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the fact that the slave did belong to a loyal master, the latter shall, in due time, be compensated. If so, it is a proclamation of emancipation by ransom, wherever the forces advance. Others contend that the slave will be kept, and, if his master demand it, will be returned; and we do not decide which interpretation is more in accordance with the letter of the document. But all seem to agree that, be the letter what it may, the spirit is to release all who claim release, and that this will be the practical effect of it. At all events it is felt to be the first great step of the American government toward emancipation by ransom.

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There seems considerable hope that the State of Missouri will itself take measures to terminate slavery; and some Northerns who closely watch the war are confident that even if it came to a speedy close, it must leave Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri Free States. We do not profess to be able to give an opinion on the soundness of this view; but many circumstances go to favour it. Maryland, before the war, contained more free Negroes than slaves, with a strong anti-slavery party. Immediately on the outbreak of hostilities many slaves were reported as escaping into free territory; and as the whole State has been occupied by Federal troops, it is to be supposed that not a few will have availed themselves of the easy emancipation to be found by fleeing to the lines. Thus the number of slaves will be greatly reduced, and the antislavery party proportionably strengthened,

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In Virginia, again, the whole of the western part of the State is free territory, and faithful to the Union; in the Eastern the hostile armies are massed. Many slaves have already found refuge in the Federal lines; doubtless many more have been sent by their owners further South, to be safe; but how far these two processes have gone toward clearing the way to make this proudest traitor of the traitor States free soil, we cannot judge As to Kentucky, it has always been one of the most hopeful of the Slave States, and at one time came very near making itself free. If the present conflict should lead it to that happy decision, its future citizens will bless the day when Fort Sumpter fell. aber e

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We lately saw a gentleman from a Slave State further South than any of those named; and his opinion was that, whether the war might turn in favour of North or South, the result would be the end of slavery. He confirmed the impression generally expressed at the North, that there is a powerful Union party in the South; saying, that there were few men of influence among his acquaintance, who were not waiting their

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time, till the turn of affairs would enable them to execute justice on the ringleaders of rebellion.

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War is always uncertain; and happy that so it is; for by that fact Providence holds the strong in check, and makes even the boldest feel that battles may go against them. But every human calculation would lead to the impression that the South would be better prepared to begin the war, and the North to carry it on. The former had long been preparing for it, the latter slumbered till Fort Sumpter was taken. But the eight millions of the South are diluted with four millions of slaves, every one of whom is a burden, if not a danger; while the eighteen millions of the North are all white, without any mine under their feet. While one asks, How many such defeats can the North recover?? another may ask, How many such victories can the South survive?' Humanly speaking, the whole matter turns on one question: Have the people of the North, or have they not, that quality of the British race which makes a few defeats at the beginning of a war needful to bring out the patient power of England? If they have lost that, they may be thwarted by their own impatience, but never by a fair trial of strength. In men, in money, in arts, in ships, in everything that constitutes national strength, they as far excel their rivals as France does Spain. If they fail, they deserve to be trodden upon. It is not likely that the North would ever think of overrunning the South; that course would have no object. Their manifest policy is to shut them up, beat them off the frontier, retake great posts, and leave the rest to time and necessity. We deplore the struggle; but certainly do not blame the government for not running away from half its territory, and leaving it to pro-slavery rebels. Wer deplore every battle; but battles there will be, and our prayer is, that success may be with those who did not prepare the war, who did not shed the first blood.enr

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As to the effect of this struggle on England, we deplore it in a moral point of view; but in a material one are disposed to think that it will bring us nothing but temporary inconvenience, and ultimate advantages of the most substantial kind. In both these respects, perhaps, our opinion is not a very common one. Morally, a condition of our press has been brought out, which is not only sad, but disgraceful. Who would have said, a while ago, that England could have found newspapers to advocate slavery, and welcome and abet a slaving confederacy? But we have them in London, in Liverpool, and elsewhere; base specimens of Mammon's prophets, who preach up the cause of the South, and try to make it palatable to us, by saying that

we must have their cotton. The world abroad knows it; and is well pleased to see English love of liberty so belied. The deliberate and elaborate misrepresentation of some of our foremost journals, seemingly with no particular object but just to stir up bad feeling, is another painful fact. It is a melancholy feature of newspaper information, that it gives all the bad things, and all the irritating ones, but omits the greater part of the good. Fifty articles in America are published without abusing England, and, of course, not quoted here; one does abuse us, and is; and so in America with what is written bere.

Our own observation in foreign countries passing through great crises, and of our newspaper accounts at the time, give us a painful persuasion that the people of England, are, in really critical times, sadly misinformed. From such remarks we would carefully except such writing as Mr. Russell's letters in the columns of the Times, which from beginning to end bear the stamp of candour and fairness, as much as of genius. The country owes that journal a debt for those letters, which goes some way to counterbalance the roods of bad information and bad teaching in its leading columns.

One of the worst things in our English press is the habit of citing from those journals in the North, which are in the interest of the South, and giving their ravings as Northern opinion. Many provincial journals, and some inferior London ones, honestly re-quote these extracts in ignorance. But who will say that the Times is so ignorant as not to know what it is doing when it quotes the New York Herald as the organ of the North? That paper has always been the violent partisan of slavery, and the rabid hater of England. It is edited by no American, but by a Scotch Papist infidel, whose name is not. infamous, because it is below infamy, and shall not stain our pages; the man alluded to by Mr. Russell when he speaks of bewhipped pariahs' of New York; the man who, on being horsewhipped in the streets, will publish a second edition, and announce it all over the city by placards headed, 'Cowhided again.' His vile print is never to be seen in respectable families. In such houses as in England have the Times on their table every morning, it would be held an insult to ask the gentleman if he took in the New York Herald. Englishmen who have spent months in America can testify that they never were in one family,-though they lived not in hotels, but in families, where this print could be found. It loudly preached secession, till the New York mob forced it by public violence to change its tone. From that time it has become fierce against the South-in words; but has steadily worked to excite

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England to war with the States, by abusing us in every' possible way, and proposing war against us; and inveighs against the ministry; all this manifestly in the interest of the South. No language could be too strong to characterize the line of conduct by which the sayings of this paper are set before England, as samples of 'opinions at the North.' Let it be represented as the Northern organ of Southern interests, and the case is plain. Another paper quoted by preference in our journals, as a specimen of Northern opinion, has actually been presented by the grand jury for treason.

We are far from thinking that the best specimens of American opinion are just to England; for we have not ourselves met with many that are so, either in private or public. They do not understand us, do not like us, and lose no occasion of showing their preference for things and proceedings that are Fretch. They foretold that we would join the South, open our ports to their privateers, break the blockade, and so on; and they go on inventing new crimes, that we are to commit, as soon as the old ones become impossible. They have seen us bear the only consequences which we could have feared in actual war with them, the stoppage of commerce, and cotton especially, and retain, not the neutrality they held in the Crimean war, of helping both sides to the full amount of pay given, but a real neutrality, of keeping our hands off altogether, giving them the prodigious advantage of shutting our ports against privateers: yet we seem no nearer their confidence. But as certainly English opinion does not do them justice, nor acknowledge the vast amount of hearty love for the old

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* We believe that much, if not all, of their ill feeling as to the present crisis is owing to the abuse and misrepresentation of the Times newspaper. Had the honest representations, and English views of say the Daily News, been taken by the English press generally, the people of the North would have understood those of England, and not believed that we hated slavery in word, and America in heart; that we frowned on the South with our brow, but patted it with our hand; that we were more willing to see a power set up on the principle of perpetuating slavery and extending it, than to see the wounds of a great rival honourably healed. These last are the views taken of our present national feelings by the people of the North, and by those of the Continent. This would be a moral condition anything but noble, or estimable; but the Englishman who, with the leading journal for witness, will try to prove us to have worthier motives in a company of foreigners, will find his task a hard one.

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We find a London journal daily writing in favour of slavery, and many hints elsewhere that we must break the blockade, that is, ally ourselves with the South, to get cotton. Such things we hoped never to hear in English air. There did seem one moral point gained in our political life, a horror of slavery; but mere politicians never hold morals as more than makeweights; and now the guardianship of this principle must rest with men, such as those who first brought it into favour,—men whose politics are all coloured by the Christian principles of our duty to our neighbour, and who believe that a loss by doing right is greater gain than a profit by doing wrong. Did England now soil her hand by any touch of the accursed thing, she would sink immeasurably in the eye of the world; and the twenty millions vaunted so often would be quoted, ever hereafter, not as her highest pride, but as her loudest condemnation. We not only do not trust professional politicians, but think them a class habitually unfitted for those feelings and convictions which are worthy of confidence; yet, in spite of all that has been written, we believe that, on the slavery question, the heart of the non-religious, of the merely political, population of England is perfectly sound; and that were the question put to-morrow, 'Shall we join the Slavers to secure their cotton ?' a cry of indignation would be raised throughout the land, while the religious part of the community would be roused to a man. But none of our statesmen would propose such a course; and it is only to be regretted that the writings of others should cause them to be suspected of what they would abhor.

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Our course is clearly the one early announced by our government, and honourably adhered to,—strict and complete neutrality.

As to the effect of the conflict on our material interests, we believe that it will be our own fault, if it do not prove to be, ultimately, of incalculable advantage to them. The Morrill Tariff is not a necessary result, but a gratuitous mischief inflicted on themselves and their neighbours by the Northerns. They ask us, 'Cannot you let us raise our revenue in our own way?' That is precisely what we are doing and will do; but if we think it is done in a way worthy of dark ages and antisocial codes, we ought to say so. The condition in which we stood as to our supply of cotton, is the opposite extreme from that aimed at by the Morrill Tariff, and both are unfriendly to peaceful relations. The latter would isolate one nation from others, tearing by the coarse hand of self-sufficiency the unnumbered kindly bands, by which Providence, when not thwarted, links nation to nation, in mutual services; so that, without a sense of dependence on either side, but with a strong

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