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which is now our accepted type of good writing on political subjects. It may be said that this only shows that they are not very cultivated, and that they have not skill enough to recognise what is best. But the thing which they do admire is one which in its kind is singularly good. They wait to see the salient points of a subject put in a consecutive, unmistakeable, unanswerable way. Their writing is in fact modelled upon their speaking. What tells with the best kind of American mob is a speech with very little art in it, but with a continuance of plain and homely logic. Fond as they are of bombast and rodomontade, they still award the palm to the speaker who puts into intelligible English arguments which are within the compass of ordinary minds. The present President had a reputation as a speaker long before he was thought of as a successor to Mr. Buchanan. No one thought him a very clever man, and still less an eloquent one; but it was generally recognised that he meant what he said, and had a happy facility in putting his case so that every sentence led the hearer a step further on towards the desired end. was, as his admirers described it, as if every sentence drove a fresh nail in. His Message appears to us to have the characteristics that used to mark his speeches. It is badly worded, and in many parts is not English at all. But it puts in a plain and forcible way the case of the Government. It forces on our attention exactly what the North, as represented by the Executive, is doing, and has been doing, and purposes to do. It raises the real question at issue, and instructs the world what are the hopes and fears with which the Government enters on the

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dreadful struggle. We may be glad that so important a document should force us once for all to consider fairly the whole case of the Union party. We may not agree with the view set before us; but until we know what it is, we cannot gain anything by determining to disagree with it.

The President recounts the history of the few months which have passed since the beginning of his Administration, and his narrative may be taken as setting for ever at rest all question as to the first origin of open war. The Administration did all that lay in its power to make war impossible. It left open every loophole for reconciliation. It even gave the rebels distinct notice that Fort Sumter would only be provisioned with the supplies necessary for the support of the existing garrison, and that no military operations were contemplated. The South, however, was determined on war; and as President Lincoln points out, the fate of Fort Sumter had a great and immediate effect. It drove Virginia and one or two of the other Border States into the arms of the South, and it roused the spirit of the North, and created a general and a profound determination to support the Government at all hazards and at all costs. Mr. Lincoln, now that Congress has met, and the outlay both of life and money can be calculated on, is to make an effective beginning, if not a speedy end. His estimate cannot be termed inadequate, or his resolution doubtful. He calls on the States still remaining in the Union to give him 400,000 men and 400,000,000 dollars. The exact sum which the Finance Minister of his Cabinet asks for to meet the expenditure of the year is not quite so much; but it is upwards of £60,000,000 of English money. Three-fourths of this amount is to be provided by a loan; and as the credit of the States is scarcely good enough in Europe to raise any great portion of this very considerable sum, America must find

it. If the North really provides something like half a million of men and fifty millions of money, besides bearing the increase of new taxation, no one can deny that it will have done the very utmost that could be expected of it. That nothing like so great an effort was ever expected of it in England may be gathered from the much more respectful tone in which the North and the Northern statesmen are spoken of since it was known that they felt so strongly, and were prepared to back so stoutly the cause which they believe to be the right one. It is still, however, thought absurd in England that the North should take so much trouble where real success is impossible. The great interest and importance of the President's Message lies in the clearness with which he explains why he thinks it worth while for the North to try at all hazards to subjugate the South.

In doing this, the President finds it necessary to argue once more the question whether the seceding States can be said to have in any sense a right to secede. This cannot be called an idle discussion, for if the Confederate States are but exercising a legal right, the war is as wicked as it would be absurd. In order to get at a right answer we must distinguish between the senses in which this right of secession is used. Sometimes it is used as the right which justified the Americans in quarrelling with the Government of George III. Sometimes it is used as a right identical with that which permits one of two partners to break up an ordinary trading firm. President Lincoln believes himself able to show that no right of the latter kind could or ever did exist under the American Constitution. But the right of a section of a people or of a whole people to judge what is best for their own interests, is a very different thing. It may be quite right for one province of an empire to try to be separate from the rest, as, for example, it may be quite right in Hungary to try to shake off the yoke of Austria. And

it may be quite right for a people to depose their sovereign, and to put themselves under a new sovereign, as has been done lately in Tuscany and Romagna. This may be quite right if, first, there is a good cause of quarrel; and secondly, if the attempt can be made with a sufficient hope of success. But it is also quite right for the other provinces of the empire, or for the reigning monarch, to prevent the change, if prevention is possible. No one can blame Bohemia and Austria-Proper for putting down Hungary if they can do so, and only place Hungary at the end in its legal position. It would have been quite right for the Duke of Tuscany to have stayed at Florence if he could. It was quite right in England to put down the Irish rebellion at the end of the last century. It has been said that no one who denies the right of the Romagnese to secede from the Pope can deny the right of the South to secede from the North. It is not necessary to deny the right; but we may admit that the Romagnese had the right to secede and annex themselves to Piedmont, and may yet allow that if they attempted to secede again, Victor Emmanuel would be quite right in preventing the secession. In this sense, secession is inevitably a violation of existing law. Such a violation is sometimes justified by past facts, wise and expedient, and in a moral point of view is therefore right; but as opinions will differ on the question of its being justifiable and wise, those whose interest it is to maintain the existing law, cannot be pronounced morally wrong in trying to uphold it. The sympathies of mankind will, however, be greatly determined by the existence or non-existence of previous acts of injustice. President Lincoln therefore shows that the South had nothing to complain of. They were beaten by the fair vote of a popular election, and they would not accept a strictly legal and constitutional defeat. If it is said that they claim to be the best judges of what will benefit them, and that this is a good claim, then the

answer is that the North disagrees with them, and claims that they shall stay in the Union. This is a good claim too. If the Isle of Man claimed to secede from England, on the ground that it was tired of belonging to a country which was burthened with a national debt, England would claim to keep it to its allegiance. The relative claims could only be settled by force, and this must be the end of all discussions which set out with admitting that no injustice has been committed, and that the strict letter of the law must be broken by the secession.

The North is prepared to try its strength, and whether this is wise, as well as legally and morally right, is one of the most difficult and intricate questions conceivable. The common arguments against the expediency of the war are principally three. It is said, first, that the separation of the Union was an inevitable necessity. It is too large. It covers too much space. It is composed of elements too heterogeneous for a compact and powerful State. Secondly, the

secession of the Slave States is said to be not only the loss but the greatest of all possible gains to the North. To get rid of the curse and guilt of slavery, to have no more responsibility for it, to get all the mercantile advantages of it without having to control it, or be answerable for it, was the very thing of all others that Northerners ought to have prayed for from the bottom of their hearts. They will also henceforth escape the presence of the domineering, insulting, intriguing politicians whom for so many years the South has sent to Washington to govern the Union; and to get rid of them opens a prospect of fair and free debate, of a quiet domestic policy, and of an honourable foreign policy. Lastly, the war is pronounced to be necessarily a mistake, because success must lead the conquerors into even deeper embarrassment than failure. How, is it asked, can it be possible that a republican government, without a standing army, should hold in perpetual subjugation an enormous

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expanse of territory and eight millions of free men, most of whom carry their lives in their hands, and would rather fight on any occasion than not? These reasons against the war, and especially the last, are so cogent, that we turn anxiously to see how they are met by the President. He tells us why, in spite of reasons so good, the North are still determined to fight, and to fight if possible in such a way as 'to make short work of it.'

When men come to a fixed resolution in a serious and very difficult matter of practical life, they are generally guided, not by their failing to perceive that the course they take is dangerous, but by their believing that the dangers which they would encounter if they took a different course would be still more serious. This is the point on which President Lincoln dwells so strongly. The dangers of making war are great, but the dangers of not making it are greater. In his opinion, the character and the very existence of Republican government is at stake. With very great truth he observes that any other government but a Republican would be expected to put down the secession of an integral part of its empire, if it could. If, then, a republic did not attempt to exercise its sovereignty, it would be a confession of weakness-a confession that for some of the greatest and most vital purposes of government Republicanism was a failure; that it would do for little States, but not for large. England has shown that it can hold together an immense variety of peoples and races. It keeps Ireland, with an alien population and a hostile priesthood, firmly under its rule, and it governs colonies and dependencies under every climate. We in England may believe that a republic could not do this, but we cannot expect that an American would admit it, or that if Americans were brought generally to believe it, republican institutions would not be in great danger.

It must also be remembered that the prophets who prophesy that the American Union must split up

from the mere effects of its excessive size, are not content with the division of North and South. They see the possibility of five or more great States in North America. The Western States might, it is supposed, form one new nation, and the States of the Pacific seaboard another. This vision is viewed with great complacency in England, where the prospect of America being divided into a multitude of discordant and comparatively small States is not unwelcome. But in America this comes as the death-blow to all the dreams of a great empire, and to all the pride and satisfaction which citizenship in one of the great nations of the world inspires. This is a powerful and a legitimate feeling. Every Englishman would think it ridiculous if a foreigner tried to persuade him that he would be just as happy if England held in the world the same rank as Sweden or Denmark.

But this is not all. It is not merely that if this secession takes effect, the North foresees that it will be only one of a number of rival States. It fears the effect on itself of the neighbours which secession will place along its border. Mr. Russell's letters have made clear to all the European world what persons acquainted with the country had long ago stated, that the South has no elements of a free State in it. There are no republicans in that republic. The governing class lives in the midst of two enormous and very dangerous subject classes, the blacks and the mean whites. These must be kept in order, or simple anarchy and the most frightful confusion will follow. The easiest way to maintain order will be to erect a despotism; and this despotism will not be a despotism of the type known in Europe. It will be a despotism that, to exist, must pander to the worst passions of the governed. The numerical strength of the mean whites is too great to permit their wishes to be disregarded. There are two things they pine for-excitement, and money got without work. The despotism that governs them will

be asked to furnish them with plenty of wars, plenty of plunder, and plenty of slaves. The despotism that will line the borders of the Free States for thousands of miles will be a despotism of slaveholding marauders. What more dreadful neighbours could there be? Nor is it merely that a marauding despotism would be a constant source of annoyance and danger, but it would be a most pernicious example close at hand. If we could imagine the Northern Union one of five States; if its nearest neighbour was enabled to carry on war and to domineer and bully by the concentration of forces which a despotism, for a time at least, ensures; and if it had been conceded, in one great and critical instance, that there is in republicanism an inherent weakness which prevents its being able to carry out a great policy, or to keep together a great empire, the firmness with which the North at present clings to free institutions might give way, and New York might be the capital of a fifth part of North America, with an Emperor instead of a President at its head. No one can deny that this is a not improbable result of the secession of the Southern States, and no one can wonder that it is a result from which the North recoils in horror and dismay.

The fate of the South itself may also weigh with the Government of the North in this anxious moment of doubt. If we may trust the reports sent to us, not only by Mr. Russell, but by every traveller there-if we may accept the papers and the books of the South as signs of what really goes on there -a more wretched tyranny, a more miserable broken-down barbarism scarcely exists anywhere than in the worst Slave States. Perhaps Mexico or Bokhara might be even more disagreeable as places of permanent residence, but it is only these very extreme haunts of savage lawlessness that can eclipse the horrors of a society where the unbridled insolence of the meanest of idlers sets the constant tone of society, and imposes an iron bon

dage on all thought and feeling. No doubt many of the planters are gentlemen, with high courage and high feeling and cultivated minds; and their families, as we on this side of the Atlantic are aware by experience, are pleasanter and more friendly than the Northerners. But the planters appear to have no more influence for good, no more power of directing and elevating the mean whites and loafers of the towns and the roaming vagabonds of the outlying settlements, than a stray missionary can direct and elevate the population of St. Giles's. Were the Southern States to continue in the Union, there is some hope that gradually this state of things would become better. may be a feeble chance, but at any rate the Southern mob would be kept from its worst excesses. It would be restrained from open insubordination. Above all, it would be cut off from the African slavetrade, the renewal of which will be the first demand of the poor proprietors of the South if once they are the supreme arbiters of a new State. There is a degradation and a waste of great opportunities and resources in the picture which may well touch the noble feelings of American statesmen, and may nerve them to try any extremity rather than suffer such a dismal chaos of lawlessness to occupy the soil of America.

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It may also be argued that the choice is not really between war and peace, but between a short and decisive one and a long and undecisive one. It is difficult to see how the two Confederations, jealous of each other, with hostile feelings and very divergent policies, could be at peace for more than the briefest interval. The command of the Mississippi and the escape of fugitive slaves would furnish endless grounds of quarrel. It is true that if peace were made, one of the first conditions would be the free navigation of the Mississippi. The North would claim this, and the South would not think of resisting it. But the access to the sea which this great river gives the North is so very necessary to the Western

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States, and could be so easily barred by the South, that every act of the Southern authorities that could be distorted by the most fervent imagination into an intention to control the navigation, would raise a flame in the North. The slaves would be even a greater cause of discord. At first sight it might seem as if the Northern States would only stand to the Slave States in the relation that Canada stands now. Every one knows that if a slave gets across the St. Lawrence he is free, and there is an end of the matter; the slaveowner accepts his loss, and no peculiar irritation against Canada or Great Britain is felt. But if we look a little further, we shall find that there are very considerable differences between the two cases. Canada is not a hostile State, nor is it really near at hand. It is a friendly State far off. But the North and South would be separated by a line which in many parts could follow no natural boundary, and would only be visible on paper. On one side of this visible line would be an enemy that would have to look on while he saw what a few minutes before had been his property parading comfortably about, and on the other side would be an enemy who would be very little of an American if he did not take care to make his success take the most unpleasant and irritating shape possible. Peace will be as difficult to preserve as it would have been in St. Juan, if, when General Harney landed his troops there, a body of British volunteers had been landed there too.

But even if the subjugation of the South is desirable or is possible, can the Union again include the Slave States, and the Constitution once more prove a working machine? It is, as it seems to us, much more difficult to see how this can be, than to see why, if it is possible, it should be sought after at any cost. But in order to discuss the point at all, we must take for granted that the victory of the North in the battle-field is complete. Half measures and a doubt

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