observe next how they struck root and grew to be
the deadly thing we see.

We are all of one mind, and of a right mind,
in England as to the evil of slavery. It is an
evil to the slave; it is an evil to the slaveholder
himself. Where negro slaves work on the soil,
the dignity of labour is denied; it is thought
shame for a white man to live by the sweat of
his own brow, and the whites not rich enough
to possess blacks, upon whose industry they
live, fall into a large, miserable, shiftless class,
known as the " mean whites," and despised by
the very negro. This poor, shiftless, despised
middle class consists of the very men who are
the strength and backbone of all free society.
There is but one field of industry—the plantation—
and industry is brought from without to
occupy it. There could be no more fatal blow
dealt to the South than this that comes of the
working of its own " peculiar institution." But
the North is really fighting not to destroy or
confine, but to claim its right of continued
participation in this institution. The Southern
planter, holding his slave to be property, desires
security in its possession, and that he had and
can only have under the sort of union from
which, on other accounts, he has withdrawn.

The constitution of the United States, framed
by slaveowners, gave the whole might of the
Union for suppression of slave insurrection. It
provided also for the capture and restoration
into bondage of any escaped slave. The capital
of the Union that the North fights to maintain
is a slave-holding city, and its Federal court
decrees slavery to be a prison with walls wide as
the country. Within the Union there was and
there would be, were the Union restored, no
place of lawful hope for the fugitive from a
thraldrom which every man has a just right to
throw off if he can. If, therefore, detestation
of slavery were really the animating spirit of the
North, it should rejoice at a division by which
it is parted for ever from the unclean thing, and
enabled, like England, to declare every man free
whose foot touches its soil. But instead of
rejoicing to be clear of the taint, instead of exulting
at a change which confines the slave system
to the slave-holding states, and not only
absolves the North from the degrading duties of
slave-catcher, but gives it a chance of strangling
the whole system of slave labour with a girdle
of freedom, the states of the North fight—if for
anything at all in the way of slavery, for nothing
but continuance of their participation in the
wrong. The South, instead of seceding for the
sake of slavery, secedes in spite of the fact that
its separate maintenance will expose them, under
that head, to risks and losses against which the
Union would afford security. The Chicago
manifesto of the Northern party, now supreme,
adopts as its fourth article the maintenance
inviolate of the rights of the states, and
especially the right of each state to order and
control its own domestic institutions, while the
small party of thorough-going abolitionists,
without political importance, though now hot
with the Unionists, has been accustomed to
claim "justice for the slave at any price," and
to deprecate what its leaders sometimes called
"the blood-stained Union." "This Union,"
said William Lloyd Garrison, ome of their chief
authorities, "this Union is a lie; the American
Union is a sham, an imposture, a covenant with
death, an agreement with hell." Mr. Lincoln,
on the other hand, said most distinctly, in his
inaugural address: "I have no purpose, directly
or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of
slavery in the states where it exists; I believe I
have no lawful right to do so, and I have no
inclination to do so." He expressed in the same
speech his willingness that the Fugitive Slave
Law, as a provision of the constitution, "should
be made express and irrevocable."

An addition was therefore actually made to
the constitution on the third of last March to
the effect "that no amendment shall be made to
the constitution which will authorise or give
congress power to abolish or interfere within
any state with the domestic institutions thereof,
including that of persons held to labour or
servitude by the laws of the said state." Slavery
was thus on the eve of the present struggle, by
the sole will and consent of the North, made
irrevocable in the Union. Of whom, then, are
we to believe, and with what shadow of truth can
it be represented to us, that the fight of the
North is against slavery, or that the secession
of the South is for its preservation? Nobody
doubts that the party use made of the slave
question has embittered feeling between South
and North. But the main party use of it has
been for the raising of political capital on behalf
of other interests than those of the slave. Even
the separation of the South from these sources
of irritation must be reckoned, with every more
material consequence of its establishment as a
separate republic, among the changes that all
tend to clear away some of the difficulties in the
way of a sound reconsideration of the slave
system. The division of the Union into two
adjacent republics, one slave-holding, the other
free, would, in fact, bring us very many years
nearer to the end of slavery than a continuance
of the old system under a great Union pledged
to support as a whole the evil that afflicts a
half.

The Federalist cry of anti-slavery as a casus
belli is not altogether a true issue. We have
here shown what the cause of the disruption is
not. We shall show next week what the cause
of the disruption is.

Meanwhile, any one who desires to acquire a
clear view of these all-important questions
should read Mr. Spence's book. The work
thoroughly vindicates its title: "The American
Union, its effect on National Character and
Policy, with an Inquiry into Secession as a
Constitutional Right, and the Causes of the
Disruption." Mr. Spence has assembled facts and
authorities in masterly support of his reasoning,
and has grouped them with a temperate and
logical clearness that cannot fail to convince.
He writes with the discretion of a judge who
has all the evidence before him, strong and