Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 26.djvu/340

 330 Southern Historical Society Paper*

war on both sides, by a distinguished English nobleman who, it must be presumed, wrote from an unprejudiced standpoint.

In a work called The Confederate Secession, written by the Mar- quis of Lothian, and published in 1864 in Edinburgh and London, that writer, after reciting and discussing with remarkable accuracy and ability the grievances of the Southern States, and the cause which led to their secession from the Union, uses this language:

" I believe that the right of secession is so clear that if the South had wished to do so, for no betteV reason than that it could not bear to be beaten in an election, like a sulky school-boy out of temper at not winning a game, and had submitted the question of its right to withdraw from the Union to the decision of any court of law in Europe, she would have carried her point."

He then draws the following vivid contrast between the way war was conducted by the two parties. He says:

' ' Let us however suppose the Southern Secession to have been altogether illegal and uncalled for, or rather let us turn away our eyes from the question altogether, and suppose that the causes of the struggle are veiled in obscurity. Can we find anything in the circumstances of the war itself which may induce us to take one side rather than the other ? Those circumstances have been very remarkable. This contest has been signalized by the exhibition of some of the best and some of the worst qualities that war has ever brought out. It has produced a recklessness of human life; a con- tempt of principles, a disregard of engagements; a wasteful expen- diture almost unprecedented; a widely extended corruption among the classes who have any connection with the government or the war; an enormous debt, so enormous as to point to almost certain repudiation; "the headlong adoption of the most lawless measures; the public faith scandalously violated both towards friends and ene- mies; the liberty of the citizen at the mercy of arbitrary power; the liberty of the press abolished: the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act; illegal imprisonments; midnight arrests; punishments inflicted without trial; the courts of law controlled by satellites of govern- ment; elections carried on under military supervision; a ruffianism both of word and action eating deep into the country; contractors and stock jobbers suddenly amassing enormous fortunes out of 'the public misery, and ostentatiously parading their ill-gotten wealth in the most vulgar display of luxury; the most brutal inhumanity in the conduct of the war itself; outrages upon the defenceless, upon