seeming to be the base of it, was a ferocity not to be accounted
for by thwarted calculations or by any resentment at injuries received,
but only by the influence of slavery on the character and manners.
"Scratch a Russian," said Napoleon, "and you come to the Tartar
beneath." Scratch a slaveholder, and beneath the varnish of
conventionalism you come upon something akin to the man-hunter of
Dahomey. Nay, the selfishness engendered by any system which rests on
the right of the strongest is more irritable and resentful in the
civilized than the savage man, as it is enhanced by a consciousness of
guilt. In the first flush of over-confidence, when the Rebels reckoned
on taking Washington, the air was to be darkened with the gibbeted
carcasses of dogs and caitiffs. Pollard, in the first volume of his
_Southern History of the War_, prints without comment the letter
of a ruffian who helped butcher our wounded in Sudley Church after the
first battle of Manassas, in which he says that he had resolved to give
no quarter. In Missouri the Rebels took scalps as trophies, and that
they made personal ornaments of the bones of our unburied dead, and
that women wore them, though seeming incredible, has been proved beyond
question. Later in the war, they literally starved our prisoners in a
country where Sherman's army of a hundred thousand men found supplies
so abundant that they could dispense with their provision train. Yet
these were the "gentry" of the country, in whose struggle to escape
from the contamination of mob-government the better classes of England
so keenly sympathized. Our experience is thrown away unless it teach us
that every form of conventionalized injustice is instinctively in
league with every other, the world over, and that all institutions safe
only in law, but forever in danger from reason and conscience, beget
first selfishness, next fear, and then cruelty, by an incurable
degeneration. Having been thus taught that a rebellion against justice
and mercy has certain natural confederates, we must be blind indeed not
to see whose alliance at the South is to give meaning and permanence to
our victory over it.

In the North, on the other hand, nothing is more striking than the
persistence in good nature, the tenacity with which the theories of the
erring brother and the prodigal son were clung to, despite all evidence
of facts to the contrary. There was a kind of boyishness in the rumors
which the newspapers circulat