the whole nation. The higher minds stand aloof from politics, as Bayard would turn from a modern prize-ring. The meed for which he had been used to contend with noble knights-the smiles of ladies, the favour of anointed kings, and immortal honour-is now a bag of coin handed to the victor in a pothouse. So the best Americans either betake themselves to other pursuits, or roam disconsolately over the world, where they see their equals winning honour in the field from which they are for ever excluded. been unceasing between crown and America has made itself felt over people for the possession of power. In a struggle involving the interests of all England, it was inevitable that the champions should be the best that all England could produce. The great names ranged on each side, of those who resisted the encroachments of the crown or stemmed the advance of democracy, are among the greatest in the world. This proves that our constitution has fulfilled its most important and most delicate office-that of bringing the best of the spirit and intellect of the nation to the service of the state. So important an end is it, that the most illogically-constructed government in the world, fulfilling it, would become more than tolerable, while the most perfect theory, which did not evolve this result, must be merely a plausible blunder. It is notorious that this end has not been fulfilled by the American constitution. Nor was it rational to expect that it should be. Statesmanship is born of the collision of great principles or of important interests. No such result can be produced where power is all on one side. When the people have everything, they need no champions. Therefore, in America, patriotism means flattery of the people; party spirit is the spirit of rapine; and debates, instead of eliciting wisdom and truth, are the ignoble squabbles of mediocrities. Where, in American history for the last forty years that is to say, ever since the impulse of the Revolution died out are we to look for her great statesmen? Yet in that period there is no great nation in Europe that has not produced men who have secured an enduring fame by their assertion of great principles, or by the influence they have exerted on the destinies of nations. And it is not true, as has been said, and quoted with applause, that the nation is happiest which has no history, for such happiness is stagnation or worse. The spirit that presides over the public life of That men of this class should countenance the violent measures of the North is at first sight unaccountable. It is difficult to imagine that intellectual men should either be friendly to a system which extends its theory of equality to intellect, and thus neutralises their natural superiority; or should wish to establish, in its grossest form, the supremacy of a numerial majority, by the forcible subjugation of the great minority which constitutes the South. It is quite possible, however, that, while giving their voice to the North, they may neither be friendly to the Union, nor desirous of seeing the South subjugated. They may wish to see the natural aristocracy to which they belong raised to its proper position in the state. They may consider that, by quiet separation, the Union might, with increased compactness and unanimity, recover much of its vitality, and that the system they suffer under might be indefinitely prolonged. And they may view the present convulsion of that system as the necessary preliminary of those political changes which, it is natural to suppose, they must ardently desire. To suppose this is not to impugn their patriotism; for if we have made our views clear in this paper, it is evident that they may look on such a crisis as now exists as necessary for the regeneration of their most important institutions. They may there fore accompany the movement with the expectation of finding an opportunity to control it. But we do not suppose that any men possessing the powers requisite for statesmanship can really believe that, if by force of arms the reluctant South should be dragged back to the Union, the Union will be thereby restored on its original basis. Successful coercion would be a greater revolution than the acknowledgment of secession-this only lops the branches, while that strikes at the root. Nor do we imagine that any such men as these are to be found in the ranks of the Abolition party. Clever people may belong to that party. Mrs Beecher Stowe is a very clever woman, and has written a very clever novel; but she is, by the success of that novel, committed to sentiments more adapted to fiction than to politics. She evidently looks on the South as a vast confederation of Legrees, keeping millions of virtuous Uncle Toms in horrible subjection; and quotes Mr Wendell Phillipps as if she believed that mischievous monomaniac to be an inspired apostle. But statesmen must ask themselves how the difficulty presented by the condition of the African race would be solved by setting them free. What is to become of the liberated slaves? and how is their labour to be replaced? are questions the very first to be asked, but which we must not expect a crazy Abolitionist to answer. But such considerations do not occur to those enthusiastic philanthropists who testify to their love of the negro by their hatred of the planter. The destruction of armies, the ravage and ruin of territory, are as nothing, in their heated fancy, compared with the success of their plan. And if secession were accomplished their plan would be at an end, for they would then have no more concern in the liberation of the slaves of the South than in a crusade to set the Georgian and Circassian ladies free from the harems of the Bosphorus. Thus, under present circumstances, their fanaticism has become sanguinary; they are pledged to their course, and will follow it with all the desperate recklessness and tenacity with which weak minds will cling to their only chance of notoriety. Supposing, therefore, as seems to be the case, that men of all classes take part in the measures of the North, we must suppose that those of the highest intellect among them do not share the opinions most vociferously asserted. Yet, after all, their opinions are not, just now, the most important. The motives of those on whom the duration and magnitude of the war depend-not the wise men, nor the politicians, nor the men in office, but the sovereign people those are what it is of most concern to understand. And we think that in attributing their present war-fervour to exalted motives we should overshoot the mark. In the absence of great motives, people are apt to magnify small ones. We must remember that the multitude have been bred up in impatience of opposition. They have also been trained to despise the South. They might have been content to separate, but they could not bear to see the South take the initiative. Opposed and humiliated as they have been, their impatience and contempt have produced vindictiveness, which seeks only to injure, and which forms a cause of action fortunately rather violent than durable. We must consider also the wound the national vanity received in the falsification of all the boastings that have so long formed the debased currency of their patriotism. Unless the dollar had been suddenly blotted from the Transatlantic system, we can conceive no change so bewildering to the Transatlantic mind as the rupture of the Union and mutilation of the star-spangled banner. It is as if a fire-worshipper should wake up some morning, and find the sun vanished from the heavens, and two pallid wavering moons supplying the place of the luminary. But, happily, neither is wounded vanity to be counted on as a durable element of strife. Like means supremacy over all, then secession is impossible by any method whatever without entailing the destruction of the Union. The Union, say the logicians, is to be perpetual, because the Articles of Confederation have decreed it. No doubt they have decreed it—just as, if it had so pleased them, they might have called spirits from the vasty deep. For whither does this doctrine of perpetuity lead? It implies that, though the Union should embrace the whole continent of America, and, after that, the whole world, still the whole world must be the Union bound by Hamilton, Madison, & Co. It implies that, though it should lead to general discontent, general hatred of the common tie, and general ruin, still the intention of the framers is paramount. It implies that, though thirty-three States should withdraw from it, still the thirty-fourth State shall consider the others as rebels, and must continue its forlorn career in the paths of the Constitution till the Union shall be superseded by the Millennium. But the truth is, that a Unionist cannot move without stumbling over a paradox, the entire crop of those logical difficulties springing from the great rootparadox of a supreme government existing by consent. There is a class of writers in the North who make it their business to discuss, not the philosophy (for they are too unpractical for that), but the logic of the quarrel. Tybalt, they fight by the book of arithmetic. They array facts, quote precedents, put cases, draw inferences, and transcribe passages from the writings of constitutional lawyers, to prove that the case of secession was not contemplated by the original legislators of the Union. One proves that the Union is not a league or a confederation; another demonstrates that it is a compact, and subject to the law of compacts. Not satisfied with this discovery, he further decides it to be a "transitory convention," which, under present circumstances, sounds like an unfeeling sarcasm; and also that the present generation of Americans, as successors to the original framers, are "in privity," whatever that may be. All are clear that no State can secede from the Union. And all the while, in grim mockery, the hostile ranks line the Potomac. Imagine Mr Jefferson Davis being required to recant his proclamation, and return to his allegiance, because a Northern reviewer has discovered that the Union is a "transitory convention." Fancy Beauregard laying down his arms on being satisfied on the same authority that he is "in privity." The intentions of the original framers are also triumphantly quoted as contrary to secession. It never seems to occur to the gentlemen who resort to this argument, that the main intention of those legislators must have been to devise a constitution, not for the sake of the constitution, but for the common good. The dilemma is simply this Either the Union means supremacy over all the States, whe- "Is there a doubt whether a ther they like it or not; or it is common government can embrace binding only on such States as so large a sphere? Let experience choose to continue to form it. If solve it. To listen to mere specuoptional, the mode taken to secede lation in such a case were criminal. is as legitimate as any other, where We are authorised to hope that a none are provided. But, if union proper organisation of the whole, This doctrine of perpetuity is derived from the Articles of Confederation only. The subsequent articles of the Constitution say nothing about it. There exists, in a document not quite inaccessible to Unionists, something important, stated by no less a personage than George Washington, President of the convention which framed the Constitution, and therefore an indisputable judge of its intentions. In his farewell address, written in 1796, he says of the Union with the auxiliary agency of governments for the respective subdivisions, will afford happy issue to the experiment. It is well worth a full and fair experiment." This is, we presume, sufficient proof to any but the Northern mind, that the framers were not so presumptuous and absurd as to deny to posterity the right of judging of its own interests, and to conceive their work, the aim of which was the general good, to be, when once executed, paramount to the object it was intended to provide for. It is because the English people have not adopted one or the other paradox, and testified a lively desire for the subjugation of the South, that the North have so virulently assailed them, and threatened them with the loss of that ardent friendship which has sprung up in its bosom-we presume, since the Crimean war. At the first dawn of the present dispute, we did not trouble ourselves much about it. We do not commonly take much interest in the domestic politics of America, because, with the exception of slavery, they do not often involve a principle interesting to the world in general. Where none such is at stake, foreigners do not feel it to be their special vocation to watch adventurers who are playing at politics, any more than if they were playing at thimblerig. A foreign public is not even deeply interested in the great question of whether it shall be Johnson or Thompson who shall enjoy the privilege of appointing his friends to be tide-waiters and postmasters. As the quarrel advanced, and it became evident that South Carolina was about to secede, we, as a people loving order and subordination, and believing that secession had set up intolerable pretensions, and was the work of a faction only, were inclined to side with the North. But when we found ourselves required to show our regard for America by esteeming nine millions of Americans as pirates, rebels, and enemies of the human race, we began to reconsider the subject; a course to which we were, not gently, stimulated by the language of the Northern press. Our conclusions, as a people, generally are, that the course of the North is a mistaken one. As to the loss of their prestige-by which title they seemed to understand the power of bullying any state with which they had diplomatic relations-that cannot be expected greatly to concern us. Nor do we share their anticipations of the consequences of the breach in their political system. We do not expect the whole continent to fall through the gap. America will still appear unchanged, we are confident, on the map of the world. The valleys of New England, the corn-fields of the South, the prairies of the West, will not wither though the same flag do not wave over all of them: the South will send its cotton to the North, and will buy Northern manufactures in return, whether Davis or Lincoln shall rule in Virginia. And if, when the fever is over, the people should prove to have learnt docility without losing energy, and if the system which may replace the Union should be better calculated to call forth the elevated national qualities which are now revealed to us by faith rather than by sight, neither we nor they will have reason to lament the change, even though accomplished by means so rude. We hope that the greatest possible amount of benefit will follow the least possible amount of calamity, and that all that is best in the nation may pass unscathed through the furnace of war. But we cannot pretend to agree with those who consider this war as especially lamentable and terrible, and to anticipate from it nothing but evil. It bears at present but little appearance of a civil war, resembling in all respects a contest between distinct nationalities. Actual hostilities are restricted to a narrow belt of country. The blood shed has, in comparison with the magnitude of the hostile forces, as yet been insignificant. Outrages have been few, and devastation confined to the space between the western armies. The overthrow of the Federal Government leaves the States' system of administration untouched for the security of justice. The thin upper crust of union is broken through, but firm footing is found close under it. Nations have often struggled through worse revolutions than this without eliciting extraordinary compassion. The kingdom of Naples is a prey to robbers, who commit the most atrocious acts; yet we do not regret the expulsion of the King, even though the expedition of Garibaldi has at first borne such unwholesome fruit, because we think the evils endured to be transient, compared with a despotic dynasty. And in the hope that this contest may end in the extinction of mob rule, we become reconciled to the much slighter amount of suffering that war inflicts on America. In the beginning of this article we represented that, judging from all example, modern intelligence will prevent any people from submitting to despotism, except as a temporary refuge from anarchy. We have also attempted to show that the evils of democracy are not accidental, as might be concluded from the example of the French Re volution; but inherent, as is shown in the result of the experiment conducted, under the most favourable circumstances, in America. That example should teach both rulers and peoples moderation. Monarchy should be willing to concede-subjects sparing in demand. Unyielding despotism over an intelligent people leads directly to democracy. Democracy in its dissolution is exposed to the risk of despotism. We have sought to show that the middle state is, even in theory, the best, and that power not born of the people may, as it passes into constitutionalism, be the surest guarantee of liberty. And we have written in vain if we have not also deduced a moral for those who would seek to improve our own condition by assimilating our institutions to those of America. Our own agitators, in their clamour for reform, are descending towards universal suffrage. Universal suffrage means, the government of a numerical majority, which means oppression — which means civil war. What civil war, even in its mildest form, means, we know from the Times' correspondent; and most heartily do we, in concluding this article, echo his wish-"God defend us from mob law." |