of curiosities," the pension list, in easy combination rob the laboring men of their hire, keep them from "going ahead," educating themselves and their children: these, and not the burdens and workings of our civilization, make them poor and keep them so, prevent their obtaining a foothold, a starting place from which they can rise and work a change of condition-their utmost energies and extreme capacity for labor being required for the procurement of the very necessaries of existence.

England is paying for the restoration of the Bourbons, and the price may yet include the Guelphs!

Are we not justified in declaring war to be one of the greatest foes to the progress of a broad, hearty, ennobling civilization? And are we not forcibly admonished by the example of Great Britain, to say nothing of other examples with which the highways of history are paved, to avoid this scourge of nations and of humanity? As God liveth a nation cannot commit the crime of Cain with impunity. If a people would be free from debt, have an economical government and light taxes; if they would secure to labor a just and sure reward, enable all conditions and classes to prosper and grow in knowledge, they will consent for no reasons that are not absolutely controlling, to be involved in war. One of the greatest writers in England has given her advice which it cannot harm Americans to hear. "The safest and least costly conquests for England would be those over the understanding and hearts of men. They require no garrisons; equip no navies; they encounter no tempests; they withdraw none from labor; they might extend from the Arctic to the Antarctic circle, leaving every Briton at his own fireside; and earth, like ocean, would have her great Pacific."

The alleged decadence in public opinion in this country since the epoch of the Declaration of Independence, upon the subject of human rights-manifested, we are told, alike in the claims and opinions set up within a few years by the slaveholders of the South, and in the tame and ignoble manner in which they have been received by the people of the free States-is cited as suggesting the permanence and increased vigor of a system at war with all improvement, and therefore as a forcible illustration of the

theory of a declining civilization. We are reminded that eighty years ago, men of the South, in common with those of the North, believed slavery to be an evil and a wrong, while at the present day men of the North as well as slaveholders, uphold it as right, and, in the widest sense, profitable and expedient. This is all true and yet we have not the slightest doubt that the real, earnest, effective opinion of the world is more surely against slavery to-day, than it was in the age which produced that glorious testament of liberty and civilization, the Declaration of Independence.

With all the aids which men have received from civilization they have not been wholly lifted above the argument of the pocket, however much it may conflict with the higher argument of right. And if we seek for the causes of this apparent change of opinion, it will not escape our notice that in the South where it began it has followed, if it has not been occasioned by, the changes which have occurred in the temporary value and productiveness of slave property; and this fact may suggest the doubt whether the increased favor with which the system seems to be regarded by slaveholders implies any radical change in their opinions. And so it is while slavery in this country has, with its supposed increasing profitableness, enlarged the number of its supporters and widened the range of its defences, in other countries, where it has been subjected to severer and more reliable tests, and where the results have not been so largely affected by transient and exceptional causes, it is looked upon with less respect than at any former period.

So long as the slaveholders were pleased to make no overt efforts to extend the system of slavery, it was easy and safe for men in either section to talk well and humanely concerning it; but when its inherent necessities required a revelation of its true nature, and compelled the work of aggression upon which it has entered,—when it had succeeded, after the death of General Jackson, in wresting to its uses the powerful and long-dominant party of which he was for many years the unrivalled chieftain if not the acknowledged founder, it became unsafe, partyward and self-ward, to the apprehension of mere politicians, to speak of it in terms such as in the past had

been freely employed by all parties in the North, and tolerated, if not approved, by the South; and political annihilation threatened to wait upon all who should at tempt to carry into execution, on occasions the most proper and legitimate, the doctrines which all men had learned to regard as vital and sacred. Then shallow and false men, politicians by trade, and mere demagogues, those who make the most noise at the corners of the streets, in coal-holes and bar-rooms, began to admit that slavery was not so very wrong, and to assert most vehe mently that slaveholders were exactly right, and, beyond all dispute, the very best fellows that ever broke bread; while of all pestilent and wicked heresies, the worst in their estimation were the doctrines of human rights taught in the New Testament, recognized in the great Declaration and sought to be embodied and made practical by those who, following in the footsteps of the fathers, would keep slavery and involuntary servitude from the free territories of the Republic; and of men none were so little to be endured, none so worthy of ridicule and ceaseless reproach, as those who, had they flourished a generation or two earlier, would have been the honored disciples of Washington and Jefferson, but who, living in these later times, are only "freedom shriekers" and "black Republicans!"

Nevertheless, the North is, and when the final trial shall come will be found to be, sound and reliable on this question of slavery. Although the purpose of slavery is agitation, and its necessity aggression, and it will, if not resisted, destroy freedom, the masses of men are slow to perceive these facts. They are attached to their party organizations; they have fought long and hard campaigns under their proud and honored banners, and will put off as long as they dare the necessary and painful admission that they have been made ensigns of disloyalty or dishonor. Believing in the general doctrines and purposes of their parties, they will not forsake them till there is no alternative for duty. The members of the old political organizations were slow to believe that this purpose of aggression had taken possession of their southern associ ates. Slavery was so bad, so wrong, by universal consent, it was not possible the South meant to extend it. In their respect for their fellow citizens of the slave States, their

faith in men, they would not credit the fact now too plainly revealed to be denied, that the slaveholders had entered upon a system of propagandism, intended to cease only with the subjugation of the free States and the transformation of the government to an odious and intolerable oligarchy. In proportion to the nefariousness of the designs of the slaveholders was the tardiness of the northern people to believe that such designs existed. And here let us stop a moment to remark that this strong and manly confidence comes of a healthy organization of society, and is as widely separated from the indifference and stolidity of an effete civilization, as from the uneasy and unreasoning jealousy which characterizes barbarism.

The vast majority of the people of the free States think alike on this question of slavery, and they only need to see alike in regard to the purposes of the slave power, to act together. Different kinds and degrees of evidence are required for different men. Some were convinced in respect to these purposes when the followers of Mr. Calhoun obtained the control of the administration of James K. Polk, in 1845; a larger number in 1848, when the Democratic National Convention refused to nominate Mr. Van Buren for the presidency, preferring Gen. Cass, who had ventured to place himself, in the Nicholson letter, on the then extreme pro-slavery doctrine of popular sovereignty, and when the Whig National Convention, frightened from its propriety by a few Southern members, dissolved its session without daring to put forth any declaration of principles. The compromise legislation of 1850, although it was pronounced a finality, and men were assured that there should be no more agitation of the slavery dispute, and that all strife should cease, did not fail to open the eyes of many people to the fact that it was part of a grand scheme of the propagandists to enslave the continent. That thousands in all the free States, who had been loyal to their party organizations and had never contemplated the contingency of abandoning them, were left no option but separation when the Nebraska bill was passed, was not so strange as that so many good men adhered to them after this most legible exposition of the plans of those who for a long time had controlled the leading parties in the country. A goodly number, how

ever, of the people who were not convinced by the Nebraska bill, were made to see by the outrages in Kansas, after its territorial organization had been perfected; so many, indeed, that, with the friends who had preceded them against old organizations, old leaders, and old attachments, in spite of cries of radicalism and sectionalism, of the fair promises and earnest conjurations of old friends, and of the fanatic trust which hopes against hope-they numbered a vast majority of all the people of the nonslaveholding States-a majority now greatly augmented by the atrocious doctrines contained in the extra-judicial opinions of the slaveholding judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, and by the interpretation of the true meaning and extent of those opinions by the Presidentan interpretation which consigns not merely the territories, but all the States, to the grasp of slavery forever! And these numbers, constituting the great array of Freedom, are to be still further increased by the workings of the sober second thought of reason and the still small voice of conscience, and by the new, and, if it be possible, the yet more startling demands and assaults which the slave power is certain to make (for aggression is the condition of its being), until an overwhelming majority of all the people of the United States, no longer doubting the unconstitutional and revolutionary designs of the slave oligarchy,true to the doctrines of human rights, strong in their power, faithful to their duties, and assured of their triumph, will be in action as they now are in sentiment, one with the eleven hundred thousand men who a year ago were ready to say by their votes that under no pretext whatever should slavery be planted in the free territories of the United States.

We have dwelt so long upon the specifications of war and slavery, that the patience of our readers would be exhausted, were we not to pass over many of the circumstances and causes of hindrance and danger which beset our civilization. To a few only we will give a brief and passing notice. Among the manifestations in our day proceeding from the old motors, is the love of power, finding expression most distinctly, perhaps, in the strife for wealth, the struggle for possessions. Certainly one of the marked tendencies of the times is to the accumulation