Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/47

Rh There had been no iniquity like it before. The Slave States of antiquity sinned, and their sin was their death; but they did not sin in the light, and therefore their corruption was less deep. The idea of a common humanity transcending all divisions of tribe and race had in those times scarcely dawned upon the mind of man, and the pang of conscience was hardly felt in reducing men of another tribe or race to Slavery. There was even a kind of justice in Slavery as it then existed. In an age of universal war the slave, while he sustained the community by his labour, was exempted from the dangers and hardships of military service, which it was the lot of every freeman to undergo. And, moreover, Roman Slavery became in its later days a great channel both of education and of emancipation.

The political character of the Southern Oligarch however was closely akin to that of the slave-owning republicans of antiquity, little as he resembled them in their culture and their classic grace. It was full of the same rebellious pride, the same fierce spirit of self-assertion, combined with the same haughty contempt for the rights of others. The land of slavery was the land of tyrannicide. Sic semper tyrannis was the motto of Virginia; and every one was a tyrant who restrained the tyranny of the slave-owner. The patriotism of the North, so far as it approaches its ideal, is that of a Christian community; the patriotism of the South was that of a heathen republic.

And the great political quality of the slave-owning republic was to be its stability. It was to remain for ever unchanged, while all things were in a state of change around it. Hope of piratical aggrandisement at the expense of its neighbours it had. Other hope it had none,