BUT COME UPON US AT LAST.

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undertook to erect a separate political system, of which slavery was to be the corner-stone.

Thus did slavery bring on a civil war between brethren of the same race and tongue and faith,-a war wide-spread and embittered and desolating as wars have seldom been. Thus will slavery have caused the violent death, in the country which tolerated it, of half a million of free people. Thus will slavery leave behind it, in the country where it held its millions in bonds, a public debt little short, it may be, of that which loads down the industry of Great Britain.

If God, in his mercy, shall in the end preserve us from results to which these deaths and losses are but as dust in the balance; if our punishment does not extend to dismemberment, anarchy, extinction as a great nation; if lookers-on from European courts are not to moralize on the ignominious failure of the noblest experiment to reconcile democratic liberty and public order that was ever instituted by man; let us remember how narrowly we shall have escaped; let us call to mind what days of gloom we have passed through, how often, as the contest proceeded, victory has hung even-balanced in the scale, and what a little thing, amid the thousand contingencies which our short sight calls chance, might have turned the issue against us. forever!

In our case, the Great Lesson was long delayed. But how terrible in its actual results, how awfully impressive in its possible consequences, when it came upon us at last!

The conclusion of the whole matter is this. Reviewing, from its inception on this continent down to the present hour, the history of that offence against humanity by which one race, in order to escape labor, usurps by violence and appropriates to itself the labor

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TENDENCIES OF SLAVERY.

of another, we find that the tendency of that usurpa tion is always to debase the usurpers, and, usually, to extinguish the laboring race, and that in the only notable exception to this last rule the effects of this sin against justice and mercy culminated in the bloodiest civil war that ever arose among men,—of the horrors and sufferings incident to which we cannot even now see the end.

If a calm review of this terrible episode in modern history bring no conviction that the crime which we are now expiating in blood must be atoned for, as crime can only be, by practical repentance,-by thrusting out from among us the Wrong of the Age,-argument will be unavailing. If, as all signs of the times appear to indicate, the nation has already attained to this conviction, then it behooves us to consider how we shall carry it into effect,-whether and in what manner we can effect emancipation by legal and constitutional

means.

The consideration of these questions shall form the subject of the following chapters.

PART II.

EMANCIPATION.

"To deliver an oppressed people is a noble fruit of victory."—

VATTEL: Book III. ¿ 201.

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PART II.

EMANCIPATION.

CHAPTER I.

A MIXED QUESTION OF CONSTITUTIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LAW.

I PROPOSE to inquire whether the act or acts whereby the slaves heretofore held in insurrectionary States were declared free are, or are not, absolutely legal and irrevocable.

Seldom, throughout all history, has there been presented to any nation, for its decision, a question of greater import than this. Its solution involves not alone the social destiny of three or four millions of human beings, but also the permanent peace and the national honor of one of the great Powers of the world. It allies itself also, in an especial manner, to the progress of civilization.

The events of the last three years have radically changed the legal aspect of this subject. Questions once purely constitutional have now become complicated with questions of international law.

A member of the commonwealth of Christendom, our republic is bound by the acknowledged rules of that unwritten code, governing the society of civilized