s _tout peuple_) admirably fitted
him for his task. He is clear, concise, and accurate, honestly striving
after the truth, while his judicious Preface shows that he appreciates
fully the difficulties that beset whoever seeks to find it. If none of
his readers will be surprised to find his work that of an able man,
there are many who would not expect it to be, as it is, that of a
fair-minded one. He writes without passion, making due allowance for
human nature in the South as well as the North, and does not waste his
strength, as is the manner of fanatics, in fighting imaginary giants
while a real enemy is in the field. Tracing Secession to its twin
sources in slavery and the doctrine of State Rights, and amply
sustaining his statements of fact by citations from contemporary
documents and speeches, he has made the plainest, and for that very
reason, we think, the strongest, argument that has been put forth on
the national side of the question at issue in our civil war. Above all,
he is ready to allow those virtues in the character of the Southern
people whose existence alone makes reunion desirable or possible. We
should not forget that the Negro is at least no more our brother than
they, for if he have fallen among thieves who have robbed him of his
manhood, they have been equally enslaved by prejudice, ignorance, and
social inferiority.

It is not a little singular that, while slavery has been for nearly
eighty years the one root of bitterness in our politics, the general
knowledge of its history should be so superficial. Abolitionism has
been so persistently represented as the disturbing element which
threatened the permanence of our Union, that mere repetition has at
last become conviction with that large class of minds with which a
conclusion is valuable exactly in proportion as it saves mental labor.
Mr. Greeley's chronological narrative is an excellent corrective of
this delusion, and his tough little facts, driven firmly home, will
serve to spike this parrot battery, and render it harmless for the
future. A consecutive statement of such of the events in our history as
bear directly on the question of slavery, separated from all secondary
circumstances, shows two things clearly: first, that the doctrine that
there was any national obligation to consider slaves as merely
property, or to hold our tongues about slavery, is of comparatively
recent origin; and, second, that there was a pretty uniform ebb of
anti-slave