Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/46

40 soldiery. It was full of violence and bloodshed, of stabbing, duelling, and lynch law, the offspring of the passions fostered by domestic tyranny. So jealously was the den of Slavery closed and its mysteries concealed, that till the Northern armies penetrated into the South, the horrors of the system were not fully known. Not the mutual confidence which reigns at the North, and produces there an almost reckless freedom of social intercourse, but suspicion, bred of conscious wrong, brooded over the realm of Slavery. The face of every stranger was scrutinised, his words and demeanour watched. Nor was silence enough: to a public conscience so burdened, silence was a reproach; you must speak in favour of slavery, or feel its knife. No doubt there was lavish hospitality, such as brought golden words from those who shared it, in the houses of Southern planters, as there always is where prodigality is fed by the sweat of another man’s brow. No doubt the graces of Southern ladies often won them admirers and partisans; so did those of the Roman ladies who were in the habit of crucifying slaves. The proudest of aristocracies, this society was called. Let those who gave it that name cease to accuse others of traducing aristocratic institutions.

As a power, Slavery was, and would always have been, fiercely aggressive. It ravened for land to supply the place of that which its ruinous culture had exhausted, and it could not bear the reproachful and contagious neighbourhood of free institutions. While it ruled the foreign policy of the States, that policy was always menacing and piratical. The North could not have lived at peace with it; England could not have lived at peace with it, unless she had sunk, as some of her sons would have had her sink, to to the level of its degradation.