more favorable to slavery than we are, but we do fear that he does not perceive that he is under no obligation to protect it, and that with less assumption of extraordinary power than he has assumed in arresting and incarcerating persons suspected of disloyalty without form of law, or bringing them to a speedy trial, a power we do not deny him, he might treat the relation of master and slave as non avenue, and declare the slaves free men. Why can he not be as bold against slavery as against freedom? Let him go as far in the slavery question as he

has gone in many others, and he will satisfy the loyal people who are now in arms to save the life of the nation. Let him make an end of the "Eternal Nigger," and feel, think, and act as the chief magistrate of a free people, and we shall be content, and not only support him as our chief magistrate, but do so with cheerfulness and alacrity, with confidence and hope that our sacrifices will not be in vain.

STATE REBELLION, STATE SUICIDE.

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

OUR highly esteemed friend of the Pittsburg Catholic, the ablest and most loyal Catholic journal at this time pub lished in our country, takes care to tell us that, in his judg ment, it is unwise to agitate the slavery question, and that in the present crisis of our national affairs only harm can come of discussing it. He will pardon us, we hope, if we tell him, in return, that we think it both wise and useful for every man who loves his country to agitate that question, and thoroughly discuss it. Slavery has produced our present national crisis. The rebellion itself is at bottom only the armed phase of the slavery question, and to suppose it possible to suppress and extinguish it without touching the question, would be like attempting to cure a man of drunkenness without touching the question of temperance. Slavery is now the question, the great question, the whole question before the American public, and it depends on the disposition we make of that question whether we are or are not to continue to be a nation. We cannot blink it, if we would. It enters vitally into the struggle of the nation for life, and we must dispose of it, so that it can never again come up, or all our efforts will be idle, and all our sacrifices of men and money will be worse than lost.

The southern confederacy, against which the United States are now hurling their armed forces, rests on slavery as its corner-stone, and derives from it its very reason of existence. Grant, if you insist upon it, that the sole object of that illegal and dangerous confederacy is not the preservation or extension of slavery, still the objects of that confederacy, the ends for which it has been formed, demand the continuance of slavery. The preservation and extension of slavery may not be the end the rebels have in view, but slavery is the indispensable means to that end. They would not seek to form a separate and independent republic, if it were to be a republic based on the free-labor system, for they are not such fools as not to know that such a republic would have fewer advantages than the present United Statescould never be so strong, never command so high a place

in the world's estimation or in the world's history. The whole is, and always must be greater than a part, and a man of real ambition would always say, with the old Athenian, "I would rather be second in Athens than first in Euboea." Even supposing, then, that the rebels had not originally, or that they have abandoned the intention of reconstructing the whole Union on the basis of the slave-labor system, they must still preserve that system as the necessary condition of the separate existence, and of the greatness and power they hope to attain to as an independent people. The abolition of slavery would take away all motive, all reason, and all desire for a separation from the Union. Being unable without slavery to attain to the objects they contemplate as a separate and independent political existence, they would naturally desire to remain in the United States, and share the greatness and glory of one united republic.

The productions on which the seceded states rely as the means of securing to them the hegemony of the commercial nations of the world they would aspire to, they believe, demand the system of slave labor. "The only reason for desiring slavery," said to us an eminent physician of Charleston, and himself the owner of a hundred slaves, "is that in the management of large plantations the planter must be able to cominand labor when he wants it, and to be always able to do this, he must own it. Aside from this consideration, slave labor is less economical than free labor. Its advantage over hired labor, or your northern system of labor, is in the fact that the planter can command it at the very moment he needs it. If he depends on hired labor, he is likely to find his hands striking at the critical moment, and compelling him either to lose the proper time for planting or for gathering his crops and preparing them for market, or to pay them wages that would swallow up all his profits, and end in his ruin. What is said about the inability of the white man to perform the labor now performed by negroes is worthy of no attention. There is no climate, there is no position in which you can place the negro and the white man side by side, in which the white man will not kill the negro. Negroes are preferred, not because they are hardier or more enduring than white laborers, even in our climate; but because they can be kept in slavery, and men of the white race cannot. I know no other argument for negro slavery." Now, as the rebels rely principally on their plantations, on growing and exporting cotton, rice, and tobacco,