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ust act according to circumstances, and their own judgment, unless when otherwise ordered...If he is acting on his own responsibility, he is only carrying out the Confiscation Act, so far as the slaves are concerned...We have no fear of the result.--N. Y. Herald, Sept. 3. BUT ONE WAY OUT. To our apprehension, God is fast closing every avenue to settled peace but by emancipation. And one of the most encouraging facts is that the eyes of the nation are becoming turned in that direction quite as rapidly as could have been anticipated. Some men of conservative antecedents, like Dickinson of New York, saw this necessity from the first. But it takes time to accustom a whole people to the thought, and to make them see the necessity. It was impossible for Northern men to fathom the spirit and the desperate exigencies of the slave system and its outbreak, and consequently to comprehend the desperate nature of the struggle. We were like a policeman endeavoring to arrest a boy-ruffian, and, for the sake of his friends and for old acquaintance sake, doing it with all possible tenderness for his person and his feelings--till all of a sudden he feels the grip on his throat and the dagger's point at his breast, and knows that it is a life-and-death grapple. Slaveholding is simply piracy continued. Our people are beginning to spell out that short and easy lesson in the light of perjury, robbery, assassination, poisoning, and all the more than Algerine atrocities of this rebellion. It cannot require many more months of schooling like the last eight, to convince the dullest of us what are its essence and spirit. Our people also are rapidly finding out that no peaceful termination of this war will be permitted now by the Slave Power, except by its thorough overthrow. The robber has thrown off the mask, and says now to the nation, "Your life or mine!" Even the compromising Everett has boldly told the South, "To be let alone is not all you ask--but you demand a great deal more." And in his late oration, he has most powerfully portrayed the impossibility of a peaceful disunion. Many men, some anti-slavery, were at first inclined to yield to the idea of a separation. But every day's experience is scattering that notion to the winds. The ferocious spirit exhibited from the first by the Secessionists towards all dissentients, the invasion of Western Virginia by Eastern, the threats to put down loyal Kentucky, the foray in Miss
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