ey have
loved the pursuit of personal prosperity and pleasure more than their
country; and now they must spend life and living to reconquer their great
inheritance, and win back at the sword's point what Heaven had forbidden
them to lose. Nor are we, here in England, without part in this tremendous
sin and sorrow; we have persisted in feeding our looms, and the huge
wealth they coin, with the produce of slavery. In vain our vast Indian
territory has solicited the advantage of becoming our free cotton
plantation; neither our manufacturers nor our government would venture,
would wait, would spend or lose, for that purpose; the slave-grown harvest
was ready, was abundant, was cheap--and now the thousand arms of our great
national industry are folded in deplorable inactivity; the countless hands
that wrought from morn till night the wealth that was a world's wonder are
stretched unwillingly to beg their bread; and England has never seen a
sadder sight than the enforced idleness of her poor operatives, or a
nobler one than their patient and heroic endurance.

And now you ask me what plan, what scheme, what project the government of
the United States has formed for the safe and successful emancipation of
four millions of slaves, in the midst of a country distracted with all the
horrors of war, and the male population of which is engaged in military
service at a distance from their homes? Most assuredly none. Precipitated
headlong from a state of apparent profound security and prosperity into a
series of calamitous events which have brought the country to the verge of
ruin, neither the nation or its governors have had leisure to prepare
themselves for any of the disastrous circumstances they have had to
encounter, least of all for the momentous change which the President's
proclamation announces as imminent: a measure of supreme importance, not
deliberately adopted as the result of philanthropic conviction or
far-sighted policy, but (if not a mere feint of party politics) the last
effort of the incensed spirit of endurance in the North--a punishment
threatened against rebels, whom they cannot otherwise subdue, and which a
year ago half the Northern population would have condemned upon principle,
and more than half revolted from on instinct.

The country being in a state of war necessarily complicates everything,
and renders the most plausible suggestions for the settlement of the
question of emancipation futile: because from f