the American
Government, the American Press, and the American Church, in its
national organizations, on its side; but the Humanity and the
Christianity of the Nation and the World abhor and execrate it. They
that be against it are more than they that be for it.

It rages, for its time is short. And its rage is the fiercer because
of the symptoms of rebellion against its despotism which it discerns
among the white men of the South, who from poverty or from principle
have no share in its sway. When we speak of the South as
distinguished from the North by elements of inherent hostility, we
speak only of the governing faction, and not of the millions of
nominally free men who are scarcely less its thralls than the black
slaves themselves. This unhappy class of our countrymen are the first
to feel the blight which Slavery spreads around it, because they are
the nearest to its noxious power. The subjects of no European
despotism are under a closer _espionage,_ or a more organized
system of terrorism, than are they. The slaveholders, having the
wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of,
employ these mighty instruments of power to create the public
sentiment and to control the public affairs of their region, so as
best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the
institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction,
even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in
safety. A Christian minister in Tennessee relates an act of fiendish
cruelty inflicted upon a slave by one of the members of his church,
and he is forced to leave his charge, if not to fly the
country. Another in South Carolina presumes to express in conversation
his disapprobation of the murderous assault of Brooks on Senator
Sumner, and his pastoral relations are broken up on the instant, as if
he had been guilty of gross crime or flagrant heresy. Professor
Hedrick, in North Carolina, ventures to utter a preference for the
Northern candidate in the last presidential campaign, and he is
summarily ejected from his chair, and virtually banished from his
native State. Mr. Underwood, of Virginia, dares to attend the
convention of the party he preferred, and he is forbidden to return to
his home on pain of death. The blackness of darkness and the stillness
of death are thus forced to brood over that land which God formed so
fair, and made to be so happy.

That such a tyranny should excite an antagonisti