the stronger to enslave the weaker can come to no
understanding with democracy. The conflict is in the things, not in the
men, and one or the other must abdicate. Of course the leaders, to whom
submission would be ruin, and a few sincere believers in the doctrine
of State rights, are willing to sacrifice even slavery for
independence, a word which has a double meaning for some of them; but
there can be no doubt that an offer to receive the seceding States back
to their old position under the Constitution would have put the war
party in a hopeless minority at the South. We think there are manifest
symptoms that the chinks made by the four years' struggle have let in
new light to the Southern people, however it may be with their ruling
faction, and that they begin to suspect a diversity of interest between
themselves, who chiefly suffer by the war, and the small class who
bullied them into it for selfish purposes of their own. However that
may be, the late proposal of Davis and Lee for the arming of slaves,
though they certainly did not so intend it, has removed a very serious
obstacle from our path. It is true that the emancipating clause was
struck out of the act as finally passed by the shadowy Congress at
Richmond. But this was only for the sake of appearances. Once arm and
drill the negroes, and they can never be slaves again. This is admitted
on all hands, and accordingly, whatever the words of the act may be, it
practically at once promotes the negro to manhood by brevet, as it
were, but at any rate to manhood. For the offer of emancipation as a
bounty implies reason in him to whom it is offered; nay, more, implies
a capacity for progress and a wish, for it, which are in themselves
valid titles to freedom. This at a step puts the South back to the
position held by her greatest men in regard to slavery. All the
Scriptural arguments, all the fitness of things, all the physiological
demonstrations, all Mr. Stephens's corner-stones, Ham, Onesimus, heels,
hair, and facial angle,--all are swept out, by one flirt of the besom
of Fate, into the inexorable limbo of things that were and never should
have been. How is Truth wounded to death in the house of her friends!
The highest authority of the South has deliberately renounced its
vested interest in the curse of Noah, and its right to make beasts of
black men because St. Paul sent back a white one to his master. Never
was there a more exact verification of the Spanish prove