Page:The abolition of slavery.djvu/23

Rh eradicated, cost what it may. We are for no half-way measures. So long as the slave system kept itself within the limits of the Constitution, we were bound to let it alone, and to respect its legal rights; but when, overleaping those limits, it bids defiance to all law, and lays its vile hands on the sacred altar of liberty and the sacred flag of the country, and would overturn the Constitution itself, thenceforth slavery has no constitutional rights. It is by its own act an outlaw. It can never come back again into the temple, and claim a place by right among the worshippers of truth and liberty. It has ostracised itself, and that for ever. Let us not be told, then, that the matter of slavery does not enter into the present controversy—that it is merely a war to uphold the government and put down secession. It is not so. So far from this, slavery is the very heart and head of this whole struggle. The conflict is between freedom on the one hand, maintaining its rights, and slavery on the other, usurping and demanding that to which it has no right. It is a war of principle as well as of self-preservation; and that is but a miserable and short-sighted policy which looks merely at the danger and overlooks the cause; which seeks merely to put out the fire, and lets the incendiary go at large, to repeat the experiment at his leisure. We must do both—put out the fire, and put out the incendiary too. We meet the danger effectually only by eradicating the disease.—Erie True American.

The total white population of the eleven States now comprising the confederacy is six million, and, therefore, to fill up the ranks of the proposed army (600,000) about ten percent, of the entire white population will be required. In any other country than our own, such a draft could not be met, but the Southern States can furnish that number of men, and still not leave the material interests of the country in a suffering condition. Those who are incapacitated for bearing arms can oversee the plantations, and the negroes can go on undisturbed in their usual labors. In the North, the case is different; the men who join the army of subjugation are the laborers, the producers, and the factory operatives. Nearly