s dungeons,
suppresses personal liberty, opens letters, and in the reckless
saturnalias of despotism it rivals many from among the European
despots. Europe, which does not see well the causes, shudders at this
_delirium tremens_ of despotism in America.

Certainly, treason being in ebullition, the holders of power could not
stand by and look. But instead of an energetic action, instead of
exercising in full the existing laws, they hesitated, and treason,
emboldened, grew over their heads.

The law inflicted the severest capital punishment on the chiefs of the
revolt in Baltimore, but all went off unharmed. The administration one
day willingly allows the law to slide from its lap, and the next
moment grasps at an unnecessary arbitrary power. Had the traitors of
Baltimore been tried by court-martial, as the law allowed, and
punished, few, if any, traitors would then have raised their heads in
the North.

Englishmen forget that even after a secession, the North, to-day
twenty millions, as large as the whole Union eight years ago, will in
ten years be thirty millions; a population rich, industrious, and
hating England with fury.

Seward, having complete hold of the President, weakens Lincoln's mind
by using it up in hunting after comparatively paltry expedients.
Seward-Scott's influence neutralizes the energetic cry of the country,
of the congressmen, and in the Cabinet that of Blair, who is still a
trump.

The emancipation of slaves is spoken of as an expedient, but not as a
sacred duty, even for the maintenance of the Union. To emancipate
through the war power is an offence to reason, logic, and humanity;
but better even so than not at all. War power is in its nature
violent, transient, established for a day; emancipation is the highest
social and economical solution to be given by law and reason, and
ought to result from a thorough and mature deliberation. When the
Constitution was framed, slavery was ashamed of itself, stood in the
corner, had no paws. Now-a-days, slavery has become a traitor, is
arrogant, blood-thirsty, worse than a jackal and a hyena; deliberately
slavery is a matricide. And they still talk of slavery as sheltered by
the Constitution; and many once anti-slavery men like Seward, etc.,
are ready to preserve it, to compromise with the crime.

The existence of nations oscillates between epochs when the substance
and when the form prevails. The formation of America was the epoch
when substance pre