Page:The abolition of slavery.djvu/19

Rh will be, that slavery, as a domestic institution of the United States, will be utterly annihilated. —Ibid, April 30. The rebellion must be put down by some means or another, else it will put us down; and if nothing else will do, even to proclaim the abolition of slavery would be legitimate. All is fair in war. Gen. Fremont and the' other Generals must act according to circumstances, and their own judgment, unless when otherwise ordered. If he is acting on his own responsibility, he is only carrying out the Confiscation Act, so far as the slaves are concerned. We have no fear of the result.—N.Y. Herald, Sept. 3.

To our apprehension, God is fast closing every avenue to settled peace but by emancipation. And one of the most encouraging facts is that the eyes of the nation are becoming turned in that direction quite as rapidly as could have been anticipated. Some men of conservative antecedents, like Dickinson of New York, saw this necessity from the first. But it takes time to accustom a whole people to the thought, and to make them see the necessity. It was impossible for Northern men to fathom the spirit and the desperate exigencies of the slave system and its outbreak, and consequently to comprehend the desperate nature of the struggle. We were like a policeman endeavoring to arrest a boy-ruffian, and, for the sake of his friends and for old acquaintance sake, doing it with all possible tenderness for his person and his feelings—till all of a sudden he feels the grip on his throat and the dagger's point at his breast, and knows that it is a life-and-cleath grapple. Slaveholding is simply piracy continued. Our people are beginning to spell out that short and easy lesson in the light of perjury, robbery, assassination, poisoning, and all the more than Algerine atrocities of this rebellion. It cannot require many more months of schooling like the last eight, to convince the dullest of us what are its essence and spirit.