ence ratified and confirmed; and that to war against us, is to incite the socialists to war against everything sacred, valuable, or venerable in free society. Let us show them that every abolitionist of distinction is an agrarian, infidel, no-government man, a free-love man-more dangerous at home than to us.

We shall not offend our friends in Massachusetts by legislation directed at the party now in the ascendant. Never were a baser set of wretches in possession of power, than those who have ruled and rioted in that State ever since the time of the Hiss legislature; and yet, no State possesses so many men eminently fitted to rule. The creatures born with saddles on their backs, have thrown their riders. The dogs have escaped from the kennel. But horses and dogs need masters-they cannot long live without them. The present governing class in Massachusetts are naturally the lower layer of society. They are incapable of fulfilling, for any length of time, any other offices than those belonging to that lower layer. They will soon subside into their proper position; and be glad to get gentlemen, and conservatives, and scholars, and Christians, to rule over them, while they "hew the wood and draw the water."

These outbreaks of society, in which the "meanest get uppermost," will occasionally occur. But in the long run virtue governs vice, intelligence governs ignorance, religion controls infidelity. Let us of the South be patient, and wait for that process of subsidence and stratification in Northern society, which will be sure to put our friends uppermost; for it is as natural for them to ride, as it is for the masses to be ridden. He who denies that God made the multitude to be directed, governed, and controlled by the few, and that this common multitude is happier, more virtuous, and prosperous, when governed, than when governing, quarrels with the course of nature, and dis-/ putes the wisdom and beneficence of Deity. Universal suffrage may put society wrong-side up, but nature is all-powerful, and soon brings down the lower layer, or stratum, to its true place.

We, of the South, take too narrow a view of the slavery subject. Opinion in favor of slavery is advancing, the world over; but that opinion is but part of the great conservative reaction in politics, in law, in morals, and in religion, that has set in, and is steadily progressing everywhere. It is the rolling back of the reformation! Of reformation run mad. It ran mad even in the days of Elizabeth, with the Puritans and Independents, the ancestors of our Yankee abolitionists. In Cromwell's day, all England, for a while, became demented.

After making Western Europe the scene of fratricidal war for ages, it culminated (in its political phasis) in France, and burst forth in frequent revolutions, whose recurrence is still matter of every day's apprehension. We quarrel not with the reformation of Luther and Calvin, but with "the right of private judgment" engrafted on it by infidels and fanatics. It has begotten socialism, infidelity, agrarianism, abolitionism, and radicalism of every hue and shade. Finally, the conservatives have been roused into action. In religion, the admiration generally expressed for the Catholic church as a political institution, and the daily adoption of more of form, of rule and ceremony, by the orthodox Protestant Trinitarian churches, is a most important point, and symptoms of a salutary reaction.

The open ridicule and denunciation of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, and of the doctrine of human equality, which we hear men indulging in every day, is another healthful conservative sign of the times. But most conclusive of all, is the evidence afforded by the change of opinion and of action on the subject of slavery and the slavetrade, in France and England. The emperor of France and the London Times newspaper are the most influential political institutions in Christendom; the best exponents of public opinion, for they always have either the sagacity to detect and follow it, or the power to foresee and control it. They are both advocates of slavery and the slave-trade. The statesmen, the press, the practical men, nay, the governments of England and France, regret the error of West India emancipation, and are busy retrieving that error, by importing or encouraging the importation of hundreds of thousands of coolies and African slaves-slaves in all save the name. This reaction on the slavery subject cannot stop here. Negro slaves, coolies, or apprentices, will be brought to every corner of Christendom, where their labor is profitable.

Shall we cut ourselves off from this great reaction in religion, law, morals, politics, and social organization, go into voluntary exile, dissolve the Union, place ourselves under the ban of public opinion; or, shall we lead the reaction, govern the Union, and use it as a means to secure our rights and punish abolition, and to exalt our long-tried, true, and faithful friends. at the North into their true position of governors instead of governed? If the South be true to herself, if she have one tittle of self-appreciation, if she can possibly be made to comprehend her own position, the post of honor is hers, and she will become the pattern, the exemplar, the leader of Christendom. She,

alone, has retained that great institution, which philosophy and history, God and nature, proclaim to be necessary to man's wellbeing. She, alone, has made adequate provision for the laboring man. She, alone, has a contented, moral, religious society, undisturbed by infidelity, socialism, riots, revolutions, and famine. She, alone, can say to the world, we present the model which you must imitate in reforming your institutions. "Disunion within the Union," no intercourse or trade with any Northern State in which our slave property is not as much respected by law and by practice as any other property, will lead at once to a direct trade from Baltimore, Norfolk, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New-Orleans, with Europe; will encourage, promote, and build up, Southern commerce, manufactures, agriculture, education, &c., and will, while it enriches and enlightens us, make us independent. It will bring the abolitionists of the North to terms, for they cannot live without our trade, without slave products, and a slaveholding market for their commerce and manufactures.

It will put the abolitionists down, and place the conservatives, our long-tried friends, in power. The Union is ours if we choose to use it, and, hence, the abolitionists denounce it.

ART. 11. THE BASIS OF NORTHERN HOSTILITY TO THE SOUTH.

THOUGH kindred in blood, the conduct of the Northern States to us has ever been that of deadly enemies, whose hatred no circumstance of time, place, or even interest, could soften. For half a century they have pursued toward the Southern States a systematic course of constantly increasing wrong, injustice, and oppression, and have injured and insulted us to a degree that is hard to be forgiven. A portion of the people in this Northern section is seeking to abolish slavery in the States where it now exists, and to turn the slaves loose upon us, upon terms of social and political equality; a larger portion, indeed, nearly all the rest, is seeking the same end, but by a more indirect route-proposing to prevent its further extension, denying it protection in the common territories, and confining it to its present bounds, at all hazards and under all circumstances. Where the settled antagonism, that undeniably exists between the people of the Northern and Southern States had its origin, may be somewhat doubtful; but there can be no doubt that active anti-slaveryism is a weed of late, though rapid and rank, vegetation. The immediate proximate cause of Northern hatred for the South is Envy; but it is probable that the so

cial antagonism—the "irrepressible conflict"-of the two sections is hereditary, and that the attack on the institution of Slavery is only a kind of adventitious opportunity eagerly caught up for this antagonism to develop itself. It is very certain that the number of people in the world who honestly and deliberately, from principle, oppose negro-slavery, is very small; and, therefore, such opposition cannot be the cause of this social antagonism, but only a sort of adventitious effect. We do not say that there are but few opposers of negro-slavery in the world-but, that it has few honest and enlightened opposers from principle; and this is made still more evident by the fact that in the Southern States, even among those who never did, and, probably, never will, own a slave, where the practical workings of the institution are felt and seen, the conviction of its justice, morality, and utility, is universal. There is not a New-England senator or politician, and very few women, (!) that really care anything about negro-slavery, that know anything about its character, or that are really exercised in spirit, because of any sin attaching to us for holding negroes in bondage. Nothing of the kind. They envy and hate us, and have seized upon the fact of slavery in the South, as a salient or weak point through which to attack us. We are convinced that, if negro-slavery were entirely removed from our midst, this New-England hatred and envy of the South would hardly even be checked for a time, certainly not dissipated, and would seek and soon find some other opportunity for development. So we believe that if the climate and soil of NewEngland (peopled as it is now), were such as to rendor negroslavery profitable, the institution would have remained there in full force, and never an anti-slavery sentiment would have been breathed in all the western hemisphere; and, yet, New-England hatred of us would have found vent in some way, stimulated, most probably, to an earlier development by the fact of a rivalry of interest which does not now exist. Whence then originated this settled antagonism-this "irrepressible conflict"? We leave the certain solution of the difficulty to those who have more time to examine the various phases of human nature, and to investigate the secret springs of its action. It does not arise from any rivalry of interests, for none such exists -on the contrary, it is vitally the interest of the Northern States to continue negro-slavery in the South. We thinkthough it is suggested as a mere individual opinion-that this antagonism originated, at least, begun to act, in the revolution. which temporarily changed the face of Great Britain something

more than two hundred years ago. The cavaliers and puritans of that age were undoubtedly the ancestors, and, to a great extent, the prototypes of this.* That the puritan was unfit for rational freedom, civil or religious, was sufficiently proved by the wild extremity of his principles going to the subversion of all society; by the fierce fanatic intolerance of his opinions; and by the short duration of his power when attained; that the Northern Yankee now is unfit for rational liberty, civil or religious, is even yet more abundantly verified in the still wilder extremes of his social, moral, and political heresies, tending to a yet more complete subversion of society and overthrow of the moral government of God. The puritan hatred of the cavaliers was deep and bitter, but neither deeper nor more bitter than that of the mass of the Northern, for the people of the Southern States, especially that portion of the North known as New-England.

The cavaliers had many human failings; they were, in leed, of the earth, earthy; they fought, they drank, they swore, and they loved, as better men will neither fight, nor drink, nor swear, nor love-but they made no pretence to unusual sanctity, and they were a gallant, high-spirited, chivalrous, and generous race, of the pure Anglo-Saxon blood; and to this day their descendants compose the only really free portion of the English people. They were brave, honorable, social; loyal to their king, and loyal to the church. Knowing that earth could not be made a paradise, they did not, therefore, seek to turn the fair footstool of God into a gloomy hell. Failings they had, but dishonor, sordid meanness, and mammon worship, they knew not; and they served their king and their church, with a loyal devotion that history has seldom paralleled. Their intellectual development was then not surpassed in Europe, and their moral culture was at least equal to that of their age. The puritan side of the picture was a revolting contrast. was moral deformity and hideous gloom. The English puritans proper were among the very worst developments of human nature-excelled by the French Jacobins only, in the extent of power achieved, and in rapidity and energy of action. The puritan revolution was a politico-religious fanaticism, that of the Jacobins, anti-religious; but extremes meet, and these

All

The reader will bear in mind that there were two revolutions in England in the 17th century, very different in their characters, actors, and objects; and that it is of the first of these -that of 1640-we are here speaking. The revolution of 1688 was widely different-its actors were the sensible and thinking classes, and its object to limit the royal power, and to create rational freedom-not to overthrow all government, and establish a crazy, gloomy, and intolerant anarchy.