Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/44

38 labour was unprofitable. The cotton gin was invented; the production of cotton by slave labour became a source of immense profit; opinion at the South, if it had ever been sincerely in favour of abolition, (which in spite of the loud professions of Southern Republicans is somewhat doubtful), underwent a complete change. That which had before been an evil, doomed to speedy extirpation, became inevitable, good, divine. A whole group of theological and philosophical theories sprang up to prove that what covetousness desired, God had decreed; and to show what intellectual feats hypocrisy can achieve when it is stimulated by the love of gold. And soon casting off the disguise of age and mortal sickness, under which he had crept into the commonwealth, the Demon towered up in colossal strength, and laid his terrible hand on the moral life of the American people.

As Northern society was in its structure and principles essentially Christian, Southern society was as essentially anti-Christian, and at the same time and for the same reasons essentially barbarous, though it might profess, and even unctuously profess, a belief in the Christian creed; though it might keep a Christian clergy to preach Slavery; though perhaps, if Secession had won the day, it would have had an Established Church for the same purpose. In its slave code it denied the fundamental principles of Christianity. It was in a literal sense based upon iniquity. Hideous as was its cruelty, at least as hideous and as subversive of Christian morality was its lust. It denied to its victim the conditions alike of moral and of intellectual manhood. It denied him what the worst of heathen slave states had not denied him, the hope of emancipation. For the purposes of its rapacity and pride, it was systematically