Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/215

Rh dissolution of the Federal Union. The battles will be studied, as Bonaparte's are, merely in the light of military science. They will have no vivifying soul, and even Lincoln's immortal apostrophe at Gettysburg may not save them.

Of course, there is no propriety in using harsh epithets concerning the causes or combatants, for such are prejudicial to philosophic inquiry, indeed, foreign to the judicial mind fitted for fair investigation, but the late endeavors to whitewash the offensive institution of slavery, or to slur over its poisonous influence upon the Southern people and its corrupting power over American government and politics, is an aberration of intellect which even philanthropy ought not to sanction. As in slavery days, the forgetters are directing their extra-fraternal services against Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the language of Woodrow Wilson, it "is not a truthful picture of slavery." Such good people seem not to have entered into the serene spirit which views the barbarisms practiced down South, not as an indictment of the Southern people, but as a sample of the degradation to which such a denial of human rights could bring a people as good by nature as ourselves.

Can it be possible that any considerable number of the American people are so short-sighted as not to see that chattel slavery was only one phase or outcropping of unrestrained human selfishness and rapacity, and that though the chattels are liberated, the spirit remains? The sphere of its opportunities is restricted, but it is still rampant and fierce, almost untamable, North, South, East and West, in fact everywhere; and the same demand for restraint is upon us, or failing in this, a descent into barbarism, deep and deeper, until aroused to partial emancipation again? The problem was not closed, the tendency or gravitating force was not removed when chattel slavery died. It is a perpetual task and no part of its features should be masked.

It is vain and foolish to mis-estimate either the character of the Southern people, the temptations in which they were placed, or the resulting social and political conditions, for such will have no other effect than to obscure the future and