12 RADICALISM AND THE NATIONAL CRISIS. have the institution of human slavery. We have tolerated it, fostered it, legislated for it, bought territory for its extension, till it has grown to its present fearful and appalling dimensions. Not a few in this country have gone so far as to call it right. And not a few who think it wrong, have desired to say but little about it. The Southern people by one of the most extraordinary apostacies in morals to be found in the history of man, and contrary to the faith of their fathers, have canonized the institution of slavery. Morever, that slavery’ is the cause of this rebellion, the great root and ground of our present troubles, is as plain as the sun in the heavens. The chief watchwords of the rebellion have been the sanctity and perpetuity of slavery. The leaders have hung out the flag of slavery. They have declared it to be the chief corner-stone of a political edifice, that is to be built on the eternal wretchedness of an oppressed and subjugated race. * When they discovered by the census of 1860, as well as by the last Presidential election, that the political power of this country was passing into the hands of freemen, and out of the hands of slaveholders, and that they were to be no longer the ruling power in the national government, then according to the programme of Mr. Calhoun, of more than thirty years standing, they rent the contract by which they had hitherto been bound. The whole meaning of this civil war so far as the South is concerned, is the preponderance of slavery, and of the obligarchy which is founded upon this institution. Slavery for its own dire purposes has decreed that the nation shall die. There is no use in blinking this point, or mis-understanding it. Public opinion, the common sense of men, and the philosophy of the facts, as well as the confessions of the rebels themselves, are not, and cannot be, in error on this point. Back of all other causes lies the slave power as the chief cause of this rebellion. And but for it no such diabolical scheme would have ever been conceived, or if conceived, attempted. What then, we enquire, are the signs of the times as written upon the sky of God’s providence? We have all been hoping and even predicting, that this rebellion would prove the death
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