16 States who have long deeply felt and earnestly striven to express, though timidly and speculatively, on what foundations of fact, with what cornel’ agents of principle, our social situation was one day to be built up fair and bright. Now is the time. Let them speak in no apologetic tone, nor place us at their peril, in any deprecatious attitude. This people has won the right surely ‘to be let alone.’ They will accept no deduction in politics, in literature, in philosophy; they will not follow but lead, not borrow but lend. They are more than content with their own principle of morals and way of life, and will stand upon it to the end, so help them God. The foregoing article contains the most outrageous doctrine ever promulgated in the name of civilization. Although it is but an expansion of the principle set forth by Alexander Stephens at the beginning of the rebellion, it is expressed in blunter and more brutal language, and is a better embodiment of the feeling and intention of the dominant faction at the South. This faction has fallen under the scriptural malediction on all who persist in systematic wickedness, and has really come to “ believe a lie.” The depravity of the slaveholding conscience has now completely vitiated the slaveholding intellect, and it has lost all hold on reason as well as right, on common sense as well as moral sense. A people that professes such doctrine in the name of religion, that impiously calls God to witness that it is content with its inhuman and atrocious principles,—such a people is the enemy of the human race. The nation is putting down a rebellion organized on such principles, is not only defending its own existence, but is maintaining the most, sacred cause of the rights of men, and is protecting the most precious interests of the whole human race.
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