Page:Two Years of Church Progress.djvu/26

16 it the basis of its own selfish commercial and manuracturing; system, while it maintains an organized persecution of those pariahs of the Northern section, the free blacks, on which the slaveholding South cries shame. As far as the future of the black race is concerned, we are convinced that the longest step ever taken, across the Atlantic, towards its complete though gradual emancipation, was the secession of the South. The political reasons connected with the balance of power in the two Houses of the old Federal Legislature, which induced the South not only to maintain slavery in the older States, but to force it on new States and territories whose climate repudiates the institution, have disappeared with the secession, and so the system is left to find its level, while the free trade, which the Confederacy proclaims, will every year open it more and more to English ways of thought and English influences. The result of these various powers in operation on each other, will, we believe and trust, be to insure labentibus annis, first internal amelioration, then serfdom and villeinage, and ultimately a constitutional system for the black population of the South. This hopeful future could not be predicted for the South, if it were to be cannonaded and ravaged into reunion. Such a contingency would only lead to two results, either the sudden emancipation of millions wholly unfitted for immediate licence, or the riveting more closely and more hopelessly the chains of their servitude. Even now, Mr. Lincoln, in his recent message, has no better consolation to offer the free blacks of the United States than a forced deportation.

In short, if slavery had been the one real grievance, the South need not, and would not, have seceded. The intolerably unjust Navigation Laws and sordid protectionism of the North, which intentionally cut those vast rich provinces off from the remaining world in the Interests of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, was the shoe that really pinched. Their political allies in the Northern States would not, or could not, befriend them in their extremity. The election of a President by a minority of the primary votes of the whole Union, amounting to nearly a million, and against the unanimous voice of the South, was a strong intimation that the day of compromise had passed its eleventh hour. The North called what then took place, rebellion; but in using that ugly word it forgot its own origin as a power of the earth, and it affixed its own interpretation to a document which was, and was meant to be, ambiguous. The constitution of the United States (we call attention to the peculiarity of the very appellation), was emphatically a compromise between States which had recently promoted themselves by 'rebellion' from colonies to sovereignties, and statesmen, who looked to a strong central power. It was drawn up so as to favour either