3 There is yet another potent cause of discontent which is making itself apparent. Every promise held out by the rebel leaders has been met by a stubborn fact to the contrary. Those who vzere lured into treason by the flattering hope of “ peaceable secession,” have encountered war, and have been forced to submit to a relentless (unless they owned twenty negroes) conscription. Those who were enticed by promises of free trade, have had to submit to a tariff, a most exorbitant direct taxation, and an export duty on cotton. Those who were persuaded that cotton is king, have been compelled to burn it (when exposed to capture), or, as is the practice more recently, to sell it to De Bow and to the cotton agents of the Confederates at a low figure in paper, and are made to raise corn for the supply of the army in its stead. Those who were taught that coercion on the part of the United States Government was a horrible—indeed an insupportable enormity,'—have been coerced into all these measures, and those to whom submission to the constitution and laws of the United States was a bugbear, have been forced to submit to oppressions which nothing but a military despotism set on foot to establish some stronger form of government than a republic would dare to inaugurate. It is true that the office-holders of the South are satisfied. They have the spoils. The rare opportunities for speculation afforded by troublous times, are not unimproved by them. They have a government strong enough to repress the unarmed and unorganized masses, so long as they have the control of a large army, and a monopoly of all the appliances of war, and they will continue to make hay while the sun shines. Still, even among them, an element of dissolution is silently at work. To borrow the language of a distinguished prelate of Ireland, “ combinations for iniquitous purposes are frequently dissolved, from a bare contemplation on trie part of each of the individuals composing them of the utter worthlessness of all the rest.” After all, the most powerful of the causes at work to break down the rebellion, is the condition of mind that has been brought about by the facts transpiring around them among the masses in the South. Men will think. All believers in a democratic government, in the enlarged sense of the phrase, are fully persuaded that though a portion of the people may be led
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