16 price to rise and emancipation to be shelved as a Virginia abstraction. It was found to be against nature, and against the dreadful fatality of Southern wants. An act of emancipation would have been as much waste paper in Virginia, as if it had been passed in Massachusetts. The “corner-stone” would have fallen upon it and ground it to powder. It was not the abolitionist alone who was antagonistic to slavery, but the spirit of the age itself. * The savage instinct of slavery divined this enmity which pervaded the air; steadily but resolutely, because pushed on by the necessity of self-defence, and the necessity of working out its bitter problem, it sought for guarantees and for expansion, and stuck at nothing to attain its end. Only revolution can bleed and pacify such passion; its logic will not come to the ground until its blood does. The whole long story of Southern aggression is a story of Southern self-defence, from the expulsion of Mr. Hoar, through the annexation of Texas, Fugitive Slave bills, Kansas-Nebraska bills, border and senatorial ruffianism, Ostend conferences, fillibusterism, to the secret treason which armed and comforted secession. * How clearly this is shown by the scorn and contempt with which for twenty years the prominent men and journals of the South met the most conservative advice which its own Northern friends ventured to offer. The vitriol dashed into the face of the abolitionist was not diluted before being used to asperse the genteelest remonstrants. The Southern exigency was long ago betrayed by the passionate tone of able editors. For specimens of rhetoric hitherto unequalled at the North, see the Richmond “Examiner,” 1853, “The Paramount Question;” March 7 and 31, 1854; May 19, “Every Northern Man a Swindler;” July 4, 1854; October 16, 1855, etc. Slavery gradually dying out! Slavery was a system which decreed its own expansion. It was mightier than 350,000 slaveholders. Do we suppose it is that insignificant body of men which has controlled the politics of this country for fifty years, and is now dashing its armed columns against the bosses of the shield of Liberty ? It is a natural force hidden in slave-labor, and enslaving the slaveholder. It ensnared him through bis lust, his pride, his political ambition, his local prejudices, and his pocket. It invigorates his arm, and employs all his gifts to enforce the extremity of its passion against the vigor of liberty. The moment when slavery can be arrested is the moment when it bleeds to death, and not before.
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