d
free speech. Where the one exists the other cannot. The vitality of
the one rests in pure force, and force and reason never agree. It
always has been, and always will be, that force must either
suppress reason or reason will subvert force. One of the first acts
of the slavery propagandists in Kansas was to pass enactments
through their spurious Legislature, making it a felony, punishable
by imprisonment and hard labor, for any man to 'assert or maintain
by speaking or writing that persons have not the right to hold
slaves in this Territory.' It has been so in every Slave State, and
worse. _Not only have slave codes interdicted, in every one of
them, all adverse discussion of the institution, but a mob power
has always been at hand to take summary vengeance upon it with
Lynch law. These resorts were not a mere caprice; they were a
necessity_. Slavery being once accepted as the prime object, there
was no alternative but to protect it just in this manner. _But the
war has ended all that. There can be no mobs where the bayonet
governs; nor arbitrary local laws where general military law is
paramount. The discussion of slavery is as free now in New Orleans
as in New York_. It is no more within the province of the military
Governor, Shepley, to interfere with fair discussion there, than it
is within the rightful power of the civil Governor, Seymour, to
interfere with it here. _And in the Border States, where the civil
laws still prevail, hostility to the rebellion has excited such a
dissatisfaction with slavery as its cause, that by general consent
perfect freedom is allowed in arguing against the institution._ The
consequence of this freedom has been that Missouri has already
determined to abolish it; Maryland and Delaware have put declared
emancipationists in places of their highest trusts by unprecedented
majorities; and Kentucky is visibly casting about to see how she
can best rid herself of the curse.

'_We say, then, that even if the National Government had the right
to institute new civil measures against slavery, it would not be
necessary. The unavoidable military operations of the war, and the
free discussion which is sure to attend it, are enough of
themselves to break down the institution. The Government has simply
to stand quiet, and l