rocious and cynical extravagance, which is to an European eye absolutely
appalling. The South has become enamoured of her shame. Free labour is
denounced as degrading and disgraceful; the honest triumphs of the poor
man who works his way to independence are treated with scorn and contempt.
It is asserted that what we are in the habit of regarding as the honorable
pursuits of industry incapacitate a nation for civilisation and
refinement, and that no institutions can be really free and democratic
which do not rest, like those of Athens and of Rome, on a broad substratum
of slavery. So far from treating slavery as an exceptional institution, it
is regarded by these Democratic philosophers as the natural state of a
great portion of the human race; and, so far from admitting that America
ought to look forward to its extinction, it is contended that the property
in human creatures ought to be as universal as the property in land or in
tame animals.

"Nor have these principles been merely inert or speculative. For the last
ten or twelve years slavery has altered her tactics, and from a defensive
she has become an aggressive power. Every compromise which the moderation
of former times had erected to stem the course of this monster evil has
been swept away, and that not by the encroachments of the North, but by
the aggressive ambition of the South. With a majority in Congress and in
the Supreme Court of the United States, the advocates of slavery have
entered on a career the object of which would seem to be to make their
favourite institution conterminous with the limits of the Republic. They
have swept away the Missouri compromise, which limited slavery to the
tract south of 36 degrees of north latitude. They have forced upon the
North, in the Fugitive Slave Bill, a measure which compels them to lend
their assistance to the South in the recovery of their bondmen. In the
case of Kansas they have sought by force of arms to assert the right of
bringing slaves into a free territory, and in the Dred Scott case they
obtained an extrajudicial opinion from the Supreme Court, which would have
placed all the territories at their disposal. All this while the North has
been resisting, feebly and ineffectually, this succession of Southern
aggressions. All that was desired was peace, and that peace could not be
obtained.

"While these things were done the South continued violently to upbraid the
Abolitionists of the North as the cause of al