As I complain of the heat, an American next
me tells me that it is nothing to what it is at
certain debates, when he has seen thirteen
hundred people in the strangers' gallery.

But the agitation is greatest and most irrestrainable
when the speaker goes on to quote
the more violent and threatening parts of the
Helper book, which certainly does not breathe
much of the spirit of that great Teacher who
said, "Be merciful, even as your Father in heaven
is merciful," and which shows clearly to me
that if the South is ready to fight, the North is
willing to strike, and that the fiery chivalry of
the one is pretty well balanced by the fanatic
intolerance of the other. I made a note on the spot,
not being unaccustomed to short-hand, of two
of the most violent passages; and here they are:

"And if it comes to blood, let blood come.
No, Sir, if that issue must come, let it come,
and it cannot come too soon. Sir, Puritan
blood has not always shrunk from such encounters.
When the war has been proclaimed
with the knife, and the knife to the hilt, the
steel sometimes glistened in their hand."

And again:

"Against this array, for the defence and propagation
of slavery, we think it will be an easy
matter, independent of the negroes, who, in
nine cases out of ten, would be delighted with
an opportunity to cut their masters' throats."

Fresh murmurs of indignation from the
Southerns in the gallery. The speaker concludes
by tauntingly asking if these are the
speeches of the cold Christian Northerns, the
hard-grinding business men, whose god was the
almighty dollar; and ends by quoting a most
fiery passage from the Olive Branch—one of the
hottest-blooded ephemerals I think I ever read,
and which ought to be printed on cartridge
paper, so combustible is it.

The next speaker, also a Southern, convinces
me more and more of the hatred of North and
South. He reads from the New Orleans Christian
Advocate, a passage aimed entirely at the
North, which he loudly praises. The gist of it
is this bit:

"Southern slavery (as a rule) is the mildest
and most benevolent system of labour in the
world, and the slaves, without (Northern)
abolition-tempters are the most happy and contented
labourers. It is, in comparison with serfdom,
most saintly and holy. There is not one evil to
character and home, to society or country,
attributed to slavery, that abolitionism does
not produce a hundred-fold."

A third speaker, a stout portly bilious man,
with an oily manner, goes higher up the pole
than all the rest. He especially urges the divine
institution of slavery, and the propriety of diffusing
its blessings over all the world.

But I must pass to other scenes, for this is
only one glimpse of the aspect of the unnatural
and fratricidal hatred. I am now on an Ohio
river steamer, gliding down, at sunset, between
the vineyards that garland Cincinnati. Half a
dozen of us are up circling the funnel on the third
and uppermost deck, for the evening is chilly.

I see no faces, for it is getting dusk, except
every now and then when a lighted cigar fusee
illuminates a Southern face. My friends, all
pro-slavery men (for all of a sudden I appear to
have no special opinion on the subject), are
evidently discussing the impending crisis, and are
telling their real minds, unconscious of a lurking
enemy. They are all well-educated, travelled,
intelligent men, and possessed of the latest
information on the prospect of a severance.

A red speck opposite me says suddenly, in an
explosive way,

"Thunder! If I wouldn't make it a law to
hang the first all-fired Northern Yankee that
dare set his foot in a slave state—yes, siree, I
would!"

A second red speck, warming to this, mentions
with great exultation that the Texans
have just been hanging a Methodist preacher
for putting the slaves up to poison the wells.

"Jee-wilikins!" says a third hot cigar. "If I
could only catch a Yankee 'litionist talking to
my slaves, I'd nigger him, and feather him too!"

First cigar now vapours a good deal about the
Palmetto regiments organising in Charleston, and
about the gunpowder Alabama is laying in store:

"It'll be a big fight, it'll be a rough-and-tumble
fight, misters!"

No. 2 cigar is evidently an older man than
the rest, he grows cautious.

"I tell you what, gentlemen," he says, as he
moves his chair back to get up and go below, for
it is almost time to turn in for the night—"if
we go out, what will eventuate will be that we
shall be just whipped back again as we have been
before. The North has the fleet and the army,
the arsenals, the stores, the ports. How can
we live without the North? It's all folly this
big talk. What do we grow our cotton for?
Why, to sell to the North. Who works it up
for us? Why, the North. We can't move or
breathe without the North, or they without us.
We sell what they buy, we grow what they manufacture.
It's so; we go, and they whip us
back again. Good night, gentlemen all!"

This conversation I select from hundreds of
others, because it points to a deeper source of
quarrel between North and South than even
slavery, and that is trade jealousy.

The South is far before the North in political
economy. The Northerns are Protectionists,
the Southerns Free-traders. There has long
been a growing feeling among the cotton
growers that it would be cheaper for them to
send their raw cotton straight to Manchester
to be manufactured, and to have it back in
the made-up form, than to send it North to
the New England mills. Several of the largest
cotton growers round New Orleans told me that
they would rather do this than put money into a
hated Yankee's pocket. (By a "Yankee," an
American always means a New Englander.)
They swore they would starve out the darned
Northerners in two years. On my pressing them
to tell me what were the peculiarly hateful features
of the Northerner, they described them as
an incurable unceasing greed for dollars, a cold