Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/53

Rh trustee. As I am persuaded, the Confederacy was not intended to remain for ever bounded on the North by a frontier so close to its capital. The old alliance with the anti-republican rich and with the democratic mob of the North, those commercial interests and connections the strength of which had been so fatally proved, the standing army which the Slave Confederacy would certainly have kept up and with which it would always have been ready to interpose in favour of its political allies, would probably have brought over to it the Border States, Kentucy, Maryland, Missouri, already tainted with Slavery; might possibly have brought over to it even Pennsylvania and New York, in both of which the Democratic and Pro-Slavery party was very strong: and the visions of restoring the right relation between labour and capital, (visions not confined to the case of the black labourer) might have been fulfilled in the city of William Penn, as well as over the grave of Washington and in the halls of the Incas. Christianity was not the aggressor in the conflict; it was struggling for life. It did not even technically deal the first blow. The Northern people, with their government, were standing at gaze, not knowing how to act, unwilling to attempt coercion, ready, I am afraid, a good many of them, to avert disruption by concessions to Slavery, when Slavery, still impelled to suicide by the vices of its own character, fired on the national flag at Fort Sumter, and the North sprang to arms. The importance of that incident in rousing the Northern people to a spontaneous movement, which the government could not, if it would, have failed to obey, has not been understood here, nor has its effect upon the question as to the lawfulness of the war been duly weighed. When one of two parties begins a