are as good as I;" but in an earlier stage of social and individual progress, we must do it by means of this other maxim, “I am as good as you." Now this feeling of personal importance, of egotism, if you please, was in no way, that we can see, to be introduced but by slavery, and without this, our Republic would not have had the checks and balances needed. The time will come, when this will not be needed, and then slavery will cease. Before, it will not.

"Another means of saving individual freedom is in the sovereignty of the individual States. Destroy the States as sovereignties and make them only provinces of one consolidated state, and centralization swallows up every thing. The individual finds the government so far from him, and his own share in it comparatively so insignificant, that he soon comes to feel himself individually of little or no importance, and when he so feels, he ceases from all manly defence of his rights, and loses himself in the mass. Now the South, in consequence of having peculiar State institutions to defend, has been the foremost in defence of State Rights, the Sovereignty of the States in its plenitude, so far at least as all their internal affairs are concerned. It is because they have had slaves, not to be retained without the supreme control of all State institutions, that they have been so earnest in defence of State sovereignty. There is some analogy between the relation a State holds to the Union, and that held by the individual to the State. The arguments which defend the rights of the individual defend those of the State, and those which defend the rights of the State defend those of the individual. The South may have sometimes tarried her doctrine of State Rights too far, but her repeated assertion of it has done not a little to save American liberty.

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Let

Now, until we have settled the controversy about state rights and individual rights, and obtained the amplest security for both, it is as unwise as it is useless to touch the question of slavery. As yet there is no security given, or capable of being given, that the slave will be a freeman, even if declared free by the laws. this security be obtained before you attempt to emancipate him. He is now, paradoxical as it may seem, aiding in laying the foundation of universal liberty to universal man, and when the superstructure is reared, and the multitude throng its courts, he shall appear in the temple a free and equal worshipper.

"Hard undoubtedly is it, that liberty should be purchased at the slave's expense, and we confess we have no fondness for the idea; but less injustice is done the slave than we commonly imagine. The Negro on a Southern plantation is unquestionably a superior being to the Negro in his native Africa. By being enslaved, he has been elevated, not degraded. Degraded he no doubt is in comparison with his master, but his captivity shall redeem his race. The years of his bondage shall not be so long, his labors, sufferings, and sacrifices, in becoming a civilized man shall be far less, than ours have

been. So far as we may judge from the past, it is the settled order of God's providence that man shall be saved only by crucified redeemers. Man is never to receive freedom and civilization as a boon; he can obtain them only by toil and struggle and blood. Why it should be so, is one of the mysteries of Providence, for which we might, perhaps, assign some good reasons, but which we do not undertake to solve. The world is full of mysteries, and this is no more dark and perplexing than a thousand others. Time will clear it up."—pp.

246-260.

We

There may be some incidental opinions in this extract which we should not now accept without some important modifications, for we are not now a Protestant, as we were when we wrote it, and we recognize now, as we did not then, a power distinct from both the state and the individual competent to decide for the state and the individual, the morality of acts and institutions. But the substance, and all that has any bearing on the question before us, we accept. The reader will also see that the ground on which we oppose the abolition societies and the anti-slavery agitation, is a ground which compels us to oppose equally all our recent filibustering tendencies and movements. recognize the right of religious propagandism by divinely commissioned missionaries, but we deny all propagandism on mere human authority against the wishes of the political sovereign. All human powers, however constituted, are in relation to one another independent and equal, and the law which binds the sovereign against intervention binds the citizen or subject,—a fact which our Anglo-Saxon race, through all stages of its historical existence, seems never to have duly considered. It may be called the filibustering race. The South as well as the North have favored the filibustering expeditions against Cuba, Mexico, and Central America, and in so doing have given countenance to the very principle on which the abolition societies defend their intermeddling with slavery in the Southern States. It was filibustering coupled with pro-slavery tendencies, that we more especially condemned in our article on the Incoming Administration. If you accept the filibustering clauses of the Cincinnati Platform, we cannot defend your opposition to the anti-slavery party, for you accept the very principle which justifies that party. The anti-slavery movement and the filibuster movement originate in the same ten

dency, and proceed from the same principle. If we are to defend slavery against the Abolitionists on the principles of international law and State sovereignty, you must not embarrass us by defending the filibustering movement, which denies international law, and the independence of States. There is nothing less justifiable in the formation at the North of a party to abolish slavery at the South, than in the expeditions which have sailed from our ports against Cuba and Central America. If you encourage the latter, how can we in your favor oppose the former? If the South encourages the Filibusters with a view to the acquisition of new slave States, what can we say against movements at the North for the abolition of slavery? If the South expects the North to respect international law in her favor, she must respect international law herself.

Thus far we had written before the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case was rendered. We have read an abstract of that decision as given us in the columns of the New York Herald, with great satisfaction in some respects and great surprise in others. It sustains us on all points except one, and the dissenting opinion of Judge McLean sustains us even on that; but the opinion of the majority, as given by Chief Justice Taney, on several incidental points, we cannot regard as worthy of the high source whence it emanates, and we are sure it will be very far from acceptable to a very large class of American citizens who are free from the slightest taint of Abolitionism.

As to the precise question before the Court the decision is final, and we have no disposition to criticize it, even if it were becoming in us to do so. We suppose the Court is the judge of its own powers, and was competent_to dismiss the case as not coming within its jurisdiction. We cannot understand on what ground it could claim jurisdiction in the case, since, if we understand it, it was purely a question for the State Courts of Missouri, and surely these Courts were competent to decide whether Dred Scott was or was not a slave under the laws of Missouri. Scott was a slave before he left the State, and we can understand no reason why his temporary residence at the United States military posts in Illinois or other free States, should have operated his freedom, so that on his return to Missouri he

could not be legally held as a slave under her laws. His being employed at the United States military posts makes in our judgment some difference in the case, for while residing at them he was still constructively in Missouri. Had he chosen when in Illinois to leave his master, a question, however, might arise, whether he could have been recovered as a fugitive slave. But he having remained with his master and returned with him to Missouri, we think the Court was quite right in still regarding him as a slave.

We are disposed to agree with the Court, that a slave brought by his master into a free State with a view merely of a temporal sojourn there does not recover his freedom, so that if he returns to the State in which he was a slave he becomes there a free man. He is free only in the sense that so long as he resides in a Free State he cannot be recovered under the Fugitive Slave law. We do not think that New York can endow a person held as a slave in South Carolina with any rights of citizenship which will make him a free citizen everywhere in the Union. If this is the opinion of the Court we do not see that it can be objected to. But the doctrine that persons of the negro race are not included in our political community and cannot be citizens of the United States, we are not yet prepared to accept. Negroes are men, and may be freemen, and the essential character of a citizen is that he is a freeman. Every freeman born within the jurisdiction of the United States, of parents not citizens or subjects of a foreign state, is a citizen in every State of the Union, whatever was the condition of his ancestors or the race from which he sprang. This is necessarily so because our institutions recognize among freemen no distinction of rank or race. There were free negroes several, perhaps in all the States at the time of forming the Union, and they were an integral portion of that people of the States who formed the Union and for whom it was formed.

in

The negro being a man, a human soul, endowed by the law of nature with all the rights of a white man, he must in all things be held the equal of white men, except where the municipal law makes a distinction to his prejudice. Is there any clause in the Constitution which excludes negroes from our political community, or that restricts that

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community to the white race? The Court will not pretend it. Is there any clause which recognizes negroes as such as slaves, and declares them incapable of being freemen? Certainly not. How then can the Court pretend that negroes born in the country and born free or freed by their masters or by the operation of law are not citizens? They may be, we need not tell the Court, citizens, entitled to the protection of the Union, and capable of holding and transmitting real estate, and of suing and being sued in the Courts, State and Federal, without being electors.

New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York, confer on negroes the right of suffrage, and make no political or legal distinction between them and white citizens. Suppose one of these negroes, whose ancestors were indeed imported from Africa as slaves, but have never themselves been slaves in other States, should emigrate to Kansas and seek to become a landholder there, could he not do it? Will the Court say that he would be incapable of owning and transmitting landed estate, or maintaining actions in the Federal Courts of the Territory? What rights has a white man in that Territory that he would not have? How then say that negroes are not citizens of the United States? Mr. Chief Justice Taney rests the opinion of the Court on the estimation in which the negro race was held at the time the Union was formed. They were regarded as no fit associates socially or politically for white men, as having no rights which white men were bound to respect, while nobody denied that they might be bought and sold as an ordinary article of merchandise. Suppose such was the fact, what has that to do with the question? Is it any where incorporated into the Constitution of the Union, or recognized by the laws of the United States ? Of course not. Then it cannot be cited against the rights of free negroes under the Federal Government.

But we dispute the fact. There can be no reasonable doubt that Mr. Jefferson and many others when they declared all men created equal intended the principle they asserted after Pope Alexander III. should apply in its fullest extent. Mr. Chief Justice Taney is a Catholic, and knows that from 1482 the Popes have condemned, on pain of excommunication, the reduction of African negroes to slavery, and he knows that Mr. Jefferson, in his draft of